Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3 million peers
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I'm a developer but have utterly no experience with torrent architecture, or for that matter anything outside of standard web services and the kinds of things companies do. But I've been wondering if BitTorrent technology would be usable for federating content for things such as Lemmy. After reading that somebody was begging for money to offset the $5k/month they were spending to run an instance (I mean, that shows true dedicaton but holy crap dude), it seems like a distributed architecture would make a lot more sense than somebody having to foot the bill for a big-ass server. I just personally wouldn't know where to begin on a project like that, but maybe if somebody with the right combo of skills and experience gave it some thought...
2 years ago I talked about the core problem with federated services was the abismal scale ability.
I essentially got ridiculed.
And here we are, with incredibly predictable scaling problems.
If we refuse to acknowledge problems till they become critical, we will never grow past a blip on the corner of the internet. Protocol development is HARD and expensive.
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if you sell something for $1 at 10am your $1 still buys $1 at 10pm.
in crypto, it's easily manipulated, and that's by design. it's a scam because the only people who have that control are the wealthy.
If I sell 1BT worth of something at 10am, it could be worth 2BT at 10pm, but it could also be worth .1BT equally.
the purpose of a Fiat currency is economic supremacy that is backed by the governing body and the economy that uses it.
tell me, what governing body or economy is crypto backed by?
Your $1 has absolutely changed in value by 10pm. What do you think inflation is? It might not be enough change for the store to bother changing prices but the value changes constantly.
Watch the foreign exchange markets, your $1 is changing in value compared to every other currency constantly.
The only difference between fiat and crypto is that changing the prices in the store is difficult, and the volume of trade is high enough to reduce volatility in the value of your $. There are plenty of cases of hyperinflation in history where stores have to change prices on a daily basis, meaning that fiat is not immune to volatility.
To prevent that volatility we just have things like the federal reserve, debt limits, federal regulations, etc that are designed to keep you the investor (money holders) happy with keeping that money in dollars instead of assets. The value is somewhat stable as long as the government is solvent.
Crypto doesn't have those external controls, instead it has internal controls, i.e. mining difficulty. Which from a user perspective is better because it can't be printed at will by the government.
Long story short fiat is no different than crypto, there is no real tangible value, so value is what people think it is. Unfortunately crypto's value is driven more by speculative "investors" than by actual trade demand which means it is more volatile. If enough of the world changed to crypto it would just as stable as your $.
Not saying crypto is a good thing just saying that it isn't any better or worse. It needs daily usage for real trade by a large portion of the population to reduce the volatility, instead of just being used to gamble against the dollar.
Our governments would likely never let that happen though, they can't give up their ability to print money. It's far easier to keep getting elected when you print the cash to operate the government, than it is to raise taxes to pay for the things they need.
The absolutely worthless meme coin scams/forks/etc are just scammers and gamblers trying to rip each other off. They just make any sort of useful critical mass of trade less and less plausible because it gives all crypto a bad name. Not that Bitcoin/Ethereum started out any different but now that enough people are using them splitting your user base is just self defeating
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2 years ago I talked about the core problem with federated services was the abismal scale ability.
I essentially got ridiculed.
And here we are, with incredibly predictable scaling problems.
If we refuse to acknowledge problems till they become critical, we will never grow past a blip on the corner of the internet. Protocol development is HARD and expensive.
Yeah, volunteer moderation is also an issue, any decent ppl doing it get burnt out if they get an influx of ppl and quit also like lemm.ee
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Orphaned IPs as well. If you have an IPv4 from your cloud provider and you want to retire it, you should thoroughly scrub your DNS and all other configs before doing so. Otherwise it's trivial for someone else to spin up a machine on that IP address and abuse your domain.
Basically, when you stop paying for hosting, also remove records from your domain, or itll link to the new person with your old hosting ips website and show that on your domain. I always forget when I swap hosting on my personal sites and haven't updated the records, see some random dropshipping or local (not to me) business website on my domain lol
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Yeah, volunteer moderation is also an issue, any decent ppl doing it get burnt out if they get an influx of ppl and quit also like lemm.ee
Lemmy also doesn't make that easy, since it's not like e.g. Reddit or the phpBB forums of old, where everyone moderates on their own turf only, but each instance has to essentially moderate all other communities on all other instances too.
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paying in crypto is nice partly for this reason
But a lot of uneducated people will spam "crypto is a scam"
Yes, doing illegal things secretly is a valid use case for crypto. So far, it's also the only one
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Yes, doing illegal things secretly is a valid use case for crypto. So far, it's also the only one
What about donating money to people online without giving away your name and privacy? What about avoiding scams for P2P transactions? What about boycotting the banking system? What about avoiding international payment fees?
These all seem valid use cases to me
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Your $1 has absolutely changed in value by 10pm. What do you think inflation is? It might not be enough change for the store to bother changing prices but the value changes constantly.
Watch the foreign exchange markets, your $1 is changing in value compared to every other currency constantly.
The only difference between fiat and crypto is that changing the prices in the store is difficult, and the volume of trade is high enough to reduce volatility in the value of your $. There are plenty of cases of hyperinflation in history where stores have to change prices on a daily basis, meaning that fiat is not immune to volatility.
To prevent that volatility we just have things like the federal reserve, debt limits, federal regulations, etc that are designed to keep you the investor (money holders) happy with keeping that money in dollars instead of assets. The value is somewhat stable as long as the government is solvent.
Crypto doesn't have those external controls, instead it has internal controls, i.e. mining difficulty. Which from a user perspective is better because it can't be printed at will by the government.
Long story short fiat is no different than crypto, there is no real tangible value, so value is what people think it is. Unfortunately crypto's value is driven more by speculative "investors" than by actual trade demand which means it is more volatile. If enough of the world changed to crypto it would just as stable as your $.
Not saying crypto is a good thing just saying that it isn't any better or worse. It needs daily usage for real trade by a large portion of the population to reduce the volatility, instead of just being used to gamble against the dollar.
Our governments would likely never let that happen though, they can't give up their ability to print money. It's far easier to keep getting elected when you print the cash to operate the government, than it is to raise taxes to pay for the things they need.
The absolutely worthless meme coin scams/forks/etc are just scammers and gamblers trying to rip each other off. They just make any sort of useful critical mass of trade less and less plausible because it gives all crypto a bad name. Not that Bitcoin/Ethereum started out any different but now that enough people are using them splitting your user base is just self defeating
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What about donating money to people online without giving away your name and privacy? What about avoiding scams for P2P transactions? What about boycotting the banking system? What about avoiding international payment fees?
These all seem valid use cases to me
donating online
Yeah i suppose any form of payment that you have to keep secret for some reason is a reason to use crypto, though I struggle to imagine needing that if you're not doing something dodgy
avoiding scams for p2p transactions
Wat. Crypto is not good at solving that, it's in fact much much worse than traditional payment methods. There's a reason scammers always want to be paid in crypto
boycotting the banking system
What specifically are you boycotting? The money that backs your crypto (i.e. that you bought it with) still sits in a bank account somewhere and continues to support the banks. All you're boycotting then are payments, but those are usually free for consumers (many banks lose money on them) so you're not exactly "sticking it to the man" by not using them. Evem if you were somehow hurting banks by using crypto, if you think the people that benefit from you using crypto (crypto exchange owners and billionaires that own crypto etc.) are less evil than goverment regulated banks, you're deluded.
What about avoiding international payment fees?
You'll spend more money using crypto for that, not less
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donating online
Yeah i suppose any form of payment that you have to keep secret for some reason is a reason to use crypto, though I struggle to imagine needing that if you're not doing something dodgy
avoiding scams for p2p transactions
Wat. Crypto is not good at solving that, it's in fact much much worse than traditional payment methods. There's a reason scammers always want to be paid in crypto
boycotting the banking system
What specifically are you boycotting? The money that backs your crypto (i.e. that you bought it with) still sits in a bank account somewhere and continues to support the banks. All you're boycotting then are payments, but those are usually free for consumers (many banks lose money on them) so you're not exactly "sticking it to the man" by not using them. Evem if you were somehow hurting banks by using crypto, if you think the people that benefit from you using crypto (crypto exchange owners and billionaires that own crypto etc.) are less evil than goverment regulated banks, you're deluded.
What about avoiding international payment fees?
You'll spend more money using crypto for that, not less
Yeah i suppose any form of payment that you have to keep secret for some reason is a reason to use crypto, though I struggle to imagine needing that if you're not doing something dodgy
imagine you’re a YouTuber and want to accept donations: that will force you to give out your name to them, which they could use to get your address and phone number. There’s always someone that hates you, and I rather not have them knowing my personal info
Wat. Crypto is not good at solving that, it's in fact much much worse than traditional payment methods. There's a reason scammers always want to be paid in crypto
if you’re the seller then it’s a lot better. With the traditional banking system, with enough knowledge you can cheat both sides: stolen cards, abusive chargebacks, bank accounts in other countries under fake name/fake ID…
Crypto simplifies scamming when the seller, and pretty much makes it impossible for buyers
What specifically are you boycotting?
Card payments, international tranfers, national transfers taking days to complete, money being seizable at all times
many banks lose money on them
Their plans are basically all focused on the card you get. Pretty sure they make money with it, else many wouldn’t offer cash back (selling infos and getting a fee from card payments?)
if you think the people that benefit from you using crypto (crypto exchange owners and billionaires that own crypto etc.) are less evil than goverment regulated banks, you're deluded.
Banks are evil anyways, does it really change anything? The difference is that it technically helps everyone using crypto, not only the rich.
Plus P2P exchanges are a thing
You'll spend more money using crypto for that, not less
That’s just factually false. Do you know the price of a swift transfer? Now compare it to crypto tx fees, with many being under $0.01
