Well, I’ve thought of a bit of an alternative, but that’d be more like digitally assisted barter with automated haggle and escrows, than like money.

Yes, I’ve remembered my old idea of something like an automated digital barter connected to storage space and computation provided on demand for tokens (every provider an issuer), or something else confirmed by escrow or whatever, after learning that in China 200 years ago people used non-uniform money, that is, all kinds of coins, some literally ancient still in circulation, and somehow that worked.

That wouldn’t be as convenient as uniform money as a universal equivalent, but wouldn’t have that particular kind of problem, which value manipulation via such globally meaningful action. Simply because there’d be no single variable to manipulate.

Fiat currency is controlled by central banks and nation-states. Obviously.

Naaaah, it’s still in the wrong paradigm, just a taste of the better world.

Like Hanseatic league and Hussites and Cossacks were not quite the revolution you’d want, and the same with Dutchies, but at some point angry Frenchies decided it’s time to show how it’s done, and around the same general period of time some unrefined colonials decided they are tired of tea.

Well, it should have went to some value from no value. So initial volatility was to be expected.

While the current volatility - I don’t know, I guess it’s because a transaction is expensive and takes some time. If transactions would cost almost nothing and were almost instantaneous, I’d expect the volatility by now to not be very big. And if there were no premined coins, of course.

And if there were inflation built into the system. BTC proponents boast how it having no such artificial mechanism is good.

They, 1) don’t understand that having inflation stabilizes a currency, because there’s a stimulus to spend practically and not as part of speculation, 2) don’t understand that what they would want to imitate, gold, has inflation too.

So - inflation and cheap and fast transactions are what would make BTC less volatile. It would be a less lucrative speculative asset.

I’ve read once that the reason Eltz castle in Germany (a kinda often encountered on the Web nice-fantasy-looking piece of fortification) was spared by the French from burning is because one of the family members was a French officer. There’s plenty of ruins around.

OK, speaking about protest - you guys are also known for the Napoleon code, the guillotine, the freedom-equality-brotherhood stuff, de Saint-Exupery, so mostly good things. I mean, there are also de Sade and Dienbienphu, but shutting up.

Copyright and patents abolition would solve this.

Honestly this is bullshit. In 1880s China they’d sometimes use thousand years old coins to pay for stuff. Coins of fucking non-standard weight and value! With symbols of sometimes dead writing systems (like Tangut). And still that was currency. EDIT: I mean, BTC is volatile, but not that bad.

BTW, I once had an idea of a truly decentralized electronic currency without proof of work and all such, with plenty of emitters, signed transactions and coins of different emitters and parties or partitions having different value, determined via market mechanisms. Like automatic haggling on every transaction, a bit the way MMORPG markets have it, except, eh, they still have some fixed currency, and here it would all be relative.

For all the inconveniences it would have two very good traits - no blockchain and no power effect (like the majority of the network deciding something or premined coins). But this isn’t important because GNU Taler people have made basically a similar, but far better, system than what I imagined, and theirs actually exists.

Fucking simple concept which major businesses are economically compelled to gaslight you out of.

So the problem is in economics.

Each such business provides all of their infrastructure, expensive, good and well-maintained (Google has its own Internet cables), which is not separated from their application services.

So one provider of infrastructure (in the wide sense, solving all the problems) usually serves many users of their own application and many application providers (I’m inventing terms) without their own infrastructure.

While user of an application generally can’t switch infrastructure providers as they want. It’s kinda technically fine and normal (there are NTP server pools, one could in the olden days search many FTP servers for the needed file, and so on), but doesn’t happen IRL. Because there’s no standard way for pooling resources and tracking them, and there’s no applications using it.

So - the data model (cryptographic global person identities, globally identified by some derived hash posts (a post is, say, datetime, author, some tags, content, hash of it all, signatures, I dunno) (creation of a group or a vote or a changing of privileges or moderation can be a post too), for forming a representation for the user a group is “replayed” in the right order to know which user had a privilege to, say, moderate posts etc ; one can also generate group snapshots from time to time when replaying thus, by the group owner identity, to make it faster) is orthogonal to the service model. That’s important so that it were fit for alternative service models, like sneakernet or offline-enabled mesh or anything delay-tolerant. Or at least a p2p kademlia DHT-based service model.

The service model - the core of it all is a tracker service. It works like a tracker in BitTorrent (or maybe Hotline, but that’s old), except with signed announces, and it tracks search and storage and relay and maybe even computation services (which announce themselves to it). A search service gets storage services from trackers and indexes their contents (one can even announce objects to a search service similarly to trackers, might be better) to search by tags. A storage service just stores objects and yields them. A relay service must be harder, you the user must somehow announce (to trackers too?) which relay service you are registered on at this moment, a bit like SIP or like SMTP (only very temporary), so that messages to that relay service would reach you.

The client would just request a bunch of trackers for all things they need - to search for stuff for services, then request these services and merge their results. Forming a group representation is “searching for stuff” too, and then getting the objects referenced by index service responses from a bunch of storage services. To notify another user that you’ve sent them a message one can use a relay service.

I think it’s easy to see that it’s kinda primitive other than requiring proper cryptography. And it’s a global system working over the Internet (except no, it doesn’t exist). Similar to NOSTR, but I think better due to separation of data model and service model.

The advantages of this - one still can make any kinds of applications using such common infrastructure, but the resource-based feudalism we have this might hurt. Similar to how BitTorrent keeps working despite quite a few people not liking it.

The disadvantages - well, stuff will get lost, there are paid BT trackers but no paid BT peers, while in such a system paid storage and other services would be a thing (still much better than Facebook).

So. Which one would you advise? To use for the purposes described.

Not that much, in the EU they had color meanings and decorations, and in KotOR armor color meant position in hierarchy and merit, but other than that - pretty similar armor sets.

It’s a bit like with usual clothes. Faces are still not visible. Finding a Mandalorian in red armor with a decoration of knotted rope on the left side of their helmet and with a backpack and such and such bag is not as easy as just match a face in the database.

I’ve thought of all these, but what I’m describing should be a comprehensive system in itself and at the same time have global identities and addressing of all content, so that data model could be applied, for example, for a sneakernet or for some situation where you’d have to synchronize data over delay-tolerant networks.

Most of all like Briar or Usenet or something else.

Perhaps Mandalorians were onto something

It’s pretty simple.

When your society values freedom and thinks it lacks it, and movies like “Blade Runner”, “Robocop”, “Total Recall” are popular, - then it has freedom.

When your society values freedom (in words) and thinks it definitely has it, and movies like those are considered funny, gross and stupid rebellion against authority, or at least not how it literally just is, while we now know better, - then it gets ass-raped.

A-and if many people were using their brains to evaluate Google and Facebook, we wouldn’t have reached this stage because parallels are very easy to draw and such systems were the main threat of plenty of sci-fi.

That’s all of today’s visible progress.

Like when at school, I knew how to appear smart when speaking on subjects. Just use common sense, logic, try to clear your mind and shuffle things around. That’s like “wisdom” in DnD as opposed to “intelligence”. If it’s hard, pump up some enthusiasm (ASD and BAD diagnoses) and it might work.

Then I enrolled to uni, and, well, the shit ran out.

But I thought it’s just my shit ran out, appears there are not just plenty of people, but whole societies having a plan, but not having any idea of how they are going to pass most its stages.

Like USSR building communism. Kosygin’s reforms to remove deadlocks and Glushkov’s ideas for computer-assisted planning and interoperability were basically the only real ideas of how to move forward, and both were collectively blocked by bosses who’d lose some of their power in the state apparatus. Then USSR just stagnated till failing.

One can apply that to the whole Soviet computing thing, BTW, there was a point where some galaxy minds decided that it’s a good idea to just copy western designs and ISAs, because they didn’t know how to resolve deadlocks between various ministries whose institutions were building their own computers.

Except when your main weakness is actual production, not RnD, RnD is fine, then that’s exactly what you shouldn’t do. The decisions others make are based on their production capabilities.

In general copying foreign designs is what USSR shouldn’t have embraced.

like, operating system level. the standard has grown enough that the web is it’s own platform.

Which is why I hate it. It both muddies and replaces the real (hypertext linked documents available globally) web and by itself is more complex than it needs to be, and inconvenient for screen readers, robots, Braille terminals and such.

For cross-platform applications server over Web - Java Web Start was a good idea, just far too early introduced and it was slow. And it should be run in a sandbox.

I’m serious, that’s exactly what Java is intended for, designed, not evolved. From the beginning. Evolution is good when it’s been many thousands of years and you reap the results. Evolution is not good for something that’s engineered. A wooden bridge unattended “evolves” towards falling apart, despite all the moss covering it making it seem firmer.

search in the url bar was seen as an antipattern at first and wasn’t included.

It still is an antipattern. Guessing machines are not good.

Honestly horrors get old when you can read in the news about “respected people” calling to exterminate Gaza and build beachfront cottages there. Even from just reading that and knowing that the same people can put anything onto your Android devices via a Facebook update or any of the Google applications update, on a whim. Nobody will even know.

About this - is it even legal to obey such pressure?

EDIT: I mean, how is it different from banning sellers by skin color when racists complain, or by religion when Muslims complain (all Hindus are Satan worshipers, didntcha knaw), or whatever else.

EDIT2: But it pains me to see how public offering was, in fact, an important part of market regulations, when everybody just ignores it without getting 9 lifetimes in jail for executives. I was against it at some point. That is - customer associations are important, and there are almost none, and when customer associations demand businesses to act like public offering, then it’s almost as good as if enforced, and no such regulation is a good stimulus for customer associations to keep existing. But - feels shitty when it’s in the law of most countries and hasn’t been removed.

I fucking hate blue leds. They cause migraines, and even when not - irritate the hell out of my eyes.

“Rich people” should be replaced with “authority”, which is more general. Otherwise yes.

I also think that if George Lucas violates some law during operation of his museum, he will get all the problems intended by the law. He’s not involved in building a digital concentration camp, he’s also not an Epstein island visitor, and he’s actually a rare example of a famous person who honestly should be richer than they are. At the same time there are different dimensions of “rich”. The fact that his museum actually happens makes me feel <erased, too personal>.

OK, I can’t be impartial about Lucas, of the people big in various parts of humanity he’s among the few who haven’t betrayed their picture in my childhood one bit. Star Wars is the most anti-fascist, anti-evil, anti-mediocrity, anti-surrender, living thing that I know (other than the living things like earth, wind, water, plants, animals and humans, but you get the idea).

It’s obvious that they are different. In the old understanding of things, you sometimes have to do illegal stuff when it’s moral. Enemies have to be fought, laws have to be broken before changed. At the same time laws were perceived as something specific and precise.

Now there’s some weird perception that all laws have an inertia of moral virtue because of being descended from popular will or something like that. At the same time it’s a fuzzy, almost mystical, entity and asking “why the hell should I do that” from authority is like attacking that entity. In the old understanding of things it wasn’t. So laws have become fuzzy, and it has become a small sacrilege to question them.

Which is what always happens, a thing perceived strictly and literally will always run into contradictions resolved outside it, and such a resolution is a normal process. Like with segregation.

And if you make an outside resolution absolutely impossible, the thing will become fuzzy.