I’m curious

I don’t believe that is accurate. Beside moons (which don’t orbit the sun), Pluto is the largest and closest dwarf planet.

If those are the only options, I am choosing juggalo

Chatgpt… please summarize the Gartner hype cycle for a 5 year old

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Cybersecurity is definitely in demand in Canada but we are also going through a housing affordability crisis and generally our tech salaries are lower in compared with the US. You would almost certainly be taking a step back in standard of living unless you swing a remote work situation from a US employer.

And let’s be honest, for mainstream consumers, the Linux desktop and the Fediverse are failures.

My point is that just because something doesn’t achieve widespread adoption immediately does not mean it is a failure. I use both Linux desktop and the Fediverse and the fact that they are not in widespread use doesn’t rob them of virtue for the people that use them. Technology adoption is a complex thing and its incredibly reductionist to just say "crypto has been around for a decade and a half and you still can’t use it for anything therefore its a failure. Our legacy financial system is very entrenched and its not to going to unseated overnight. These things take time.

Ultimately I think it should come down to consumer choice, those that prefer centralized finance should use that and those that are OK with the added overheard of decentralized finance should be able to have that choice. That is why I make the analogy to these other systems. Linux desktop for a long time was harder to use but it was worth it for people whose values aligned with open source software. Crypto has a similar trajectory and faces similar uphill battles including negative attitudes from those using competing systems. But for those who value what it provides, it is worth it.

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What you are saying is inaccurate…

1. BTC has a performant layer 2 called lightning. And if layer 2s are not your jam, there are plenty of L1s that can handle 1000s of transactions per second

2. Crypto solves the problem of having a central bank control the money supply. Also having private organizations controlling digital payment rails. Provides options or underbanked people in countries with unstable financial systems. I could go on…

3. Blockchains do not use an enormous amount of energy. You are thinking of the consensus mechanism used by proof of work cryptocurrencies. There are alternative consensus mechanisms that use much less energy

Also the adoption rates are not a measure of utility. The Linux desktop has been around 30 years and has an adoption rate under 5 percent. Mastodon has not grown as fast as twitter did. Democracy is not used by the majority of governments and where it is, voter turnout is low.

Is it also your opinion that these things are bad products?

Decentralized systems just take longer to mature. It’s crazy to me that fediverse users don’t understand this.

Yeah he volunteered to to be solider, so what? Being a solider is not the same thing as being a war criminal and the burden of proof still applies. War is messy and it is entirely possible that this division committed atrocities that haven’t been proven but the mere possibility is not sufficient reason to label him a war criminal. You are de-meaning the term by doing so.

Either you have specific evidence to support your charge or realize you are participating in sensationalism.

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One use for RSS feeds is to distribute podcasts to multiple apps. I believe most podcasts apps are just RSS readers combined with an audio player.

The fact the morality was invented makes it synthetic but not necessarily relative. Numbers are also “made up”.

Its possible that moral truths are objective but our interpretation of these objective truths is imperfect and therefore seems relative.

To use another commenters example, the fact that killing is not morally blameworthy in some cases doesn’t mean that an absolute moral truth doesn’t exist but just that our concept of killing is just too broad to express it.

Yeah crypto critics often gloss over the fact that the war on drugs is an example of repressive government policy and that darknet markets where a lifeline for folks using drugs. As an example, psychedelic have genuine therapeutic uses and on the street level, many “research chemicals” with horrible safety profiles are sold as things like LSD or MDMA.

With a darknet market you get access to a community that can help vet sellers through forums, comments and rating that help keep users safe.

Moreover what this shows is crypto can help organizations or people under repressive governments. Another example was a group in Nigeria who was protesting against the police group SARS. The Nigerian government froze their bank accounts but the group was still able to fundraise using BTC.

Why does every criticism of crypto always hinge on attacking the character of the industry is some ad hominem way. Oh the tech is no good because it’s “tech bros” running these companies.

Layer 2 networks like Arbitrum resolve the issue of high transaction fees and still be able to transact in ETH. I get there is hurdles compared with the simplicity of PayPal, but at least some of us prefer decentralized payment options where possible.

Genetic diversity protects a species against epidemic disease

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Asset Tokenization and Smart Contracts are two things that will be increasingly used in Finance. That is why the recent BIS report on CBDCs included both of those as essential features of a Central Bank Digital Currency.

What Blockchain does is provide these features of a digital currency in a way that doesn’t require a trusted intermediary. This makes Blockchains resistant to censorship in a way that a central bank digital currency can never truly guarantee. It is true that a centralization system like a database or ledger can be faster, more efficient and more secure but that you will always have to trust that provider of that service that they will continue operating in a manner that is congruent with what a user may want.

A recent example of this would be the news that Ubisoft is deleting inactive accounts on Uplay, which is potentially resulting in many users losing access to games they bought on that platform. Were the rights to those game tokenized on a Blockchain or CBDC, the users could potentially redeem that on another platform. Another example would be the case of the user losing his 900 hour character in Red Dead Redemption after Google shutdown stadia. Had that player’s character been tokenized as an NFT he might have the capacity to move it off of stadia and onto another game platform.

Get a little nervous about your Steam Game collection worth 1000s of dollars that is completely locked into Valve’s ecosystem? How about a decentralised, immutable and censorship-resistant record of your ownership of those games? That is what asset tokenization is about and it will become more important in the future as our lives and our assets become more digital.

Then there are multitude of uses for smart contracts which, again, don’t require a blockchain provided you are ok with relying on a trusted intermediary to execute the contract as it was termed. Given that contracts by their nature often involve agreement between organisations or individuals with diverging interests, it almost a certainty that having an immutable, censorship resistant network to run those smart contracts is desirable.