Knowledge and intelligence are wasted outside of the US. You could build great stuff but if you're not in the US, your chance of success is extremely low because the media algorithms will work against you. Not to mention regulations. In Europe, it felt like politicians were being paid to suppress tech.

I'm jealous of tech people who live in media-sovereign countries like the US, China or Russia who don't have to experience algorithm discrimination.

IMO, tech/science people who leave the US before accumulating big money are making a mistake. They underestimate how rigged the tech industry is. You've got to leverage the rigging. You either benefit from the rigging or you are victim of it. I cannot wrap my mind around people who are born in the US and leave. People don't understand how lucky and privileged they are before it's gone.

I cannot say what I'm working on because it will be downvoted. Only pointless gimmicks which do not compete with the tech oligopoly can get any traction nowadays.

If I make a really good AI coding platform which saves people hours compared to existing platforms and provides more security. The chance of success is 0 because it's competing with incumbents.

If I make an app which allows cats to order food and back massages from their owners, this has a high chance of success.

This thread is about people hacking on code that gives them pleasure and maybe some monetary reward. People enjoy discovering others work. Whether your project gets traction is sort of irrelevant.

Personally I found this thread more interesting than the spew of AI or rust posts.

I assume there's a lot of people who might be interested in what you're coding even if it's taking on the incumbents of providing services to cats.

I encourage you to share.

I guarantee you that blockchain tech can solve a real, extremely important problem, though it's only a problem for some people. If you're connected to the money printers, then it's useless to you. Just like if you worked for a company like Enron which was cooking the books, 'honest accounting' would not be a solution for you; 'honest accounting' would be a problem for a company like Enron and everyone who works for Enron.

Proof of Work is highly inefficient and inconvenient. I agree to this.

Cryptocurrency sector is mostly a scam; or at the very least, a kind of casino. I Agree to this; though my understanding is that it has been corrupted by mainstream financial interests; just like Africa is kept corrupt and poor by some of those same interests. Then the plebs basically blame African people for 'choosing this'.

I've worked for some very successful crypto founders who became corrupt. I saw the change happening. The desire to improve things turned into self-sabotage. It was unlike any other company I ever worked for; nothing made sense. Yet I know for a fact that government regulators gave their approval. I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. It was all announced publicly though it took some time to understand that the projects were scams from the beginning... But like they got money from a government entity and they didn't build anything AT ALL. Then they got more funding on their next project... Weird right?

Proof of Stake is actually highly efficient; it's basically a ledger with dynamic runtime replication ability.

Unless you fully understand the current mechanism of how money is created globally; including the Eurodollar system and how stablecoins, derivatives and other financial constructs could be used for legal counterfeiting, you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.

I never got the whole larger "crypto" economy. The number of meaningless alt coins. That come and go most of the time, build on zero any type but speculative value. Worse than any fiat.

And then stable coins. Fancy IOUs of fiat. Which might or might not have actual assets backing them. Which you might or might not be able to redeem. Say if Russian government had a billion in whatever stable coin. Could they redeem them and get real dollars transferred to some account they own?

I think the second line is touching on something. The implication is that there may be a kind of legal cross-nation counterfeiting happening. Stablecoins likely play a part. When I worked in crypto back in 2017, all the successful people would tell me that they thought there was something really wrong with Tether and they all believed it was propping up Bitcoin. They expected it to collapse any day... But here we are 8 years later.

Ideally, countries should only be allowed to issue their own currency. It's not hard to see why a country being able to print another country's currency would pose a problem... With all money being digital and stored on thousands of distinct bank ledgers which basically don't have consensus, it would be very difficult to track with manual audits and with the current incentives in place. It would be trivial to hide these transactions under legitimate names as various forms of international payments.

What is there to get? Do you get sports betting or lotteries? People play games. They invent arbitrary rules with real consequences and try to "win".

Back in school we used to do things like "dare" people to do something or bet on a coin toss or something with the stakes being a snack or a desirable bit of stationery. I feel like everyone believes there is some clear boundary where things suddenly become "grown up" and "real". Do you remember when you became "grown up"? No? Nobody does. The secret is it never happens. The only difference is children have no "real" assets to play with.

What makes some derivative traded on Wall Street, like a "synthetic CDO", any more or less meaningful than alt coins?

> you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.

But most of the engineering around blockchain was to improve throughput (ie off chain transactions)

Its not like you can really do fractional reserve banking on the blockchain, well not practically. this means that you can't treat it like "money" ie the ever increasing supply of non-central bank controlled cash (ie your eurodollar, yen etc.)

There is no utility in stablecoins. They are basically joint stock company, but without an income, or case law to help you when it goes pop. Of course they are popular because they have no regulation and can basically do what banks do, but without any of the oversight need for stability/fraud prevention. "we are going to act like an investment bank, and create money, oh no, not by securities, but by word of mouth, that word being pyramid."

The utility of stablecoins is to bypass regulations. I suspect it could potentially be even more shady than that; could be some hack which leverages the Eurodollar system to allow EU entities to print US dollars which can be used inside the US.

The concept of fiat currency is fundamentally flawed. A US dollar in my bank account probably has nothing to do with a US dollar in your bank account besides the name. In reality; your bank uses one ledger, my (different) bank uses a completely different ledger. There is no consensus. It's not even the same currency in reality; only the name is the same.

If I hold a US dollar in a European bank account, it's yet another thing on a different ledger, operating under a different government with different incentives.

There are supposed to be checks and regulations to ensure that Europeans cannot print US dollars and then transfer them into the US for spending (to prevent Eurodollars from physically flooding the US economy), but correspondent banking is extremely complicated and there is no real consensus; one weak link in the chain (one nefarious or neglectful bank out of thousands) could potentially compromise the entire system and currency.

Imagine if some corrupt EU politicians, working with some big finance traders, found a way to digitally 'print' US dollars out of nothing within the EU and then spend them into the US; to redeem real US labor in exchange for these Eurodollars they printed out of nothing. I suspect this is where stablecoins may play a role as they are not as well regulated; some shady firms with minimal licensing and supervision could neglect to segregate Eurodollars from USD behind the scenes; thinking "A dollar is a dollar."

There is a big difference between exchanging currency vs converting currency. If, you were to set up an account which could receive both Eurodollars and USD and teat them both as the same; this isn't an exchange; this is a CONVERSION; it's counterfeiting.

But most people would see this situation and just think "This is just an international account which receives US dollars from both US and Europe; no big deal, nothing nefarious going on." They don't realize that the US Dollars printed by the US are not the same as those printed by Europe. I believe stablecoins may be an additional mechanism to try to blur the boundaries between the two monetary systems to allow counterfeiting.

>> I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. <<

could you share some links here to these EU-supported projects?

Functionally, they can easily do without Microsoft... I'm more worried about the implications in terms of PsyOps and repercussions... Like they pulled with that ICC judge.

One thing I learned is that I severely underestimated the power of mimetic desire. I think partly because I'm lacking of this compared to the average person.

Anyway, people are hungry for validation because they're rarely getting the validation they deserve. AI satisfies some people's mimetic desire to be wanted and appreciated. This is often lacking in our modern society, likely getting worse over time. Social media was among the first technologies invented to feed into this desire... Now AI is feeding into that desire... A desire born out of neglect and social decay.

When I started using Linux about 10 years ago, whenever I bought a new computer, I would keep a partition for Windows just in case for dual boot... Nowadays I just wipe it all clean.

It's weird to think I'm still paying for the Windows license because I like to buy from a physical store and they don't have alternatives.

Microsoft has become a bit like Oracle... You don't need what they make anymore but you have to keep paying for it. It's like the company has entered into retirement and society is still supporting it... But the difference is it never dies of old age to make room for new generations of companies.

Good article. I think the combination of information asymmetries and the fact that a lot of people have bad taste both play a large part. If you produce something of a quality which is above your target customers' perceptual capabilities, then you will lose because your costs will be too high relative to your competition.

This also creates a perverse incentive to use the media to condition your customers to have bad taste.

I was poor and recognizable in a tiny niche related to open source tools and 100% this was true. The recognition creates envy and ambitious people invest extra effort to sabotage you... Often, people who are rich see you as a threat and go all out war on you... And you don't have any buffer or support so you have to be 10x better just to stay afloat. Convincing people to work with you is much harder since you can't offer them any money and must offer pure equity... And your reputation, which fades over time, is the only thing that makes such equity potentially valuable.

OP has the problem that his product is much more well known than he is. That's probably why he is not richer. Though at least his product is a mainstream brand by now. He can get recognition by association once he does the reveal "I'm the guy who created Mastodon" this creates opportunities... Though perhaps not as big opportunities as one may think. It depends on the degree of control he has over the product. In general, with open source or other community-oriented products, the control is limited.