I’m surprised no one has mentioned mutualism, as it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re looking for. Mutualists aim to create an economy of worker cooperatives, and abolish long-term absentee ownership.

I don’t think kbin.social is coming back at this point, so I’ll start making my anime_irl posts here instead.

Seems so. It’s been giving me the “We are working on resolving the issues” message for over a month. :/

Yikes. Is there any further context available? Not that it would improve anything, I’m just curious.

There is a “Knife Rights” organization that works to overturn these laws. From what I hear, they tend to be pretty successful, since there isn’t a ton of attention on the issue and there isn’t much in the way of entrenched opposition the way there is on the guns issue.

Monero will not scale. All attempts at “improved” altcoins have just sacrificed scalability in exchange for features that look good in the short term to investors that don’t know any better.

I’m not interested in spending a ton of time on this, but I did go and watch this short interview with him about scaling misconceptions.

Wasn’t convincing at all. For one, the guy comes across as kind of dishonest. Not scammer-level dishonest, but more like a politician. The main thing though is that he’s just a big-blocker, which is just a total dead end. Having everyone store every single transaction that was ever made until the end of time is just not realistic.

In order to scale to any globally significant number of users, a cryptocurrency needs a second layer to aggregate transactions, such as Lightning. Monero seems to have nothing in this regard beyond “However, academic and industry research is ongoing and promising in this area.”

they are a hell of a lot smarter than me

You should not be investing money in something based on this level of understanding, and you *definitely* should not be advocating it to others. Scaling is an existential problem for cryptocurrencies. Their utility is based on their monetary value, and their monetary value is based on investor assessment of their future utility. Without the ability to scale, there will be no growth in utility, which means no investment other than temporary dumb money, which becomes a vicious cycle.

Oh damn. When I first looked into Session I was really excited, until I found out that the anonymity layer was based on an altcoin. Which means that you’re only anonymous as long as line goes up. I didn’t expect it to fail quite this quickly though.

IMO, you shouldn’t be investing in cryptocurrencies or any currencies for that matter. Currencies should be
used, not hoarded with the expectation of gain. If you’re buying cryptocurrencies as an investment, you’ve already lost.

Cryptocurrencies literally cannot function without speculative investment. Even in the absence of formal investors, *someone* has to be the first person to accept the tokens in exchange for something of value, in hopes that they will have value of their own in the future. Until then, the tokens are unusable.

Further, the market cap and liquidity of a cryptocurrency impose practical limits on what it can be used for. You can’t very well conduct a billion dollar transaction through a cryptocurrency that has a market cap in the millions. Investment raises the market cap, “unlocking” these higher-value use cases. Conversely, loss of investor confidence will reduce the market cap, and effectively reduce the utility of the coin.

This is why ability to scale is so important. The current market values of Bitcoin and the various alts are based far more on speculative investment than they are on usage. Those investors believe that the coins will see far more usage (and have far more natural demand) in the future than they do today. If that turns out not to be the case due to an inability to scale, investors will start to flee, and the vicious cycle will start.

Scalability isn’t quite as simple as “how much data can a well-off enthusiast from a developed country store”. You need to consider the behavior of your lowest common denominator users.

You want as many users as possible to run fully-verifying nodes, rather than SPV (“simplified payment verification”) nodes that can be tricked by a malicious miner. The more transactions are being done through SPV nodes, the more potential payoff there is for an attacker, and the more resources they can dedicate to an attack.

Further, if your number of full nodes gets low enough, it becomes feasible for state actors to track down and compromise the remaining node operators. At that point, you may as well just be using a centralized, government approved payment system instead.