A historical review of the multi-decade centralization and capture of the email protocol.

Interesting history and analysis of SMTP’s history. How can we prevent fedi and other open protocols from suffering the same fates?

  • ___@lemm.ee
    0·
    4 months ago

    By design, it will slowly stop inflating at the snails pace it does vs unpegged paper currency.

    A central bank regulating where money is printed and to whom it’s distributed at what contrived rates is horrifying. It’s also the default in most of the world.

    You can trade bitcoin and use it as a currency in a non-capitalist market. The fact that it has been abused and traded into stratospheric value is a result of manipulation, sanctioned exchanges, and propaganda.

    Bitcoin just allows you to write debits and credits on a distributed, verified, ledger. That’s it really. How the market is regulated is on the people, not the technology. There is nothing inherently capitalist about the technology other than allowing any individual to trade value with another in a free market manner. You would be trying to escape supply and demand dynamics to remove that “capitalist” aspect of it.

    The power draw on the other hand… the first imagining of a digital decentralized and distributed currency was bound to have some problems.

    • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      4 months ago

      Snails pace??

      You wanna take a 2 second peek at the value of bitcoin over the past decade (over 7 years bitcoin is about 3000%, USD is approximately 32% over 10)

      Banks do suck but there’s absolutely no reason rich people can’t manipulate bitcoin - maybe even easier than traditional money.

      Put your money in gold or something that actually exists instead of an imaginary number that’s limited in supply

      • ___@lemm.ee
        0·
        4 months ago

        That value was increased initially through usage as countries adopted ATMs and online retailers accepted bitcoin. This obviously reduced the supply due to increased demand. Then the speculators started buying it up making it even more scarce.

        It has a fixed amount. It’s normal to rise in value as it becomes more useful for either transacting, holding value, or making money through speculation. You can’t compare it to a 300 year old dollar which was unpegged from gold and has the US economy/government backing it now.

        The dollar is also manipulated, but the effects are less pronounced due to the sheer amount in circulation around the world. Some of the effects are also thrown on other economies through the Forex markets too. If bitcoin were as ubiquitous as the $, it wouldn’t be easy to manipulate either. It’s like having your own coin with only 100 physical coins in circulation. All someone has to do is buy a bunch and refuse to sell and the value rises for the uninformed.