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?

  • Handles@leminal.spaceEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    I know there are problems with big email providers subverting decentralisation to benefit their business models, and throttling mail from independent or self-hosted domains. But I couldn’t take the analysis seriously past this statement:

    You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.

    Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.

    • ___@lemm.ee
      1·
      4 months ago

      Bitcoin is hypercapitalist? A decentralized value store not controlled by any one country and immune to money printing inflation? What are you smoking?

      • Kogasa@programming.dev
        2·
        4 months ago

        Bitcoin is more widely seen as a vehicle for speculation rather than a decentralized currency. Unlucky.

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

        Capitalists will even sell you communism if it makes them a dime, end result is cryptocurrency is half assed solving a problem that doesn’t really exist.

        Like inflation is a great example, you shouldnt have to add modifiers onto its definition, inflation is inflation - bitcoin by design must inflate

      • Darohan@lemmy.zip
        0·
        4 months ago

        I mean, it’s been shown that it’s relatively easy for a big company to control the price of Bitcoin, and there’s nothing more capitalist than wanting to get away from the control of countries and states that might get in the way of making as much profit as possible so, yeah no I’d say hypercapitalist is a valid accusation. Bitcoin was designed to beat the big banks and capitalist status-quo, but I don’t think that we can pretend it succeeded anymore.

        • ___@lemm.ee
          0·
          4 months ago

          No tech is perfect. And the current bitcoin is not the same as the original client. It has been modified to allow for abuse and control. The fact that we allow this to take place is more a reflection of our governments aiming to control it than any inherent property of the currency.

          Big banks would have far less control if you couldn’t print sanctioned currency to buy as much bitcoin as they want to play with the value set by sanctioned exchanges.

          I agree that bitcoin is capitalist like most monetary bills in a free market. I disagree it’s more capitalist than what we have now. It’s just being propagandized and veiled from the underlying technology to make it seem so.

    • makeasnek@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.

      Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.

      This guy is a protocol engineer, talking about protocols. You may not like like Bitcoin, but it’s pretty hard to argue it’s not one of the most successful, widely-used, and forked open source protocols developed in the last several decades. Bitcoin core is in the top 100 starred repos on Github. It has a unicode character.

      Bitcoin’s market cap (> 1 trillion USD) is bigger than Sweden’s GDP and it moves billions of dollars around the world every year. You can use it to send money to anybody with a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees, and it settles instantly. And it’s been working for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack despite pandemics, wars, financial crises, and attempted bans by global powers.

      Like, be mad if you want, but it’s a pretty successful and robust protocol. And if you don’t like it, you can fork it and change it, because it’s open source.

      • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        4 months ago

        http, https, ssh, ntp, ftp. These are all algorithms some of us use every day. Bitcoin is a protocol, true, but it’s not a good one. And it’s one that most people have not used, and don’t intend to

        It has a lot of forks? that is neither here nor there. it’s a tech buzzword. of course there are going to be a lot of forks. Do any of them actually go anywhere though? not really

      • Handles@leminal.spaceEnglish
        0·
        4 months ago

        No, see — if I dont like it I don’t need to fork it. I can just leave it and all its forks the hell alone. I’d do the same for national currencies if I could, cryptocurrencies are just the same bullshit without the regulatory checks and balances.

        TL;DR — I see what you’re selling and I’m not buying it.

          • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
            01·
            4 months ago

            ‘One of the most successful, widely used, and forked protocols’

            SSH is also a protocol, tho I’ll admit maybe its ‘one of the few’ above bitcoin - but I can come up with a page of examples that top it if you need (HTTP, TCP, UDP, RTSP, RGMII…)