Look, I get it, I wouldn’t give a shit if TikTok imploded tomorrow and went out of business. I don’t use it. Actually, I would cheer on TikTok’s implosion. It’s a cesspool. However:
“First they came for the xxx and I didn’t care because I didn’t use or like xxx”…“and then they came for me or the thing I liked or used there was nobody left to defend me”
I knew I shouldn’t have said anything, because I would have become everyone’s enemy. Please don’t generalize my words, because I have this opinion only about tiktok only.
True. Impossible to fully censor. Easy to “censor enough”, force out of app stores, and deem illegal while being cheered on by the left and right because they both somehow think it’s in their interests, having abandoned the idea of free speech somewhere along in their ideological trajectory. Just like with TikTok ban or the Digital Services Act.
They’ll start by saying lemmy is spreading “disinformation” or “foreign influence” or “harming children” or whatever their excuse of the day is. Then legislate lemmy apps out of the app stores and go after lemmy server operators or users.
Not saying lemmy couldn’t survive as a network, the point of the meme is the dangerous precedent set when people support things like a TikTok ban and say the government should be able to regulate speech or access to speech in that manner. The government shouldn’t be able to tell you what you can say or think, who you share those thoughts with, or what media you consume. It’s a human right to think and speak and be able to listen to others speak. And unfortunately, for different reasons, both the left and right are cheering on its erosion.
Centralized platforms are proprietary, brittle, easily targeted. When they are taken down, they stay down.
Lemmy is, effectively, a protocol, not a platform. Anyone can host an instance, and they all talk to each other by default. Any of the big instances get knocked down, and they get replaced by a dozen others. An instance may die, but so long as someone wants to put up another, Lemmy remains.
Bitcoin is not a centralized platform. Tor is not a centralized platform. Government has had little success targeting these protocols.
I visit reddit occasionally and honestly, Reddit is also just reddit recycled content. I’m not on there nearly as much as I used to be and I still see the same fucking posts and videos on popular, many of which are just karma bots.
I think I see more new stuff on Lemmy. Not usually good stuff, but at least it’s novel. Or very very old memes, but that’s not recycled reddit, that’s more recycling icanhascheeseburger or some shit, and I’m down for that.
The government controls it and they use it to gradually decrease the portion of supply your hard-earned money represents. They aim for 2-3% inflation in a “good year”. That’s the nice countries, ask any Argentinean how they feel about who controls that money printer. Monetary inflation mostly impacts the poor and middle class who have more of their net wealth in cash whereas rich people have their money safely stored in assets like stocks or land. So the government controls the money printer.
Unless you use Bitcoin. Then the protocol (nobody) controls it. And it’s controlled to never make more than 21 million BTC. No person, even if they had a trillion dollars, even if they bought every Bitcoin in existence, even if they had 1000 guys with AKs, no person could make Bitcoin print an extra BTC it wasn’t intended to print. Or spend money that they didn’t have the private key for. That’s a money printer I can trust. It’s faithfully done this for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or being hacked and has a market cap that places it in the top 20 countries by GDP all while experiencing continual growth and adoption. But it’s a fad right? That has no purpose? A scam? And on year 16 you’ll finally be proven right?
You could actually break bitcoin with enough computing power. Bitcoin works on the fact that most of the miners are honest. Someone with enough processing power could rewrite the Blockchain as they want.
Not really, and miners have fantastic financial incentive to remain honest. It’s not altruism. In terms of the attack you are talking about (51% attack) Nobody can amass that much computing power and certainly not quietly, good luck acquiring enough ASICs to do it, let alone enough energy. You’d need your own fab for them which means designing your own ASICs (specialized devices for mining which are orders of magnitude more efficient than regular computers) or stealing designs for them. You’re already into the billions of dollars right there with having your own fab. You can’t buy even half of the processing power you’d need on the open market. A 51% attack is absolutely insanely expensive to do and logistically impossible at this point. And even if they could, the absolute best they can do is temporarily delay transactions or do a double-spend (spend the same BTC twice). They can’t spend money they don’t have the key for and they can’t print extra Bitcoin as all other nodes would reject those transactions as invalid. Doing a double-spend makes no sense because the only benefit of doing so is getting something else in exchange for that BTC. If I’m going to trade say… 1 billion dollars of oil for your BTC, I’m gonna wait for a few blocks of confirmation, even assuming I could transfer that much value that quickly. And whatever you trade has to be more valuable than the cost of a 51% attack which is probably north of a trillion dollars at this point depending on how you do the math. Plus, you know, the legal/extralegal/diplomatic/etc consequences of your actions depending on what you did the attack for.
The attack isn’t a one time thing, your delay only works if you keep attacking. The second you stop, the chain reverse to the “true main chain”. A 51% attack has never happened successfully against Bitcoin and never will at this point. Even at the nation-state scale, Bitcoin is tied in enough to international markets at this point that attacking it could easily cause an international bank run/financial collapse and massive diplomatic problems. And all you’d prove is that you wasted an inconceivably large amount of money to attack a system that picked back up right where it started a few minuted, hours, or days later. Because unless you intend to continue your attack and energy use forever, that’s exactly what would happen. Meanwhile, you’ve pissed off every voter, hedge fund, state retirement fund, business, bank, national treasury, international organization, charity, and legislator who has any sort of exposure to Bitcoin.
That’s just Mitnick’s over-inflated ego and constant media presence. The punishment he received was not commensurate to his crimes, giving him reasonable support. Everything else is just his hype game.
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