@protonprivacy
this is a real weird move for a "privacy" company, given how *not* private bitcoin is - so is building a public mapping of users emails to their btc addresses

> "(and one shouldn't confuse Bitcoin with "crypto")"

and this is a weird thing to hear from anyone who isn't a bitcoin maximalist

why is *Proton* offering the _least_ private way to pay people and telling me its a good thing?

@AeonCypher @gfwellman @tivasyk I think money creation is not really a problem with a technical solution.

Decentralizing things at a protocol level *does nothing* to decentralize **power** - pretty much every chain of any size has far more drastic wealth concentration than most govt currencies and could be (and sometimes are) crashed by the actions of just a few individuals.

@ShadSterling there are ones where those are less bad (though not eliminated) - I think the volatility is a worse problem - its not really that useful to accept payments in a currency you can't pay your *bills* with and may not be worth the same amount by the time you *can* exchange it.

stablecoins aren't a solution either - they *are* a central authority, and algostables (or generally any token pegged to *anything* off chain) *provably* can't guarantee they won't depeg.

@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur was mostly on things closer to a "private blockchain" than public one w/ adversarial consensus (didn't have to work with *totally* mutually distrusting parties - it was still verifiable, you couldn't undetectably change history - but we never needed a solution for a "cold start")

I generally like the idea of trust networks but I think the hard part of them is UX - its hard to make clear (especially to nontechnical users) what's happening.

@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur i worked on a lot of similar pre-"blockchain" tech and then after it took off watched a lot of my ex-coworkers and peers go on to blockchain co's that I thought were at best producing clunky subpar products and sometimes just outright scams

the incentives are toxic - crypto is a space where investors don't have to wait for an "exit," and can profitably just sell hype so even well-meaning projects get turned into pump-and-dump schemes

@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur https://github.com/ctfs/write-ups-2014/tree/master/stripe-ctf3/level1

there wasn't a mempool or anything but if you were really into the idea of proof-of-work version control there's no reason you couldn't take it further