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"we sell gift cards :)"

"and we ban you for buying or redeeming them"

is just top tier comedy honestly.

As soon as I heard the first one of these stories about a guy getting google broad-spectrum banned because a junkbot AI thought his completely normal youtube comment was a nazi rant or whatever else it hallucinated - I bailed on the whole shebang. Hosting your own stuff is, if you're a reader of this site, easy enough and cheap enough there's little reason not to.


All of this was obvious 8 or so years ago during the first real boom when cryptos pants fell down. All hype no usecase. Here we are now how far along in (20 odd years?) with how many smart people making a genuine concerted effort to build something useful (literally millions over the years?) - and still the only useful thing anyone has ever done with blockchain is buy drugs and have a good time.

As I say, crypto is only useful if the whole world is already on the chain. Until then you need to trust outside sources which undermines the entire deal in trustlessness and undermines it in performance.


There are multiple countries in the world where issues like hyperinflation have pushed day-to-day transactions to crypto for everyday people.


No, there actually aren’t. People just assume there are but the majority of desperate people turn to the barter system before crypto helps them.


Yes there are. It is well documented in other countries such as Venezuela or Argentina and some vendors even prefer cryptocurrency because compared to their national currency it is more stable. In addition, there are significant remitance and cross-border payments done in crypto where banking or FX controls make dollars hard to access in countries like Venezuela and certain regions in Africa.

Day-to-day transactions at the street level may not be dominated by crypto or even a majority, but it is a growing nontrivial minority in a lot of places especially emerging markets.

[1] https://www.trmlabs.com/reports-and-whitepapers/2025-crypto-...

[2] https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2025-global-crypto-adoption...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1362104/cryptocurrency-a...


> countries like Venezuela and certain regions in Africa

So approximately none of the world's money and only in the most desperate situations.

I'm all in favor of some kind of vehicle like this, a currency supplemental system that is decentralized and safe. What I don't give a shit about and what is obviously useless are the "usecases" people keep coming up with beyond currency. The absolute #1 best usecase is ticket NFTs - proving you did something on the network to the outside world. As soon as you need to prove to the network something you did on the outside world - 99.99% of the ideas people have - you are back to uselessland.


Please tell me about a better system that would let me send money from EU to Russia to help my mother buy her medicine?


I will get downvoted for this but who cares... AI is the same, 10 years and all we have is autocomplete and waifus.


The people who occupy the b2b ram buying kind of jobs are not aliens from another planet. Brand awareness in consumer markets, especially ones that are so closely tied to people's jobs (nerds gonna nerd) is going to have a knock on effect. It's not like a clothing brand or something.


Sometimes reputation and suchlike in the consumer market can directly boost your B2B business. Consumers and professionals alike will look at backblaze drive reliability figures.

Other times professionals will sneer at a consumer product, or a consumer product can diminish your brand. Nobody's wiring a data centre with Monster Cables, and nobody's buying Cisco because they were impressed by Linksys.


Not that it invalidates your point, but Cisco sold Linksys in 2013.


Yes, but the consumer brand has to have a good reputation for that to pan out positively in B2B. Crucial has a decent reputation, but the problem is that there hasn't been any innovation in the consumer DRAM market for 2 decades that wasn't driven by/copied from the enterprise sector. The difference between a Crucial DIMM and a Micron Unbuffered dimm is which brands sticker they put on it, and maybe a heatsink and tighter binning/QA. That's not unique to Micron/Crucial. Aside from "Moar RGB", what innovation has happened in this space in the consumer side of things that isn't just a mirror of the enterprise side (eg DDR4 to DDR5)? XPO/XMP? That's Intel/AMD dictating things to DRAM companies. So what impression really are people meant to carry over from Crucial to Micron in this instance? How is Micron meant to leverage the Crucial brand in this space to stand out above others?

Similar story on the SSD side of things regarding reputation/innovation, especially when you consider that Crucial SSD's are no more "micron" in a hardware sense than a Corsair one built using Micron flash (support is a different matter), as the controllers were contracted out to 3rd parties (Phison) and the flash used was entry level/previous gen surplus compared to what's put in enterprise. The demands and usecase for consumers and even prosumers/enthusiasts are very different and in general substantially less than on the enterprise side of things with SSDs, and that gulf is only growing wider. So again, what is meant to carry over? How can Micron leverage Crucial to stand out when the consumer market just doesn't have the demands to support them making strong investment to stand out?

Frankly, taking what you say farther, I think if this is what they want to do (having consumer brand recognition that can carry over in some meaningful way to B2B), then sundowning crucial now (given the current supply issues) and then eventually re-entering the market when things return to some sense of "normal" as Micron so that both consumer and enterprise brands are the same brand, "Micron", makes much more sense.


I haven't seen anything that suggests chat control would do anything to e2e. I am genuinely curious. It seems to be an often parroted point but... ?

It's just local image hashing and matching? Or is this only one implementation idea?


Chat Control is in some ways a response to E2E, by saying "let's backdoor the endpoints, then".


Famous communications lecturer at most prestigious school on earth beats grad student from public college at teaching. Wow wa we wa high praise indeed.


Look around you. How many of the prominent people you know got there by listening and humbly soliciting opinions? lol


Well, if you're out to con people, then yes, you don't have to listen to their opinion, only to shape them, but that never lasts. You cannot fool all of the people all of the time.


fwiw, for this kind of tech - personal level projects - there is not a snowball's first summer outing in hell's chance I'm going to pay for someone else to host my thing remotely. I would like to just self host, and if it was good I would buy a license for it so I can self host - but I think you have a customer in mind that doesn't exist.

Your ideal customer a) is extremely technically proficient, such that they are even capable of finding this in the first place, and their brain doesn't glaze over at "jQuery is Your Starting Point" - the opening line of your docs. b) They for some reason would rather pay for someone else to do the world's easiest hosting job and deal with whatever baggage and limitations come with this.

Or am I misunderstanding? Like it's a nodejs server on some aws box. Charging people for this is fine, but not allowing them to do it themselves seems... ridiculous?

You gotta eat, I know, but I'm wondering who it is that is ok paying for someone else to do the easiest part what they do for a living.


> You gotta eat, I know, but I'm wondering who it is that is ok paying for someone else to do the easiest part what they do for a living.

I don't think that hosting is necessarily "part of what they do for a living" for people who write the code.


I mean, if you can't host a box, hang up the gloves.


I think you're underestimating the market here. It's not just extremely technically proficient people, it's the glitch people, the "custom myspace theme" people, possibly even the jsfiddle people.

The `/save` endpoint looks almost trivial. Knocking up a mimic wouldn't take much. The client libs will be interesting, but from the looks of things they're not quite there yet.


> the glitch people

poor art students?

> the "custom myspace theme" people

they stopped existing a decade or more ago?

> possibly even the jsfiddle people

These aren't even a real group?

lol


Internet comment safety policing, when you have no idea what went in to making the content, is one of the more tiresome things a person could ever do.


You heard it here first folks - children are too niche now.

2ish billion people, well known for their indirect spending power, are not worth figuring out a simple whitelist system for.


It's parenting that is niche. It's outsourced to Google.


This is exactly what I got from reading the article. Your explanation is a less detailed overview packed in to a smaller format. Oh... the double irony?


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