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Comment by kareemsabri | Hacker News Reader

Promises of crypto has a lot to do with how crypto as a system actually manifests in the real world with real people. If I say "promises of email have nothing to do with a random, US-based centralized entity like GMail. Not your server, not your emails." that would be a very silly thing to say.

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Well, that might not be a very silly thing to say.

I figured it was obvious, given 1.5B people use GMail so it's probably the largest receiver of email in the world. So even if "email is open" if there's a closed system on the receiving end of your message it doesn't do you much good.

Maybe it's not obvious though, and we're just talking theoretical techno-utopias.

I think this is a false dichotomy. Gmail is popular, does not undermine the “openness of email”. Both statements are true, and people can and do run their own mail servers, or choose other more trusted providers. It’s a good analogy to crypto actually.

Google scanning all your emails does not undermine the promise of email, just as coinbase forcing addresses doesn’t undermine the promise of crypto.

Gmail absolutely undermines the openness of email. That's fine, it's a choice users made because they don't want to run their own email servers, so they offload it to Google. Google decides what to classify as spam. As such, if I stand up a new email server and start sending email to Gmail addresses, I am at the whims of Google deciding what email from me gets delivered.

The protocol is open and designed to be decentralized, but the system as implemented in the real world is fairly centralized at this point. Saying "you can run your own mail server" doesn't matter if virtually nobody actually does.

If the end state of crypto will just be a bunch of web2 style companies running centralized servers that (maybe) interact with blockchains, and we say "that doesn't undermine the promise of crypto, you can run your own node", I guess I'll have to agree to disagree.

"As such, if I stand up a new email server and start sending email to Gmail addresses, I am at the whims of Google deciding what email from me gets delivered."

This is the critical point. Adoption matters, and always ends up with consolidated power. It's just how things are, and how they stay, short of the severe intervention of dramatically easy-to-use tools for "click to host your own stuff".

Yes. I think this is an important distinction, freedom to do something is still important even if the majority don’t do it.

It allows us to trust gmail/coinbase more knowing we can move away from it if required. Because they know that too

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