Also, even purely in the umbrella of "giving money to strangers for them to have fun", a bitcoin conference is a weak use.
But it also sounds like sending her to participate would have been even worse than ignoring her!
Many people get all emotional around crypto and blow it out of proportions imho. Sure there are many bad things about it, but to let your opinion of crypto taint so many nice tings is sad imho.
"Some subset of these features is in MP3" is not a valid response.
These have been around in podcatchers for a long time, see e.g. [1] for chapter markers. Apple lagging behind on podcasting features/quasi-standards is also the norm, not the exception.
Anything that is crypto-adjacent or sometimes even "not actively opposing" cryptocurrencies is heavily disapproved of here. I get some of it, and agree with much of it, but it always goes too far. Always leads to conclusions not grounded in truth because as soon as the term comes up there is a heavy emotional reaction.
That couldn't be father from truth :) . Tokens are very much liked and often used by the HN crowd and by the IT workers in general. But there is a crucial nuance - most people using tokens, are using them for tax/customs avoidance. So in the topics where people are discussing how to pay for this or that and avoid taxation or or avoid sanctions etc. tokens would be shown in a positive light and those comments upvoted. What you've stumbled upon is the case of "selling" tokens to people for any other task, and that is widely ridiculed for a reason.
Only those that believe privacy and sovereign control of wealth has no value, can assert cryptocurrency is useless.
"Anonymously paying for VPN" seems a bit ironic given that almost all VPN users then immediately proceed to completely deanonymize themselves towards the VPN by accessing it from their (not anonymous) home Internet connection and/or to access sites that deanonymize them. Add to that the fact that most blockchains are very much public, and I couldn't think of a better way than crypto to deanonymize my entire payment and Internet usage profile in one go if I tried.
I do agree that payer (not necessarily payee) anonymity is really important and most existing payment methods fall short of what's arguably the absolute minimum in a non-surveillance state.
Still, this seems like a problem largely orthogonal to crypto. It's possible to build a payer-anonymous payment system based on regular centralized databases just fine, see e.g. GNU Taler.
> What is your backup plan to pay bills when your bank account is frozen by identity theft (can take months to resolve)?
Mine is to live in a jurisdiction where banks aren't allowed to get away with stuff like that (and where "identity theft" is not really a thing because knowing a 9-digit number and maybe having a photo of somebody's driver's license is not considered a valid KYC method), but I realize that this is not an option for nearly everybody in the world, and I do see some value of crypto as a forcing function in those.
I didn’t say it was useless, it seems to have a niche value to speculators and investors.
All of the examples you gave either don’t matter to 99% of everyone (“hey mom, how do you donate to whistleblowers”) or isn’t the most practical way to do a thing. E.g. bank account-related fraud is vanishingly small (the vast majority is credit card-related); in the US it affects ~10k people per year. Is the average person more likely to lose their savings to fraud or lose a crypto wallet due to human error?
Also I have legitimately purchased things in person all over the world with bitcoin, including at major department stores. A great way to meet the rare actual cypherpunks though are places that are crypto first, like the pubkey bar in NYC.
I do not trade, and have no interest in trading.
Decentralized payments will be as easy as paypal soon with Silent Payments allowing you to pay someone by email -> dns -> private one time use address, all automatically.
It has produced Monero which absolutely is that currency. Now if only we could get people to actually use it.
I think the only thing that stands a chance is something that partially anonymizes one party to the transaction but not the other, or something that can deanonymize a given transaction only by very publicly and verifiably "breaking glass".
I'd rather have my money work in a way that allows that than in the current status quo, i.e. a complete lack of privacy for anything other than cash (which has different issues and doesn't work so well online).
Or when Lithuania breaks glass on every transaction and sends the data to the FBI, like what they did with Anom?
And even when it's not drugs, I sometimes use it to pay for things online because Visa randomly doesn't want me to use my Visa card for unknown reasons.
My point stands also if you weren't: Podcasting 2.0 did not invent chapter markers, it only added them to the RSS feed.
> Anything that is crypto-adjacent or sometimes even "not actively opposing" cryptocurrencies is heavily disapproved of here. I get some of it, and agree with much of it, but it always goes too far. Always leads to conclusions not grounded in truth.
I can't deny that I'm coming into crypto-adjacent discussions with some preconceptions, even though I'm sympathetic to many of the ideas, and don't treat the ecosystem as a monolith. There are well-intentioned folks in it, but also libertarian fanatics, corporate short-term-profit maximizers, social media grifters... I really wouldn't say that only crypto critics are at fault for the lack of grounding in truth. (And I say that as somebody that's been somewhat involved with it for a very long time.)
If you're one of the remaining well-intentioned folks in what has largely become a sea of grift, I do feel for you, but I also understand where people here are coming from.
Yes part of podcasting 2.0 is lightning payments (which address a lot of issues people here have with crypto and has the potential to support indi devs and creators more fairly), but I admit I played with it and it is not there (yet).
Edit: And thank you for your thoughtful answer. There are some real lunatics on the crypto side indeed.
But then they don’t have no issue giving money to powerful people that likely don’t share their righteous worldview.
IPFS has largely failed to find adoption as a protocol because it was over engineered and did not give users what they want.
People don't want decentralization. What they want is the downstream effects of decentralization like privacy, disaggregation of powerful entities, and permissionless participation.
For a protocol to be adopted it needs to give individual users these things in practice, not simply be "decentralized" in design.
I develop for NOSTR and use zero cryptocurrencies because the communication aspect is what matters, especially the account with npubs which are basically universal entry cards to avoid anyone having to create separate accounts just to use some website or app.
There are so many clients, here is a site that tries to keep up with what exists: https://nostrapps.com/
Sure, you can always fork a protocol/not federate with who you dislike etc., but you might find yourself fighting an uphill battle against other people’s experiences and preconceptions. Protocols are ultimately always designed by people too.
[1] Note that I have no experience with either Nostr or professional football, so take this as a purely hypothetical analogy with no relation to real organizations. I have to assume both are lovely passion projects by people that just share a common passion.
About the only ownerless protocol is Bitcoin (not Ethereum, Monero or any other one) and it still has an entity with soft power over it.
Nah, you didn't understand it. Lightning is a layer-2 protocol on top of bitcoin. Nostr is the so-called layer-3. Good luck trying to build Nostr without Lightning.
The amount of ignorance about Nostr (by both pro and antis) is astounding for such a simple concept. I feel like literally nobody reads the very short specs.
You're just lying because you hate crypto. That is as bad as the blind evangelizing of cryptocurrencies.
Beeeep, wrong. Next question.
Same goes for the agents I deploy, I'd like to have methods of returning value for whatever value they extract (in the form of information).
You said I'm anti-crypto, then I linked you to a msg I wrote in the past advocating for L402 (which is a Lightning-based protocol).
I was just telling you that you're wrong. I'm a big believer that Lightning is the only way to solve micropayments.
Now get your conspiracy theories somewhere else please.
You can still send money without integration, but you have to copy-paste an address into a separate bitcoin program and click a few buttons.
that'd be a big step up because when I tried Nostr the last time I didn't even see people discussing computer science or pulp literature, but just random cryptocurrency nonsense, the equivalent of a room full of high school dropouts trying to sell you Tupperware at the door
I do think you can blame a protocol for the users it attracts. The medium's the message. A protocol is designed with intent, if there was no relation between a protocol and its users, what's the point of inventing it, just use an existing one.
Anything like this in 2026?