A historical review of the multi-decade centralization and capture of the email protocol.

Interesting history and analysis of SMTP’s history. How can we prevent fedi and other open protocols from suffering the same fates?

  • makeasnekOPEnglish
    817·
    1 month ago

    You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.

    Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.

    This guy is a protocol engineer, talking about protocols. You may not like like Bitcoin, but it’s pretty hard to argue it’s not one of the most successful, widely-used, and forked open source protocols developed in the last several decades. Bitcoin core is in the top 100 starred repos on Github. It has a unicode character.

    Bitcoin’s market cap (> 1 trillion USD) is bigger than Sweden’s GDP and it moves billions of dollars around the world every year. You can use it to send money to anybody with a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees, and it settles instantly. And it’s been working for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack despite pandemics, wars, financial crises, and attempted bans by global powers.

    Like, be mad if you want, but it’s a pretty successful and robust protocol. And if you don’t like it, you can fork it and change it, because it’s open source.

    • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
      211·
      1 month ago

      http, https, ssh, ntp, ftp. These are all algorithms some of us use every day. Bitcoin is a protocol, true, but it’s not a good one. And it’s one that most people have not used, and don’t intend to

      It has a lot of forks? that is neither here nor there. it’s a tech buzzword. of course there are going to be a lot of forks. Do any of them actually go anywhere though? not really

        • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
          41·
          1 month ago

          ‘One of the most successful, widely used, and forked protocols’

          SSH is also a protocol, tho I’ll admit maybe its ‘one of the few’ above bitcoin - but I can come up with a page of examples that top it if you need (HTTP, TCP, UDP, RTSP, RGMII…)

    • Handles@leminal.spaceEnglish
      51·
      1 month ago

      No, see — if I dont like it I don’t need to fork it. I can just leave it and all its forks the hell alone. I’d do the same for national currencies if I could, cryptocurrencies are just the same bullshit without the regulatory checks and balances.

      TL;DR — I see what you’re selling and I’m not buying it.