I'm a pessimist too, however you may be discounting the effect of capitalism in your analysis. To me it seems reasonable that efforts of a group of cooperatives instead of a group of for-profit companies could lead to a different result.
Of course there are and will also be highly negative effects, but the hope is they will be more easily isolated as a result of many cooperatives taking action to exclude those negative effects and their propagaters, rather than rely on policies and practices of a small number of profit-seeking companies.
That is your educated perspective. A larger share of Americans place greater trust in what they hear about public issues on social media from interesting personalities than in the NYT, sadly.
The article mentions that 9-1-1 calls can be made without a SIM card, and the phone will attach to the strongest network, regardless of the phone’s home network.
Out of curiosity, is the same thing true if the phone is in Airplane mode? Or would attempting to make an emergency call instruct the phone to attach to its home network?
I use it every day for personal projects. Since I’ve been writing code for more than 20 years, the aesthetics aren’t as relevant to me. It’s a useful tool that works quite well. It’s not trying to win this year’s design competition.
It's true, it's an old field that remains (I think) in progress. I just fear that the confidence in decentralized currency you cite may be overly influenced by the profit early proponents have earned.
Perhaps a few academic collaborations could generate peer-reviewed papers that leverage those decades of research alongside the practical experience of bitcoin experts.
This is a lovely faq and quite informative, however I'd feel a lot better if there were peer-reviewed papers by researchers with some prior work on Byzantine Fault Tolerance.
Of course there are and will also be highly negative effects, but the hope is they will be more easily isolated as a result of many cooperatives taking action to exclude those negative effects and their propagaters, rather than rely on policies and practices of a small number of profit-seeking companies.