Here is the problem:

Yes Tether is shady and shouldn't be trusted, we've known for about 10 years (see articles and comments here on HN)

But guess what, look into most banks it is probably worst and connected to Epstein. The rabbit holes don't end.

Blame the mismanagement, corruption, deficit, debt that has been going on for a long time.

You can't rely on your national currency and will be left juggling between USDT, XAUT, Bitcoin and tokenized stocks on some blockchain and apps.

It is either this type of farwest or some enforced, worthless CBDC like they might do in the EU.

Once national currencies have been destroyed by decades of mismanagement there is no good solution.

Totally agree.

But, it feels like there were attempts by government to regulate and penalize bad actors. Watered down and neutered by lobbyists, of course. FINRA and Rohit Chopra and Lina Khan had some power in the last administration.

But, this seems like the top down government is actively engineering a looting of the treasury for private interests.

Am I wrong that this feels at a totally different scale and audacity?

> Am I wrong that this feels at a totally different scale and audacity?

I believe the difference is that now it is really "in your face" because the internet is dominant.

The world of money/finance/banking always had a lot of money and the best thing they can buy are the people in charge. There are plenty of books explaining it decades ago and and I read a lot of them. 2008 was when it started to become mainstream for the first time, now it is free to read on substack.

The difference is also today we have an open battle between an old guard and the tech/crypto challengers, and it seems the newcomers have outbid the old guard in the current administration.

Should you side with WellsFargo/Visa/Mastercard or Circle/Tether/Strip ?

I believe that we established all those government systems are fairly easy to hack. I remember some French military naval construction network got owned about a year ago, much worst in a sense.

My guess is since a global conflict is ramping up this is only the beginning and we are about to see some real damage.

It is fairly easy to create chaos in a country for a few weeks if you start disrupting the grid, payments or internet access.

The question is why IPFS did not get the traction something like Tor had for decades?

I believe the fundamental problem of those protocols is everyone fear ending up serving child porn just by running a "node" and taking a chance at explaining the future P2P internet to a judge.

IPFS got a CID deny list [0] but it was too little too late

- [0] https://badbits.dwebops.pub/

Other nodes cannot make you host arbitrary content you did not request yourself.

I was talking about running a public IPFS gateway. This is what the deny list is for.

A few years ago they got into the AI bandwagon and stoped funding the P2P/Web3 stuff from what I remember.

The era of big tech cooperation around free software is obviously over.

Those kind of moves are petty but there are worst tricks they can pull unfortunately.

It seems Grapheneos is the rare actor willing to put up a fight nowadays, and their "partnership" with Motorola seems to be a first step. They need to ensure a hardware platform.

My guess is at some point they will have to fork AOSP, just because Google will take it in directions that go against Grapheneos principles.

> My guess is at some point they will have to fork AOSP

I am still sad that Huawei didn't go this way, I thought they would with HarmonyOS.

I wonder if it could happen at some point that an alternative Android becomes so big that OEMs start supporting it. It feels like it may be interesting for the big Android manufacturers to support something like GrapheneOS?

I wonder: for those Motorola phones that will come with GrapheneOS, won't that make it cheaper for Motorola because they won't have to pay the Google licence (because those GrapheneOS-Motorola phone won't be Google-certified)?

> I wonder if it could happen at some point that an alternative Android becomes so big that OEMs start supporting it.

I think this is the huge battle GrapheneOS won with Motorola. There are probably a few manufacturers of phones unhappy or nervous regarding Google.

The next battle is really on the app front. Once a country says our government and bank apps need to run on the fork of AOSP then you will start to have a real alternative to the Google/Apple (and now Huawei) duopoly.

My guess is there are a lot of candidate countries for breaking out of the American/Chinese grab on every smartphones.

So in a way the future could look bright as long as we support GrapheneOS and Motorola.

> I wonder: for those Motorola phones that will come with GrapheneOS, won't that make it cheaper for Motorola because they won't have to pay the Google licence (because those GrapheneOS-Motorola phone won't be Google-certified)?

There's been no confirmation that any phones will come pre-installed with GrapheneOS from Motorola, just that some phones will be compatible.

My guess is Google is already applying pressure on Motorola to make sure every phone still ships with standard Android from the factory.

Beautiful !

Big government, big surface attack.

Spyware and bloat ain't cheap these days.

Linux users don't rejoice too much, the Fedoras and Ubuntus were eating so much of my RAM I had to take refuge in Alpine.

"Linux users" is a pretty big spectrum. My XFCE install uses barely any ram.

CachyOS was using 3.25gb of ram while streaming video at 4k on my system.

My Windows work PC is currently using 28.2 gigs to have outlook, teams and 6 browser tabs open.

Kind of odd an apple to oranges comparison you're making there, streaming video uses hardly any RAM.

How much RAM does CachyOS uses if you're running outlook, teams, and 6 browser tabs open?

There's a LTT video that came out recently that showed Linux using 4-6gb less in equivalent use cases across the board, if that is helpful.

Is it actually using it though or is most of it just cached stuff?

Debian-like without systemd: devuan. I actually use it instead of gentoo these days for VMs since I dont have to compile everything. Sacrilege, from me, gentoo user since 2005 or so.

systemd has plenty of negatives but it doesn't cause memory bloat.

At least with Linux you have the option to debloat it, because it's your computer.

You might consider MX, it has a much lower footprint for eating ram.

Debian XFCE is still strong with a low amount RAM, too.

> The grass is always greener on the other side ... until you actually dare to find out.

Yes this is the core problem.

The grass used to be very green in the "first world" (North America and Western Europe) but it is now getting dangerously yellow.

Instead of asking themselves the hard question why the grass is getting yellow the people in charge try to prove it is fine by bringing cows (it is an image here) from the "the third world", and say look the grass is not getting yellow because those cows like it.

This is why you usually see the collapse of the rose-colored glasses effect in third generation of immigrants.

So yes the grass can still been seen as relatively green in Germany, but I have regularly traveled there for decades and I can tell you as an external observer the country looks like it is going to hell over time.

You get a similar effect with westerners going to East Asia. A lot of them like it very much there wearing rose-colored glasses and can't figure out why the locals believe the future is dark for them.

Uh, I think you’re misunderstanding.

3rd gen immigrants aren’t impressed because they literally have no idea what it is like to live back in the ‘old country’.

Go back (to actually live there) and often those 3rd gen immigrants will definitely have a different perspective than they used too.

‘Native’s’ in 1st world countries often just don’t really understand the reality of the situation, and are the ones with the rose colored glasses.

Or do you think someone complaining about, say, the UK, will legitimately find things easier in India?

Because I’ve lived in Both; and nah dog.

The bigger issue here IMO is the fraying social contract and exposure to narcissistic manipulation due to social media and the ‘algorithm’.

It’s ragebaiting everyone about everything.

Combined with the bill ‘coming due’ for a lot of debt fueled overspending, and population collapse, of course.