OkTurtles, a company building decentralized internet tools, writes about certificate transparency, Zcash, blockchains, and internet security.
HN commenters cite its critical posts on Zcash's trusted setup and fees; one defends it as legitimate criticism rather than a rival coin's promotion.
> I'm curious about this. Any references?
Yes, see my post above for links about one possible cryptocurrency approach called Group Currency (disclaimer: I am one of the contributors to that idea).
Group currencies can be thought of as "company-tribes" where relationships are familial instead of exchange-based. We'll post a simplified version of this scheme to https://blog.okturtles.com soon.
The TLDR of the simple method is: (1) members of the company-tribe all accept payment for their products and services to the group's account. (2) Funds are divided evenly until a basic income has been reached for each member (say, for the month), after which all additional funds go to the member who is generating them.
> The problem I see is that you already have this huge taxation burden which soaks up surplus wealth that might power such things. Implementing basic income at the government level would redirect this firehose, but I don't see how decentralized voluntarist approaches would achieve that.
This is a great point, and one that needs to be considered and discussed.
It is possible for a group to both pay taxes and provide its members with a basic income (and campaign for an end to mandatory income taxes ;).
Even if you host your own email server, your emails are still handled by routers and the destination server unencrypted. You are not trusting others much less than not hosting your own email.
If you have your own domain and you don't trust others with your conversations with others, I think you are better off hosting a chat server over an encrypted protocol, such as XMPP or IRC or https://blog.okturtles.com/2015/11/five-open-source-slack-alternatives/ . Persuading your contacts to use it is a problem though.
Calendar is a different thing though. As long as you have a CalDAV server and a CalDAV client you should be good to go.
Also related to selfhosting stuff: https://sandstorm.io/ is a project I've discovered some time ago and haven't been paying attention to, but it seems to have thrived pretty well.
ZCash requires a trusted setup, takes a 20% fee from miners, and active mixing requires 8GB of RAM.
https://blog.okturtles.com/2016/03/the-zcash-catch/
http://weuse.cash/2016/06/09/btc-xmr-zcash/
If you are interested in anonymous blockchains, I highly encourage you to look into Monero. It meets or exceeds that of ZCash. And Monero's RingCT is currently implemented and in use on TestNet with a target "go-live" this January.
This is an utterly stupid comment. If you read an article that slammed MongoDB's eventual consistency and encouraged people to use mysql instead would you call it a "mysql pump?
This is also not the first time someone has smacked down ZCash for being ill-conceived and dangerous: https://blog.okturtles.com/2016/03/the-zcash-catch/
http://blog.okturtles.com/2014/09/the-trouble-with-certificate-transparency/
Disclaimer: okTurtles is a competitor to the traditional CA system.
Worth it? You sure? Check this out: https://blog.okturtles.com/2016/09/how-to-compromise-zcash-and-take-over-the-world/