Well, in actual reality, crypto has failed to achieve anything besides being another financial instrument to invest in. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but that's the reality.
What specific aspects do you think crypto failed to achieve? I use crypto payments on an almost daily basis. Wasn't that the primary purpose of Bitcoin? A global, decentralized payment network accessible to everyone. Why do you care if many people now view Bitcoin as a potential investment opportunity, if it still serves its primary purpose?
I don't doubt there are a small number of people in the world using cryptos to pay for things "on a daily basis" but the keyword here is
small. There are something like 30 billion transactions a day worldwide using credit cards alone, and there's simply no chance, architecturally, that cryptocurrency could even achieve one thousandth of that.
And as I've said many, many (many!
) times here, I think it's
great that people view Bitcoin as an investment opportunity. You have my viewpoint here exactly backwards. I think cryptos are a perfectly fine investment instrument and they've shown their popularity in being so in the last 10 years.
But as a worldwide payment system, crypto has failed. And you know what? Given the price of Bitcoin right now,
nobody cares. How hard is it to believe that a technology that was created for one purpose was instead used for another purpose, the original one being a bust? That's happened a zillion times in the history of tech...
GMail is the first kind of "private", because it's absolutely private unless there is a court order.
Google is literally the privacy nightmare of Web2. You can probably keep your documents private from a family member or a friend, but in general? Google lives off your data.
Yes, absolutely Google itself lives off of your data in lots of ways, but they don't do anything with your
actual emails. They work off of aggregated data. I don't discount the privacy concerns with them for a second (my company doesn't even use cookies
at all for instance), but your actual emails aren't getting breached unless there's a court order.
I feel sorry for you if you really think that. These are the facts, though:
Google has been involved in multiple lawsuits over issues such as privacy, advertising, intellectual property and various Google services such as Google Books and YouTube. The company's legal department expanded from one to nearly 100 lawyers in the first five years of business, and by 2014 had grown to around 400 lawyers
source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_litigationSorry that I think
what? I said I agree that Google has privacy issues, and they are well-documented. And my company
doesn't even use cookies because we see them as evil.
I was only making a narrow point about the text and meaning of the emails themselves, for which there has never been any evidence that Google has every breached that without a specifically targeted court order, nor would there be any reason for them to. That doesn't mean I deny they have many privacy issues, many of which I've seen first hand in my IT career.
