DFinity: The Apotheosis of Decentralization is Here.
Monday 2021–05–10 was DFinity’s big day. Four comments: 1) Whoa. 2) Yawn. 3) Yikes. 4) Good grief.
Let’s start with Whoa:
I have to go and purchase ICP Tokens to set up my canister to have a viable environment. For any purpose. So, this is the pay wall, as it were, or a subscription fee.
The token went up to $750 and then “settled” back down to $345. As of 23-Jul-2021 the price is $35.20. I’ll have to investigate further, but here it is again in the “decentralized” world: you never know what something is going to cost. From minute to minute. But that’s a separate economics lecture.
There are 469,213,710 tokens. About $160.5BB market cap at its height.
Therefore, the owners (AndreesenHorowitz, et al.), you know, the ones who also own big parts of the “non-decentralized” world, have made back their money and probably way more. And let’s not forget, they are on the board so...
Now let’s proceed to Yawn:
So, what’s up and running and how do you get to it? A bunch of videos of DFinity folks doing things. And these are pretty basic. How do you do anything… well, the short of it is: you have to pay since you always need a cannister. And presumably any time you spin up anything, the cost varies.
Yikes….and Good Grief:
As part of airing his views on WHY WE NEED DECENTRALIZATION, the founder and brains of DFinity, Dominic Williams, says:
“Ultimately the Internet Computer is controlled by the Network Nervous System (NNS), so all this remains to be seen. I do think it’s reasonable for social media to have some kind of moderation but… personally, I feel what happened to Parler is *outrageous* (and I’m not MAGA)”
If nothing else, he is like so many others in the space. They live in a world devoid of responsibility and human consequences: “I’m not MAGA”. Well, a lot of people in 1930’s Germany could have said “I found it outrageous that Der Stuermer was shutdown (and I’m no Nazi)”.
The less control we have –aka, Decentralization — the better. And there’s no difference for these True Believers between Western Liberal Democracy and Totalitarianism or Fascism or Autocracy or Kleptocracy. All comers are welcome with their messages. No consequences. May the best one win.
But wait, it gets better….
So, there are 188+ folks working on this, being paid a large amount of money and a large number of them will be MAINTAINING THE CODE and deciding how the product works. And they will be part of a large for-profit corporation with a board stacked with VCs. After all, why else would all those hot-shot VCs invest?
There is not just the fake “decentralization” of BTC, ETH, etc. Here it is deeply clear that SOMEONE runs the show and needs to profit. Just because you let people vote on things, doesn’t mean that those running the show and fixing the code can’t do with it what they want…or need.
How on earth can anyone not see that this is just another scam in a space that is pretty much from foundation up a scam?
