Like i sometimes wonder what alternatives to Patreon could be used?

For instance liberapay? But dunno, probably people do want to communicate to their supporters.. (like, even if you don't, you might want it as a backup?)

Switching is a huge step.. their current income and career would be at risk.. Suppose, maybe unless you use two platforms at the same time and can see the users switch..

Substack has payments I think. You can also run Ghost or WordPress and get paid subscribers set up fairly easily.

Then there are always crypto options. This looks interesting.

https://charlestown.social/notice/ANOMOnfeYKwf3fwUOO

@thatguyoverthere SubStack is another capitalist venture.

I got really interested in Ethereum because it could do kickstarters and this, for instance. But it's filled with capitalists, finance, and piles and piles of grifters now. People being rich is bad, PoW is a total waste.

I hardly think blockchain _can_ actually do it without a harmful mess around it.

I don't know that proof of work is a total waste until we can find a better mechanism that is just as hard or harder to exploit. I agree ethereum seems to be headed in a bad direction. Monero is a bit different. They use proof of work, but no specialized hardware is required to mine. Transactions are private and ring signatures help obfuscate things further. AFAIK it's the only truly fungible cryptocurrency and it's censorship resistant

@thatguyoverthere @jasper proof of work makes a good deal of sense from a physical/thermodynamic perspective

an alien could come to earth and quickly determine which is the hardest cryptocurrency by checking the hardest hash in each chain - this would give the alien a decent guess at the amount of energy used to secure the chain

just as one could gain a rough estimate of how much effort was put into mining a given amount of gold

bitcoin's PoW uses less energy than clothes driers

Clothes driers actually dry clothes for everyone, @skells in contrast PoW, at best, protects a _tiny_ amount of peoples financial transactions.

And that's _protects_, like from other people? The _alleged_ utility is based entirely on distrust. Whereas bank transactions are reliable for over a hundred years..

And the alien analogy, what's the point. What is/isn't obvious to an alien is utterly irrelevant. I just want to send money from A to B, possibly with a few rules about it.

@jasper banks cause financial crashes several times a decade

that said, I can see you've made up your mind