The one thing I’m taking away from all this talk about Free Software author burnout and maintainership transfer to unknown parties and long untrusted dependency chains: it’s fucking incredible how this works! 🎉
Sure, there are bad actors, bad anecdotes, but think about how many times this worked: all the overhead we avoided by simply trusting each other, all the community we experienced because we helped each other.
I guess I’m trying to make a comparison to credit cards and bitcoin: if you don’t trust anybody, financial transactions start costing a whole lot of electricity. Take a look at Comparing Bitcoin’s energy consumption to other payment systems in where “other payment systems” is VISA. “an average Bitcoin transaction requires several thousands of times more energy.” Not trusting fellow humans is expensive.
Comparing Bitcoin’s energy consumption to other payment systems
They have a sister site for Ethereum, too.
#Free Software #Philosophy