https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Graber
In 2015, Graber began working as a software engineer for SkuChain in Mountain View, California. She then worked in a factory in Moses Lake, Washington, where she soldered bitcoin mining equipment. In 2016, she began working as a junior developer for the Zcash cryptocurrency.
So lately I have been trying to figure out why people are calling BlueSky decentralized and I noticed that fun fact. It made me realize how cryptocurrencies are something else that was often technically “decentralized” but in reality controlled by a single person or group.
In case it’s also not known, Jack Dorsey who helped found BlueSky is a big cryptocurrency booster.
Why should we know this?
Because however one feels about blockchain tech and its future, past companies within the crypto industry are notorious for selling the moon, being shady, and cashing out early. ‘ZCash’ appears to be a good example, particularly because a small group exerts such a high level of control over it.
And if the parallel holds, and at least some of that applies Jay Gaeber’s own personal experience and expectations of what a company’s trajectory should look like, it doesn’t bode well for Bluesky.
Because the claims of people involved with cryptocurrency are historically very untrustworthy, that’s why.
The thing that got me interested is that BlueSky says it’s “decentralized” but the more I look into it, it’s only “decentralized” using a very narrow, highly technical definition of the term “decentralized”.
Cryptocurrency is the same. People with a financial stake in cryptocurrency often say it is “decentralized” but it’s only true if you accept their extremely narrow definitions of what that word means.