So Vitalik, the guy who wrote the Ethereum protocol, recently posted this, which I feel I can comment on:

I'm not necessarily calling him a grifter - but analyzing his post falls squarely under the subject of analyzing grift.

I've never heard of fileverse.io so I looked it up. Turns out, they are mostly a private-beta shop, their products are mostly in private beta? About the only time I'm interested in raw unfinished products is if they are my products, if I am building them. Otherwise, I'd probably stay away from anything that isn't well-supported publicly. So many services have stopped existing over the last decade - anything without a robust support just disappears into the ether. Ask anyone.

But a bigger concern is over the functionality. What does fileverse.io provide, exactly? Document storage? I hate to be that guy, but document storage has been solved for a while, by little something called: the filesystem. To use it, you just own a USB stick and put your files there, on an SSD drive, and then you put that, in your pocket. Some readers will say - yes but that's not in the cloud. If you store documents in your pockets, that's perishable, that not on the cloud. But really, anyone in the tech industry will tell you that remote storage has been around for a while, including private encrypted storage. Separately private, separately encrypted, or private-encrypted combined. You can implement your own, with tools that are decades old. So document storage is not new. Private, encrypted document storage is not new, either.

Signal vs Telegram vs whatsapp and whatnot. I have a friend whom I asked to install whatsapp, and he said no. The outcome of that is that he and I barely talk anymore: whatsapp is my preferred messenger (I'm aware of its lack of privacy), and if he can't use whatsapp, then that's a huge barrier for communication between him and me. Same goes for signal and anything else: you can switch from whatever to signal, but if all your friends are still using whatever, they will soon be your ex-friends, if noone moved to signal except for you. It ain't always an individual's choice.

And what happened to implementing your own messenger? If you are worried about privacy, isn't jabber and XMPP the way to go? Last time I checked, signal was still owned by somebody other than you.

Regarding Simplex: never heard of it, but I doubt that naming a piece of software after herpes is a good idea.

Regarding Session: never heard of it, but since I know what the word means, I don't even want to search for a product with this name, since it is stupid. A session is an instance of a login. An identity has access to a resource, and that identity is represented by the session. The name already exists, the word is already used. Calling a product Session is stupid.

Yeah, I don't like google maps anymore, I like them less and less. I used to have a bunch of favorited places - but now the map decides to shove advertisement at me and claim it as favorited by me. Unacceptable. I was writing a map-bookmarking service a decade ago... but it went nowhere.

Regarding protonmail. I've actually used it. I attempted switching from gmail to protonmail. And you know what? protonmail sucks like any other. Protonmail is about the only time I lost email data. When attempting to withdraw from them and take my data out of their system - it proved impossible, their software ("bridge") didn't work for me, it hung, and since the messages were "encrypted" I never got them back. I lost an email archive when closing down my protonmail account, and it was the only time I lost email archives. So no, I don't recommend it.

Besides, protonmail is still owned by someone else. If you are privacy oriented, wouldn't you want to actualy own your data? There are so many self-hosted email solutions. is Vitalik even a technologist? Can he now bring up an email server by himself? Why is he advertising a you-own-nothing service, instead of a common dovecot or another self-owned email infrastructure bundle?

So you see how I interpret his message as grift: it sort of seems like he's making sense, except it doesn't. Messaging, documents and email can be self-hosted. Buterin's point is counter-productive and moot.