Fiat currencies keep losing value and are controlled by a small elite. On the other hand, there are open-source cryptocurrencies that cannot be inflated and work in a peer-to-peer network, without the need for a central bank or single administrator. Why pay attention to them and use them? How to do it?

These currencies keep gaining value compared to fiat currencies, because they cannot be created out of thin air as central banks do when it is in their interest. That is why people who save or invest in cryptocurrencies have a big advantage over people who save in fiat money.

But they are not just an investment tool; they are currencies that can be used to buy all kinds of goods and services. There are a large number of companies that accept cryptocurrencies. If a company does not accept them directly, it is often possible to purchase gift cards through companies that act as intermediaries¹. It is possible to live on your own only using cryptocurrencies; I have done so for some time and continue to use them in my day-to-day life.

Keep reading Cryptocurrencies are free-software money, so I use them

Ignorant people rant about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies. They don't know shit. How many wars were created over fiat currencies and the power plays of politicians and central bankers?

Fiat currencies are inflationary, so they encourage economic growth (at what cost? At whose expense?). That inflation also attenuates the indebtedness of states, it is like an invisible tax against the poor and the financially uneducated.

Dumb journalists, central bankers and politicians try to hinder financial independence and privacy with bans and biased news. They have failed; they will not succeed. It would be like trying to ban precious metals.

There are cryptocurrencies that are trash, that don't provide privacy, etc., but you can't tar everything with the same brush. Moreover, the environmental impact is minimal compared to fiat currencies. There are cryptocurrencies that pollute more than others, of course. For those who care more about the environment, there are cryptocurrencies that do not use proof-of-work algorithms.

Many complain that they are censored on the Internet, that they can't speak openly about certain topics for fear of losing reach and revenue, and so on. They depend on platforms over which they have no control, they are like tenants that can be kicked out at any time. When you post on platforms like X, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, you are using someone else's platform (someone else's home). The moment you stop being profitable and the advertisers or the owners of the company don't like you, they censor you, they kick you out.... And you can't do anything about it. Or can you?

The cheapest way to protect yourself against the whims of one platform is to use more than one. If one platform fails you, you still have the others. In my opinion, it's best is to use a free platform that is part of a decentralized network. If you are not convinced by any platform, you can set up your own. Is this expensive? No. Thanks to the ActivityPub protocol, it is very cheap to create a node within the Fediverse. The Fediverse is a large decentralized network with which you can reach millions of users. You can choose PeerTube to upload videos, Mastodon to create and share short written posts, Lemmy to discuss with other people...

You can also buy a domain name for very little money and set up a website on a server that you rent or set up at home. For further protection against censorship you can also set up a hidden Tor service.

You can also create a mailing list or a group in a messaging program. With this method, your publications reach your recipients directly, without depending on arbitrary algorithms that can limit your reach. If the server from which you send the emails belongs to you, you will have more control, you will be the sovereign.

In short, the trick to avoid censorship and the whims of big owners is to have your own platform or channel. If this is not possible, the best thing to do is to have several accounts spread across different platforms. This way, if you are censored on one, you still have the others.

You are watching a video you like. The video is interrupted. An annoying ad. Back to the video. A sponsorship. Subscribe. Leave a comment...

Slowness, pollution, consumerism

Digital ads make you buy useless things you don't need and waste precious time. In addition, ads cause pages to load more slowly and create huge CO₂ emissions (both directly and indirectly).

Ads that kill

Advertisements have always been used to manipulate our perceptions using psychology. Advertisers sold tobacco as a symbol of liberation, unhealthy foods as if they were healthy... Then health problems and death followed for people who were convinced by those ads.

You pay for them with your money and time

If you buy a product advertised on the Internet, the part that companies spent to produce and propagate the ad is paid by you: with your time and money (we are talking about a billion-dollar industry).

Censorship

You can't express unconventional political opinions, nudity is not allowed... Advertisers don't like to take risks, everything has to be under control. If they don't like you, your video will be demonetized, it won't appear in the search results. Anything that doesn't contribute to consumerism must be ignored, because it doesn't make them money.

Zero privacy

With the rise of targeted advertising, many companies monitor everything you do on Internet, creating psychological profiles that allow advertisers optimise ways to manipulate you.

A life without ads

For all these reasons, I block ads on websites, videos (including sponsorships), etc. With the time I save, I can find the information I'm looking for more efficiently and read articles or watch videos without waiting. This has allowed me to learn more in less time and to spend more time doing what I really like.

If I buy something, I try to buy it wisely:

• What are the ingredients?
• Are there higher quality options?
• Where was it produced?
• How much does it cost?
• ...

If I like something and I want to support it, I do it directly (without intermediaries) so that they get more money than they would if I gave away my time to abusive advertisers.

Of course, advertising on the Internet will continue to exist, because there will always be sponsored articles, corporate-funded videos or things like that. Luckily, it is possible to avoid many advertisements using programs like uBlock Origin and Piped.

Thousands of Reddit communities will stop being accessible tomorrow in protest against the decision to charge millions of dollars to apps that use the API. As a result of the policy, many apps will stop working.

However, while some people are recommending that people stop using Reddit, the protest is limited to two days. The problem with doing a temporary boycott is that it sends this message to the owners: a lot of people are angry, but after two days they're going to come back and we're going to keep making money. Reddit stopped being free software years ago and it's not going to stop censoring information they don't like.

I support boycotting Reddit, but I think it shouldn't just last two days; it should be permanent. There are several programs similar to Reddit that are free and respect the privacy of their users: Lemmy, /kbin, Postmill, Lobsters, Tildes...

Lemmy and /kbin, unlike Reddit, are free and federated, so the administrators of a node cannot censor information from nodes they don't control or impose anything on them; each node has its own policy.