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Comment by jasonkostempski | Hacker News Reader

Choosing file transfer as the first goal seems like a great decesion to me. File sharers are willing to adopt anything.

They might not like that too much based on:

> Bitcoin is unethical as it prevents the state from effectively extracting taxes from economic activity, or from enforcing basic rules on allowed economic activity.

Interesting how privacy in communication is ethical but privacy in economic activity isn't.

It’s the general default of societies I’ve lived in. The idea that money is speech and corporations are people is a very very new and uniquely North American concept.

That said the privacy of users can be protected with crypto-currencies just like it is with cash, without providing a tax-evasion scheme for the wealthy/criminal. GNU Taler is a good example of this design. I wish it well!

> Choosing file transfer as the first goal seems like a great decesion to me.

True. We still don't have a good way of doing this[0].

[0] https://xkcd.com/949/

Actually, there is: if both users are on gmail, you can attach big files to your mail, and it's automatically uploaded on Drive (and retrieved seamlessly by recipient from mail). If recipient is not using gmail, you can still use Drive to upload your file and share it. And obviously, there are many Drive competitors, like dropbox and Box, to name the biggest ones.

Unless something has changed each of those still require an existing account on the senders side. With an account on an appropriate service or the right program sending files has been a pretty solved problem for ages. Not sure this really solves super well either since both people would have to download, install and configure GNUnet.

Indeed, it requires auth. The xkcd page nor grandparent were mentioning not requiring auth as a requirement :)

I didn't get this is something GNUnet would allow. I guess it could be a thing... if using GNUnet is easier that registering a drive/dropbox/whatever account.

one to one peer to peer file transfer: justbeamit.com peer to peer file transfer (link doesn't die after one person) file.pizza

but ironically every single OS today ships with a remote desktop functionality. some even on by default.

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