Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.
Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.
People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.
Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.
Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.
Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions—things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis—while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.
I call it ponzipunk
I just wish people who complained about it would spend at least 5 seconds trying to think about an alternative way to achieve p2p electronic cash transactions that lacks the problems they see in cryptocurrency. But nobody ever does. At the very least, don’t try to convince me that the problems that cryptocurrency purports to try and solve aren’t real problems.
That is beside the point though. Crypto is very polluting, that’s really not compatible with solarpunk ideas.
How polluting is it?
That’s just Bitcoin though. What about other implementations of crypto?
I think there are good things about it, insofar as some kind of currency is necessary for a society to function at scale.
I like the decentralization, and the open-source nature that allows platforms to be built on top for things like streaming and splitting funds with no middlemen.
Apart from the flaws inherent in any form of currency, and potential environmental impacts of some implementations, I haven’t really heard any compelling arguments for why cryptocurrency is “bad”.
Sounds like you want a system that is distinct but similar to what we have. But that’s extremely un-solarpunk. Solar Punk is about imagining a better world that doesn’t rely on bad systems anymore. Crypto is still a tool of the capitalist system at the end of the day, and that makes it the enemy.
I’m honestly quite bewildered by your comment and I don’t even understand how you can make a single inference about my values based on what I wrote other than I think banks controlling the money supply is actually bad and that we should do something about it and if we don’t like crypto, we should think of a better idea
We do have a better idea, it’s called communism as imagined in the solarpunk movement
Yeah exactly. There is a problem, crypto is a solution. Fiat currency is also a ponzi scheme.
Gnu Taler is doing this. No new currency, no mining, and no fraud. https://taler.net/en/index.html
Thank you for sharing this.
Its not a currency, you dont buy it. Its a way to transfer money safely
From the link:
“Customers will use traditional money transfers to send money to a digital Exchange and in return receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this digital cash to anonymously pay Merchants.”
They may be calling their monetary units the same names as their fiat counterparts, but this is clearly a different digitalized currency with exchanges as middlemen. Furthermore,
“in practice a fraudulent Exchange might go bankrupt instead of paying the Merchants and thus the Exchange will need to be audited regularly like any other banking institution.”
@xnx
A good explainer campaign of how it works practically is essential if it hopes to be adopted for sure. I know a bit, but still not clear on it. At some point credits need to be purchased. And as far as I understand it’s not something that is connected to a bank account.I was curious of how it was supposed to function as well, this presentation cleared it up pretty well, and more specifically, the part at 10:24. The process involves sending money to an exchange bank, which then gives you the tokens of the amount sent to the bank. The tokens can then be sent to a merchant/person anonymously, who gives them to the exchange bank. The exchange bank then sends the real money to the merchant’s bank.
@ProdigalFrog
Thanks!!:)
Okay but who gets left to hold the bag? What kind of hyper-volatile get-rich-quick scheme is this anyway?? /s
So I’m not sure I see how crypto is preferable to the non-crypto banking system? I don’t support either of them but if you can show that it’s better, then maybe it has some uses temporarily until we find a better solution.
It’s going to have to be a lot better in other ways to get over the issues around scams, volatility, and energy use though.
I’d like to just point out that systems that don’t use Proof of Work, such as Eth which uses Proof of Stake, use only a tiny fraction of the energy.
There are a ton of proof-of-stake cryptos out now. Cardano, Tezos, algorand, solana, for a few.
Pure proof-of-stake systems don’t use more power than any other typical internet service.
It only works better on a global scale and only for certain cases. And if you ignore problems present in the current banking system.
My examples would be:
people traveling (or refugees fleeing) across multiple countries would benefit from some kind of cryptocurrency in that their assets would be easier to access globally. No having to convert their money as they cross borders or dealing with banks and credit.
People living in places with unstable government and financial institutions would maybe benefit from having access to a decentralized global system to store some of their money in a system their government doesn’t have a hand in or control over
Cryptocurrency is still a new technology and idea. Centralized banking has existed for thousands of years.
Capitalists did what capitalists do and tried to prematurely scam and squeeze as much money out of the idea as possible. Potentially forever ruining the image and possible impact the tech may have had.
Im pretty salty over what happened with NFTs. There were a lot of exciting things it could have been applied to. But no. It turned into money laundering with ai generated images.
These examples are wishful thinking based on some anecdotes at best.
Crypto-currencies are a multi-billion dollar business largely run by the worst people from the existing banking and investment sector and people are surprised that it is predominantly used for bad stuff?
It’s not only an image problem and a few bad apples that spoil the rest, the technology itself is structurally predisposed for these kind scams and acts like a magnet for people with bad intentions, because they know this technology shifts the playing field in their favour.
Always a recommended read on this topic: https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disaster.html
…did you respond to the wrong comment? Cryptocurrency is available from wherever you are - that’s more of a core feature than wishful thinking.
It’s wishful thinking that crypto has ever be used for those purposes by any significant number of people. Those are anecdotes to whitewash crypto.
On, yeah, no argument from me there. I thought you meant those things aren’t feasible, not that they aren’t the primary use case.
One could argue that narcan has never been used for legitimate purposes by any significant number of people. It’s used primarily by criminals.
I hope we both agree that it’s a good thing and the criminals should be able to obtain it.
Denying goods and services to minorities just because a majority has no use for it is simply wrong.
Nice trolling attempt, but being addicted to drugs is not a crime.
Cryptocurrency is available from wherever you are
As long as both parties have trusted devices, power and an internet connection.
With a bank card only one the recipient needs that and with cash nobody does.
So all you can come up with is some edge cases where traditional banking can’t be relied on? Seems like a very convoluted way of saying that crypto is usually worse than traditional banking.
Also just wait until you hear that if you can buy crypto, you can probably participate in forex as well. I know people who come from countries you describe, and they just use euros or dollars because a highly volatile currency with astronomical payment processing fees is the opposite of what one needs for daily life, no matter how much what the SV techbros wish it weren’t the case.
Imagine telling a refugee he’s an edgecase not worth optimizimg for :D
Read my message again. The optimization is “use euros or dollars (or yuans or whatever is most applicable regionally)”. Your “optimization” is a solution looking for a problem.
Imagine telling a refugee that jeopardizing their life-savings in a ponzi-scheme is the best they can hope for.
I have yet to hear of a possible use of NFTs that would actually be useful. Stuff that was floated like in-game purchases or concert tickets don’t solve any problems compared to the current system.
NFTs died out because scamming was the only thing they were useful for.
They do solve problems though. If there was a simple app that musicians could sell tickets direct to customers, you can loose all the predatory middlemen
You don’t need NFTs for that app. You can just make it with a frontend attached to a database and a payment system.
Venues are contractually tied to TicketMaster and the like. You can’t solve that with NFTs.
You don’t need it because we have ticketmaster? That’s your argument lol? It’s to prevent the next one.
It won’t work because contracts. Try to read next time.
Aside from all the scams, the other use I’ve seen is corporations trying to use them to create artificial scarcity of digital goods, essentially making NFTs a new flavor of DRM with an added, desperate hope of making DRM and FOMO marketing tactics seem cool, techy, and hip.
I don’t like DRM, I don’t like artificial scarcity, and the basic premise of NFTs reminds me of those old infomercials where someone promises to sell you the rights to name an actual star, except it’s only in their proprietary database and you have to go to their website to see that anything has changed. I’d rather just have a copy of the digital image itself than a receipt someone gave me claiming that I own it.
. . . someone promises to sell you the rights to name an actual star, except it’s only in their proprietary database and you have to go to their website to see that anything has changed.
That’s one of the best descriptions of NFTs I’ve heard, and really brings out its fundamentally scummy nature.
Art, actually, once the BS has settled.
Copyrighted works that give owners a small sliver of resale purchases. Buy a used book/audiobook from someone, 2% automatically goes to the author.
Inventory tracking.
Fair trade proof of sourcing.
There are plenty of good uses, and plenty of bad ones.
Like anything, though, you have to apply effort for change. Crypto isn’t some panacea that solves the world’s problems. It is a tool that will be used for dystopic purposes, and can and will be used for more sound reasons.
I’m only responding this to point out that I never said that it was preferable to the current banking system.
You sure are going to bat for it as though it were
How do you figure I’m “going to bat” for cryptocurrency?
I’m extremely tired of criticisms of cryptocurrency without a very least acknowledging the problems with the global financial system that drew people to it in the first place
It’s weird to request that criticism of something first do PR work for said thing, that’s why
OK so you think that anybody who wants people to criticize the global financial system earnestly is doing PR work for cryptocurrency? Seriously? Please tell me I am misunderstanding you.
Enough of your reason. You said something that might put cryptocurrency in a positive light, and you have been judged justly as bad. That’s what makes us all feel good, and that’s what we’ll do. More downvotes for this guy please.
In case it’s not abundantly clear: this is sarcasm.
Well I guess I don’t understand why you want peer to peer cash transfers if not to avoid the banking system which already allows various methods of transferring money.
Or maybe you are saying both are bad and we need something better? If so I agree but otherwise I’ve lost what you’re trying to say here.
I didn’t do a good job in my messaging, I was agitated. but really I was just trying to say these things
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The global banking system represents a far bigger fish to fry, maybe like 100 to 1000 times bigger (it’s quite difficult to assess, but the total wealth held by private banks is frequently estimated to be in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Compare this to the total value of literally all cryptocurrency)
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I probably see a dozen posts that are just writing the same criticisms of “cryptocurrency” over and over again without ever actually addressing why people are drawn to it in the first place, for every one post that’s complaining about banks. despite the fact that banks have screwed over orders of magnitude more people than any crypto bro could ever dream of
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When you don’t actually clearly spell out the problems that drew those people in in the first place, and at the very least empathize with them explicitly, all you do is alienate those people and you don’t actually get them to stop using cryptocurrency
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That’s not what peer to peer means. P2P means no middle man, nobody taking a cut eg.
I don’t see where this post did that, though? It criticises crypto for failing to solve the problems it claims to solve and for adding additional problems on top, not for trying to address things that aren’t problems
It’s just the vibes i get after seeing the 30th mini essay with the same exact content as this, in which nobody ever actually acknowledges any of those problems as being real nor ever proposes a better idea. I guess it literally doesn’t try to convince me they aren’t real problems, but you sure can’t conclude from anything the author has written that they think they are real problems.
I’m pretty sure that nobody describes something as “a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation” in a positive way
I’m a little confused by your response. What gave you the impression that I thought there was anything positive about what the author wrote?
Your last sentence
Excuse me, but they were describing a problem they perceived with cryptocurrency not with the current financial system. And all I’m saying is I’m extremely tired of criticisms of cryptocurrency without a very least acknowledging the problems with the global financial system that drew people to it in the first place, and making it very clear that they are indeed problems that we need to address, and that it’s gonna take a lot more than just complaining.
Well I think that’s a very limiting way to have a conversation. You are now placing an expectation on everyone to spend time to make their posts about topic A longer so it can include topic B. That makes it less likely people will engage because post length is a big factor in attention.
Secondly, many of the people excited by crypto, and nearly everybody engaging in solarpunk discourse, recognize the problems with the current system. So OP addressing people who have been led into thinking crypto will solve XYZ is a good thing. Those people know we need change, they just got excited about the wrong change, OP trying to steer them in the right direction is a good thing.
I’m responding to the part of your comment that says “you sure can’t conclude from anything the author has written that they think they are real problems.” I mean that the author describes the exreme centralisation of power in currency in that manner; crypto is criticised for accelerating us towards that, but it’s clear that OP regards that situation as bad regardless of whether or not we end up in it via crypto. Sorry if my own comment was unclear.
Actually if you just take what they’re saying at face value and don’t make any assumptions or inferences about what they must believe, all you can conclude is that they don’t believe that we’re currently under the control of a Tyrell-esque corporation, and that it’s going to be cryptocurrency that gets us there. But personally I think that’s highly naïve and I do think we’re currently living in a global financial system which might as well be controlled by the Tyrell corporation
They don’t have to believe that we’re currently living in such a situation to believe that it would be bad whether crypto put us in it or not. I think you’re making more assumptions about their beliefs than you’re stating, here.
Personally I agree that we’re not in a position as extreme as that at the moment, because the ultimate powers over currencies are governments rather than corporations. Now, how much of a difference that makes absolutely depends on how democratically accountable the given government is to the populace, but for corporations it’s always zero accountability to anyone but shareholders, so there is definitely room for difference. And, of course, just because things can technically be worse doesn’t mean there are no problems with how things currently are.
In S5E3 they invite on a guest in favor of crypto. The hosts do nothing to counter his statements. Even if they had on that episode, it would have been a zero-sum game. They could invite more guests on who oppose crypto. That still would fail to undo the damage of introducing crypto as something that deserves debate, rather than consistent and clear condemnation.
“Debate me,” is the rallying cry of the alt-right. You absolutely should not debate them. Those ready to argue in bad faith of the indefensible know the power of muddling issues, of eroding moral clarity, and creating uncertainty when there should be none.
I expect solarpunk media to have enough clarity of vision that they present a future that is better than a zero-sum game. And I expect them to do better than being permissive toward crypto. I have lost faith in the ability of “Solarpunk Presents” to deliver bold and radical truth. I have canceled my Patreon support and unsubscribed from their podcast.
I’ve listened to their podcast since the beginning and I’m a proud supporter on Patreon.
They have made it a point to interview people and I don’t get the impression that they agree with all of their interview subjects. I also don’t agree with them on everything. But that’s what an intellectual debate is. Just because they talk about an idea does not mean that they endorse it. Just because you hear about it does not mean that you must go out and buy crypto.
If you are going to look at a movement as diverse and amorphous as Solarpunk, you can interact with multiple ideas and learn more. But just because you learn about something, it does not mean that you must accept it or integrate it into your worldview. As I see it, understand where people are coming from - even if you disagree with it. Understanding does not equal acceptance.
(For full disclosure, I think that crypto makes very little sense. I’ve tried understanding what it is and why it is important but I just feel like it is a solution looking for a problem.)
Ok here’s the thing, crypto as a concept it’s not a completely bad idea the main problem is that the entire ecosystem was kidnapped by scammers and vcs, most of projects are scams at this point and it’s extremely difficult to even talk about the concept without talking about bitcoin, which is the worst offender. But there are small projects like nano that tried to bring back the original concepts after fixing the principal flaws like mining and by extension the transaction fees, of course as you might guessed this project isn’t popular among crypto bros because there’s no profit to be made from the currency itself. I think all of this is still in it’s infancy and has potential to develop in a positive way, what it needs is to remove the idea of easy money and systems that prevent users from earning from trading, in other words remove capitalists from the equation
I’m sorry but I have to disagree on this one.
Core to the design of the public-ledger blockchain system that powers all crypto is the idea that you have to have a proof-of-work mechanism. That’s actually the big innovation that Satoshi Nakamoto brought to the table. Blockchain systems have been around forever, but blockchain in the crypto context came about because of the idea of proof-of-work. Before that you didn’t have a way of securing the public-ledger against bad actors.
Proof-of-work is a system that gives control to whoever will put in the most “work”, and work in this case is measured in computing power. That means that, by design, the system has to produce endless and unfathomable amounts of e-waste. It’s a system that rewards infinite growth and exploitation; to be the dominant power in the crypto ecosystem you have to be constantly expanding the amount of compute power at your disposal. That means endless resource extraction, for one thing. This is as fundamentally un-solarpunk as you can get. It’s also why a reward scheme is built in; there have to be incentives for providing that compute power, and payments to balance out its cost.
(By the way, all of the alternative schemes, like proof-of-storage or proof-of-stake, either have the same problem of endless resource costs, or just hand even more power to those with the most resources)
But if you take away the reward structure, all you’ve done is change the incentives, not remove them, because there’s still the reward of being able to control the system as a whole. If you own the bulk of the processing power, you get to decide what the authoritative version of the chain is. You can decide to change the rules of how transactions are processed, or just roll-back transactions entirely. Without a monetary reward, you’ve now simply handed that control to the people who already have the wealth required to simply throw at it for the sake of the control itself. Your public-ledger blockchain is now owned by Jeff Bezos. You could have a state step in and use its combined resources to prevent this from happening, but then why run it as a public-ledger system at all? It’s already publicly owned if it’s being done by the state, so just have a central bank with an authoritative database system that wastes far less energy and far fewer material resources.
Crypto can’t be printed out of thin air which is what the billionaires hate.
hard forks your crypto
trades it back and forth with my friend to balloon it
dumps it on you
he he nothing personnel kid
Can’t it? Is there any restriction on someone minting a brand new coin and trying to convince people it’s worth money?
You can draw a $5 sign on a piece of paper as well. doesn’t make it a real dollar.
Printing Bitcoin, Ethereum or Monero just isn’t possible.
Doing wasteful math, shitting out an answer, and getting a fucking Bitcoin for it sure sounds like that.
If you can convince someone a piece of paper with a 5 dollar sign on it is worth value, then it is.
Oh wait, you invented checks.
All money is fiat. Nothing has inherent value.
All money is fiat. Nothing has inherent value.
Actually I’m going to disagree on that one. Fundamental value is actually an important concept when talking about money, and understanding why both backed and fiat currencies do actually have fundamental value is key to understanding why crypto doesn’t, and why that matters.
See, the key here is that any currency can possess fundamental value if there is something that only that currency can buy. Fairground tickets can actually have a form of meaningful value, because they’re the only thing the fairground will accept in return for that teddy bear you really want. Within the realms of the fairground, those tickets are a currency, just one with no exchange rate, and a very very limited definition of fundamental value. This is how Bitcoin briefly attained fundamental value; for a while it was the only good way to get drugs and hitmen.
More importantly, this is why every fiat currency (to my knowledge) still has some form of fundamental value; there is one particular service that you can only pay for with US dollars in the US, Canadian dollars in Canada, pound sterling in the UK, and so on… Taxes.
Every country wants you to pay their taxes in their issued currency. Which means there will always be some value to owning that currency, because even if you don’t need it, it’s basically guaranteed that someone else will. It doesn’t matter how many people suddenly decide that the US dollar is just a meaningless number on a meaningless piece of paper, because once every year a few hundred million people still have to come up with a whole bunch of those pieces of paper.
No, but printing things that trade for them is.
This is, in fact, shockingly common in the crypto space.
Step 1: Create a new ERC-20 token. Call it Dickcoin or whatever.
Step 2: Sell a hundred of them to yourself (using different wallets) a few times to establish a trade price.
Step 3: Trade your Dickcoins for ETH or BTC at the newly established rate (if need be, you might have to trade for some more well established alt-coins first, then trade those up to the big boy coins). Alternatively, just use the billions of dollars worth of coins you note own as collateral to take out loans in other cryptos, then default on the loan and let the worthless collateral get seized. Thanks to DAOs running as automated banks powered by smart contracts this is hilariously easy to do because the tiny piece of code will automatically approve the loan at instant speed without ever checking with a human.
None of this is hypothetical. It’s been done an absolutely ridiculous number of times.
Actually they can. Tether is basically running an endless printing press right now. They’ve produced billions of dollars “worth” of Tether backed by absolutely nothing, and most of it is used being used to bid up the notional value of Bitcoin.
Tether isn’t what most people consider crypto.
Stable coins are inherently pointless as theyre tied to an unstable currency. Why would I want my coin to depreciate with inflation?
And yet, the entire crypto economy relies on them.
That is a gross exaggeration. I don’t like tether either for the same reasons listed above but this is such a non nuanced response. We’ve seen price crashes from other stable coins eventual collapse, and other coins have still recovered to a market cap greater than the previous all time high. Your statement is literally, historically verified to be false
Because other stablecoins were able to fill that void. As you yourself noted, even one stablecoin collapsing was enough to trigger a total meltdown in the crypto space for years. And Terra-Luna didn’t have anything like the market dominance that Tether has. If stablecoins as a whole went away, any institutional interest in crypto would go with them (and that’s without getting into the fact that the price “recovery” is almost entirely down to Tether printing money and using it to buy up the price of Bitcoin, which drags every other crypto coin with it, because the market is very tightly corellated).
The recent crash was less volatile than previous crashes, and lasted half as long. There were also more factors than just the stable coin crash, there was also the FTX scandal, and silicon valley bank collapse which had ripple effects in the economy.
Still though, the resulting crash was half as long and not as severe as previous crashes.
I’m not saying you’re wrong about stable coins, but saying the entire crypto economy depends on that, while BlackRock has pushed the SEC to allow for Spot ETFs, is an exaggeration.
I’m not even going to say this is a morally good thing. I hate BlackRock because they are the mainstream/institution. But that level of support shouldnt be taken lightly
while BlackRock has pushed the SEC to allow for Spot ETFs
This is the part you’re missing; institutional investors like Blackrock are only willing to be involved in the crypto space because stablecoins exist. Moving real dollars into and out of crypto is a messy and unpleasant business that big firms want as little to do with as possible. Stablecoins give them a way of buffering those transactions without exposing themselves to additional risk. If you take away stablecoins, you no longer have stuff like Blackrock pushing for bitcoin ETFs.
???
Real world money gets into and out of crypto via stablecoins. They basically underpin the entire notion of crypto as an investment. Without them, none of the apparent dollar value in the space would exist.
Obviously, if you’re a true believer in the ideology then none of that matters; 1 bitcoin is 1 bitcoin. But since actual use of crypto as currency is effectively non-existent, for now the only thing that could be meaningfully called a crypto economy is investment.
Not all cryptocurrencies are the same. Sounds like you don’t quite understand their differences and just want something to rage about.
You’re right, some are ponzi schemes designed to burn the entire amazon and rest are ponzi schemes designed to only burn half the amazon.
Can you please explain how all cryptocoins are ponzi schemes?
If we look at other types of investments/stores of value there is always something:
Stock -> Company
Personal loan -> Work
Gold standard currency -> Gold
Fiat currency -> Taxes *
Crypto -> ?The only way for the prices of a thing to go up is investment or the thing providing value to someone. Therefore the price of Bitcoin is either the result of speculation or the value it provides as a currency. Bitcoin is to slow and expensive for normal use and I don’t think it provides billions of dollars in value to controlled substances market.
A system of investment where the only money comes from new investment is considered a Ponzi scheme.*It can’t just be trade because all the others could work. Is it ease of trade? No, otherwise everyone would use USD. It’s the ability to pay taxes and settle legal debt in the country you are in.
They never do.
Ask anyone who talks shit about crypto for anything besides a meme, and you’ll still get a meme. That’s how their perception of it was established. They probably don’t know the difference between the internet and their web browser, let alone decentralized vs centralized, or all the many reasons why the economy has gone to shit the last few decades.
But they do know memes! The same two memes that have been told since Bitcoin was priced under $10k
To expand on this, there are crypto such as Nano, which take very little energy and time to crunch transactions. I wouldn’t expect most people talking about crypto to be talking about that kind of coin, though. Bitcoin and Etherium are the heavy hitters, and they are incredibly wasteful.
I’m not going to get behind the finger pointing on the comment I am replying to, though :)
Bitcoin has a market cap comparable to apple. It’s not going away anytime soon. You should do your own research and not let the mainstream media establish your perception. It’s not like the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on crime, or the opioid/Xanax crisis were complete blunders by the media, right? But now, they’re opinions on a crypto asset that fundamentally threatens their status quo is not full of shit?
For general blockchain tech but built around leftist goals I would check out [The Blockchain Socialist] (https://theblockchainsocialist.com/)
Tech isn’t evil, its a tool, building tools and using them for our goals is what matters.
That website is giving me serious wolf in sheep’s clothing vibes. In fact, I think it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s trying to bundle blockchain with various leftist concepts to make the grift less apparent. In this article on the website, under the ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)’ section, it says:
In Part 2 we discussed a bit about smart contracts, which are contracts written onto a blockchain in computer code. It can take many types of actions based on some predefined criteria. This is interesting for the Left because of blockchain’s immutability and it can offer trustless interactions between parties that can give certain protections to its participants. If we take this concept a step further, we see that it’s now not too difficult to say that you can create entire organizational structures on the blockchain which are not owned by a single person or entity. Or in socialist-speak, it creates an avenue to encode organizations where workers own the means of production removing Capitalist middlemen.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are usually one or a collection of smart contracts on a blockchain that interact with each other to represent an organization. That organization could be a company, a cooperative, a political party, a social fund or just a group of friends, there really is no clear limit to the type of P2P collaboration that could be made with a Turing-complete language. What makes DAOs special especially for socialists is that we can create organization with encoded Leftist principles based on inclusion and democracy.
This immediately triggered alarm bells from what I’d seen about DAOs in Folding Ideas video on NFTs.
Tech isn’t evil, its a tool, building tools and using them for our goals is what matters.
This tech is so obtuse and reliant on specialized knowledge, that it appears to almost exclusively be created and run by those with ill-intent. It may be possible to use, very briefly, in certain scenarios, as a useful tool. But it really isn’t worth propping up as a good thing/tool, and we should be seeking better alternatives to any form of Crypto.
What are the alternatives though? Currently much of the scaling of organizations hit the issues of Dunbar’s number results in big (and exclusive) clubs, cat herding, and Kafka problems.
The value points I see are: codifying bueracracies into actionable contracts prevents the current problem where rules and doctrines are written but selectively enforced as a personal choice. I don’t disagree on the need to explictlt account for failures to predict all outcome of a rule though, but I would rather be something fixed upstream then selectively prescribed.
A root of trust built on a transparent system using a mathematical proof as the underpinning to explicitly state and enforce the structure of power.
I don’t disagree on the difficulty part though
What are the alternatives though?
Federation of smaller groups? Rojava is a living experiment in that way of organization.
Bottom-up decentralized power does not require management if people are allowed to self-manage. Combined with some form of cybernetics (cybersyn style), an organization could likely scale pretty effectively.
codifying bueracracies into actionable contracts prevents the current problem where rules and doctrines are written but selectively enforced as a personal choice.
Isn’t all of that just things happening on a computer, though? It still has to translate to meat space, and there, you can still ultimately selectively enforce things. The blockchain won’t stop social clicks from forming.
A root of trust built on a transparent system using a mathematical proof as the underpinning to explicitly state and enforce the structure of power.
Unless everyone becomes educated enough to fully understand the implications and inner workings of how all that operates, how would they be able to trust what the blockchain says if it involved controversial things, or things of significant weight? They would either all need to be programmers to understand what the code is doing, or personally know a programmer they trust to verify the code is legit and actually doing what they collectively agreed upon.
I mean in general smaller groups and bottom up organization seem like the moves but I imagine this tool being specifically part of a cybernetic type system like cybersyn was imagined. The guy I mentioned actually introduced me to project cybersyn first and I watched the video not long after wanting more details on the subject.
What I mean on actionable could be the configuration of the IT systems that mediate decisions between memebrs. If a jury system is supposed to be in place then the DAO could orginize the digital apparatus for deliberating votes, apply penalties for failures to appear, hold the configuration for the agree apon forms and inputs, etc etc
All of that today is done by people interpreting regulations and codes and implementing thus enforcing themselves.
That is true of any system, but a system with roots in mathematical certainty, when given enough understanding, lead to the same understanding. That just can’t be said of other systems. The fact that people may rely on experts for complex systems seems inevitable (lawyers for example are that for our current political systems, union reps for the union, the coop evangelist for that system, etc, etc).
The part where you said “people interpreting regulations and codes” is really, really important, and I don’t think you quite understand why. This is where the advocates of DAOs and smart contracts constantly trip up; they think that the interpretation of law is a failure, and not a feature.
This is exactly why we don’t allow police officers to judge guilt and assign sentences. It’s why we have an adversarial court system; because no law can ever perfectly encapsulate all of its own implications. Laws will, inevitably, need to be interpreted at some point in time, because sooner or later you will encounter a scenario that could not possibly have been envisioned when the law was written.
This is why you cannot programmatically enforce regulations and contracts. There must be room for interpretation for any community or society to be able to act in a manner that is truly equitable and just, because - inevitably - most often the least imagined scenarios will involve the most marginalized members of that community.
I mean we don’t disagree on the idea that we need flexibility and the ability to allow for remidiation even in the face of uncertainty.
Its just that I think that where we can be certain we should be. If we can be certain that we want officials that are accountable to the people, we should be.
There is tremendous value in this beyond what is made possible by DAOs. For example many people prefer the set price system set by stores both owners and customers as compared to haggling and bartering for every exchange.
The adversial court system, I personally think, is a great institution but it is very expensive to operate in so the default is too avoid using as much as possible. Its good to have if you need it, and we as a society do need it, but most administrivia doesn’t and shouldn’t be done there.
Its been two years since that video, do you mind breaking down what the DAO critique was again?
To be honest, I don’t think I’d be able to do it justice. The video link is timestamped at the relevant DAO section, I’d recommend it when you have a spare moment to reacquaint yourself.
I get it! Its a good detailed video tbh, I do vaguely remember have some critics of the technical aspects but the general dismissal of a the grift that was building up at the time was well warrented.
I will give it a shot sometimes to go back over it. DAOs are one the more exciting structures to me for me, potentially covering the gap between small very personal coops and large buerocratic ones, as well the exciting possibility of IT administration accomplished via democratic means vs the wink knod power dynamic that exists today.
Basically, DAO’s aren’t inherently evil, just useless, because they cannot solve any of the problems they purport to solve; you can’t code away human behaviour. Well, useless, and in the right circumstances actively harmful.
A DAO is, in theory, a system of governance where you have a token used for voting, and a set of “smart contracts” which are programs that operate on the blockchain (more or less). The smart contract part doesn’t work, because thousands of years of contract law have proven that there’s no such thing as an unambiguous contract, so a computer can never be allowed to automatically execute the terms of a contract. That will always create issues. The voting token doesn’t work unless you tie them to a real world identity (in which case the whole purpose of the public-ledger aspect is meaningless), because as long as they can be traded away in some form or another you’ve now opened up the possibility that a wealthy person can directly purchase voting power. The public-ledger aspect of blockchain also makes DAOs a terrible idea for purported left-wing uses like union organising, because it’s not actually that hard to tie a crypto wallet back to a real world identity, so now your future employers can all see your union voting history.
Everything that DAOs purport to do, leftist groups have already been doing for forever. It’s just techbros trying to reinvent the wheel we made and sell it back to us.
I would personally think most things like voting be off chain so you can do things like secret ballots more easily, but also just the cost. The use would be use the on-chain contracts to establish the org, governance and the off chain systems to establish an external root of trust. Its was also a growing development to tie the DAO to a matching legal structure so that things like taxes but also state enforcement of contracts. This means you can issue tokens with legal stipulations like (one token per member).
I agree that trying to use this to solve all problems of building an organization is fool hardy. In the same way I don’t think worker and community coops solve everything (but I do support them!)
In the same way I don’t think worker and community coops solve everything (but I do support them!)
They don’t solve everything, but the evidence does seem to indicate they are an objectively better way to operate, with virtually no downsides compared to regular corporate structures.
The problem, basically, is that everything you can do with a DAO can be done just as easily without one. Working out the legal particulars of contracts is still a job for lawyers, for example. That job doesn’t get better, easier or cheaper because you now have to pay a lawyer and a programmer. It’s all just added complexity for the sake of added complexity.
I don’t agree, its the same benifit expressed in the idea of policy as code for encoding security policy of IT systems to be turn into reusable and programtically accessible checks.
You could have a team of cyber professionals that know compliance standards and deeper knowledge answering every question and reviewing every deployment or you could add some relevant programming skills to that team and catch known things automatically.
You could have a team of cyber professionals that know compliance standards and deeper knowledge answering every question and reviewing every deployment or you could add some relevant programming skills to that team and catch known things automatically.
This seems like a pretty big barrier for adoption, not to mention an added layer of bureaucracy. If every single deployment has to be reviewed, you’re creating a new bottleneck and adding a centralizing factor. Catching known things automatically sounds overly optimistic, considering automated testing for other programs still doesn’t catch every bug.
Honestly, I’m really struggling to imagine scenarios that are either only possible with DAO’s, or where they are so massively better than just a normal voting system. If organizations remain small and federated, and if there are no owner/employee dynamics (replaced with coops), it likely that voting fraud would likely be extremely minimized, since everything could just be transparent to begin with.
It just feels like the equivalent of having smart-lights in your home. It’s a little more covenant than getting up and pressing the switch, but now I have an operating system, program, and wifi protocol inserted between me and turning a lightbulb on, introducing many points of potential failure and potential security implications for the most minor of conveniences.
Can you give me some examples of things that have been a big problem for an organization that you’ve been involved with that would definitely be solved by DAOs?
The link takes you straight to that chapter in the video, it’s less than 20 minutes
Use this as an opportunity to clear house, you’ve got a bunch of nazis revealing themselves here.
Lol what
Words I no like = nazi
Duh
This is a little confusing to me. Clearly the arguments are centered around cryptocurrencies and on that note it’s exactly right - those are a steaming pile of shit that have no place in solarpunk. But the language of this post sounds inclusive of all forms of encryption, and that’s problematic given the essential role of various forms of encryption for protecting privacy, and the security of those with little or no political power.
“Crypto” has become a common shorthand for “cryptocurrency”. Unless I’m missing something, I saw nothing in their post that references cryptographic technology as a whole.
Cryptocurrency is just fossil fascism disguising itself as anarcho capitalism. Anyone who took one good-faith look into crypto and didn’t instantly become a communist as a direct result is full of shit.
What is fossil fascism and how does it apply here?
TIL
https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/fossil-fuelled-fascism-and-the-lessons-for-the-greens/
TL;DR modern fascists have ditched the progress/science cult of yesteryear and now engage in performative anti-environmentalism.
I don’t think it’s the best name though. It makes me think of either applying fascism historically or a reference to the specific fascist movements of the 30’s as differentiated from modern inbreds, but, on the other hand, I can’t do better.
Gas fash? Crudeolinis?
Crudeolinis 😂. That’s a fun one.
This is annoying in its inaccuracy. Crypto is a variegated set of technologies that are competing with each other.
Bitcoin, ethereum, etc all use proof of work, which is ridiculously energy-intensive, and not required for crypto to function.
…but there are lots of other cryptocurrencies out there that don’t use proof of work, and are no more energy-intensive than any other typical internet service.
It’s hard enough to get people on board with social movements that directly help them and have no downsides; you’re going to have a hard time promulgating a financial system that undermines the wealth of the people who dominate the standard financial system, especially when the more wealth you’ve accumulated (in the standard system) is directly proportional to your ability to spread propaganda to support your wealth.
There are better, more winnable, battles to fight than the global financial system.
While i agree that a victory there would be huge, part of the reason it would be so huge is because of how very, very unwinnable it is.
That said, if you’re super stuck on finance as the issue you want you be involved with, imo, the best thing you can do is communicate the questions – the problems with contemporary finance, of which there are so very many – and don’t waste your time offering solutions.
(Even if we had a solution that could work, it would surely be obsolete by the time it could be meaningfully implemented. Cryptos of all kinds, at this point, can only provide their benefits to people with disposable wealth, who can afford to take the risk, and those are exactly the people who don’t need you to fight for their interests. Or anyone – but you’re not anyone, you are you; your energy is finite, spend it where it can help the people who need it most.)
I appreciate your well-considered response.
I have a lot of things in involved with in life, and to varying degrees. Crypto is by no means my absolute focus.
However, crypto is immensely useful, and no amount of wishing it away or saying ‘the time hasn’t come’ for it will be effective. It has a niche, and will occupy that niche successfully, without any big battles to fight.
It also is flexible, and new uses will come around, paralleling the existing ones.
My own uses for it are primarily in DAOs, which are really neat and useful, for me. There are plenty of other uses, but voting and traceable structure and organizational finance as exist in some DAOs really is a major one.
It’s Cypher punk, not Cyber punk. Ones a movie genre about swords and dystopian tech, ones a decentralized trustless protocol powered by encryption
I’ve been a fan of cyberpunk for years, and I feel like an unsecured currency backed in computational waste (proof-of-work style) is a perfect fit for a cyberpunk setting. If I’d read it in a story years ago I’d have said it was a little on the nose
That’s the problem with fiction. Unlike reality it needs to be believable.
How is it insecure? Schnorr signatures and the txID system literally make it quantum resistant. Even if you cracked a transaction’s key, you’d only have access to already spent funds. Like a receipt instead of a debit card, with no certainty who has the money until they spend it.
Oh, and in terms of computational waste, the fiat backed inflation based currency system we have now, has incentivized a world of endless growth which isn’t sustainable. Switching to an asset with finite supply like Bitcoin would remove those incentives. There’s other costs to using deflationary assets, but if you actually value the environment, switching to Bitcoin would economically inventivize a world where people are encouraged to save more instead of spend more
Unsecured, as in stuff like mt gox where the nearest thing to a bank for crypto just closed one day and stole hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins with no recourse. Unsecured like watching the crypto scene reinvent/rediscover financial regulation one theft, scam, or disaster at a time. That’s a perfect fit for a cyberpunk setting.
Unrelated to my point about the genre, I’ll admit I’m especially skeptical that it’s the devaluation of currency is what’s responsible for the endless growth mindset of capitalism, or that systems that seem to be used more like investment stocks than a currency are structurally capable of fixing it.
I’m sure the some of blockchain technology has some practical uses, there’s probably a way it can work as currency, but I have a hard time seeing any way to separate the modern cryptocurrency scene from investment capitalism
Edit: I really do wish you luck in doing so though
@ComradeKhoumrag @JacobCoffinWrites The US dollar became a fiat currency in the 1970s. Funny enough, US rate of growth starts to decline around that time. The first steam engine went into use around 1776, kicking off the industrial revolution.
Crypto is Fecespunk
Valid points all.
if you’d like a fantastic example of how Crypto is going to fuck up power supplies, just look at Texas - they can’t keep their statewide grid running, shit on their renewable strengths constantly, and cut deals with cryptochuds so they’re PAID to stop mining. SO FUCKED-UP.
