It might be useful for the title of this post to clarify that this is the co-creator of Dogecoin, it’s not mentioned anywhere on the linked thread itself but is very relevant framing for the content. I didn’t realize who this was until I saw this thread linked elsewhere with that context
A smart man once said, "I'd rather be a hypocrite than the same person forever." It was Adam Horovitz, of Beastie Boys, when confronted about going from sexism in their early content to defending gender equality later in life.
I do this with myself constantly. I think if I met my younger self I would hate me.
I don't know how far back in time it takes for a disconnect of 'who was I then to do that?' or 'I can't believe I did that' but sometimes I think back to recent things and get so embarrassed my face turns red and heats up.
Like Bill Burr sometimes I have to scream it out and wriggle to release the shame.
I'm not sure what other peoples' conception of hypocrisy is, but for me I think that it's acting in a manner that contradicts, or is at odds with your espoused beliefs.
The simultaneous part is important, if your beliefs change and your actions change accordingly; that doesn't count as hypocrisy in my book.
Based on your post history, it seems like you may not be familiar with the expectations for discourse in this community. Per the guidelines[0]
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
It looks like a lot of your grey comments did not follow this guideline. I see you've been here since 2018, but maybe nobody ever brought it up. This community is different from other places like reddit, and its partly because of these practices.
I've nothing but respect for the group, including the member I mentioned. Instead of all this trash talk you could have just said what bothers you about them.
Foremost is what I said before - the quote is entirely unremarkable and unoriginal. You could easily choose a quote with the same content but said by someone actually remarkable, although there is literally no reason to quote here at all here since anyone that has made it through adolescence has came to the same realization.
What catapulted it from silly to amusing was that the person you quoted is entirely unremarkable, known only for being in a group that made some of the worst "music" I have ever heard get regular radio play.
The quote is particularly relevant to the thread, and who made the quote matters little to nothing except for the fact that the person did had a very public change of heart regarding a specific topic.
Why do you feel you need to ignore the substance of the quote and instead deflect it with cheap ad-hominem attacks?
The image you're conveying of yourself is that you're willing to forego discussing things rationally to instead focus your energy in petty persona attacks and deflections.
> He's rejoined and left the industry multiple times. While he brings up plenty of valid issues, Jackson could also do with some self-reflection.
It seems to me that his personal journey granted him a privileged vantage point to talk about this topic, with more insight than the vast majority of people.
Clearly, if anyone did that exercise in self-reflection, it was him. Don't you agree?
And why is he, of all people, the one being singled out and required to meet all those high bars?
Then modify his statement accordingly. Your issue with Keynes's quote is that he used the word fact in a way that indicates that it can be changed. But according to you, it can. But also according to you, they can also be "time-constrained".
But the general thrust of his point remains. When the time constraints of a fact elapse and allow a new fact to replace the old fact, he changes his position. New information allows for new opinions.
Arguing about the definitions of words to score points is meaningless pedantry. You don't want to argue the actual point, that you should be able to change your mind when situations change or you learn new information. Because doing so would make you look like you're just stubborn and easily led. But for some reason, you can't agree with the quote because then you'd be granting something to the person you're currently debating with. Or to the side of the debate you agree with, seeing as we're dealing with multiple responders.
But all of this is to discuss the credibility of the Dogecoin founder. And that's a fair discussion to have, because his credibility and motives are very much relevant to why he should have certain opinions.
But now it seems the entire discussion is being done a very meta level. Where we're no longer talking about his qualifications, his stake in the success or failure of crypto, his reasons for making statements, etc. No, now we're discussing the dictionary definition of "fact".
If facts are time-constrained, then a statement that was at one point factual may stop being factual. I would still consider that to be an existence proof that "facts change".
You may want to put some temporal logic spin on it, if that makes you happier (technically, it makes me happier, but I am content with saying "facts can change"), but the question I was trying to answer was "do facts change". I think I demonstrated that what once was factual may stop being factual.
That is a statement that requires you to reason within a temporal logic. And it is a statement that is not equivalent to "There is a country in Europe named Yugoslavia".
"Alternatively, fact may also indicate an allegation or stipulation of something that may or may not be a true fact, (e.g., "the author's facts are not trustworthy"). This alternate usage, although contested by some, has a long history in standard English."
Are people not allowed to change their opinion? It seems to me that this is a person who once believed something, but later has gotten proof that what they believed was wrong and then changed their mind. This is a good thing, not at all hypocritical.
Changing your mind is hypocritical, your opinions must be kept consistent and non changing no matter what.
Really though, it's surprising that a lot of people have this same knee-jerk reaction to someone having an opinion and then changing it when making a comment (here, Reddit, etc.). Obviously it's not great to change your opinion with the wind or to simply please others but it's sad that any form of changing your opinion is seen as negative. Even for people that I would trust to be authorities on the subject like Jackson Palmer are not given the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it's a natural reaction to someone who doesn't conform to the group mentality on some subject.
One of my favorite tweet/relies with co-creator Billy Markus:
> @TerrysFishyTips: Billy when you made #doge coin did you try to consider energy usage or was that not something you thought about? How can the dev community make doge more efficient?
> @BillyM2K: i made doge in like 2 hours i didn't consider anything
[edit] So with this in mind, no, I don't find their position hypocritical. I quite enjoy following Billy's twitter. It's one of the most friendly/positive in the space, he's clearly trying to uh, do only good everyday if you will.
Doge was created as a joke, but it seems that Markus and Palmer quickly got a lot more serious about it, probably because its market cap exploded. Palmer only left the project in early 2015, which would mean that he was involved through the whole of 2014 when Dogecoin was a genius-level marketing phenomenon: that was the period of the original NASCAR sponsorship, for instance. The guy is of course entitled to change his mind, but he has absolutely changed his mind.
People are still doing it as satire just with billions of $ and people making a profit.
Elon Musk could have picked anything, he picked Dogecoin because... satire.
I think people still don't get in an inter-connected world for 7 billion people and losing established religions and other old mind memes jokes are worth billions, people will lose and gain lives over them, they will spend parts of their lives centred around jokes. They won't go to church, community markets or medieval fairs, they'll go to Dogecoin stores, why not?
Dogecoin was just a cookie cutter crypto with marketing and I would think mostly others took his idea and meme'ed it to the moon.
He can change his mind, but it still is what is was day one.
To be fair most religions are pretty cookie cutter as well. The Abrahamic ones even share text and repurpose holidays from other local cultures. Buddhism is the only popular one that is pretty uniquely cool, Sidhartha was pretty original.
Worse yet, this culture of shaming people for changing their minds/position is embarrassingly unintellectual and socially dangerous. Its one the most toxic attributes leftover from old timey gender role ideas.
I don't see what he has to be ashamed about? Nobody died. He created a thing as a joke, took it seriously, looked at it seriously and re-evaluated the pursuit. He comes out wealthier and wiser.
I don't really understand the 'advocacy against' part of that. Aside from the lexical contradiction, it seems there's no actionable purpose. What does he want people to do or not do? And what will be the result if they do?
Cryptos make rich people richer, and are sold to poor people the same way lottery tickets are. ”Look at old Pete here, he used to be a loser like you, but he believed and now he’s got $millions in the bank”
Was recently watching "Becoming a god in central Florida", a Netflix sitcom about a fraudulent MLM scheme in the 90s. I was struck by how similar the vibe was to today's crypto community; anyone who wasn't making money or who questioned the value proposition of the overpriced cleaning products simply didn't understand, didn't believe hard enough, and those who refused to get involved were the enemy, their lack of belief viewed as an attack on the scheme ('no-coiners', anyone?)
I've said it before, but over here in Europe, a lot of the good ol' boys from the 80s/90s/00s MLM scene pivoted to crypto the second it hit the mainstream - if not before that.
If I were to invest in anything related to crypto today, I'd conduct the due-diligence of a lifetime before sinking a cent into the investment, even going as far as hiring private investigators to fine-comb through the people involved. I don't think any tech sector has more veteran con-men than crypto - these folks have been scamming people for a lifetime.
Same, I wouldn't put any money into crypto if I hadn't at least glanced at the code for it and understood the high-level value added. The amount of (non-technical) people I know who invested in dogecoin and shiba inu (and not in a memey way) is astounding
For sure. It really has become a more distributed lottery.
The people I know who are obsessed with slot machines and buying lottery tickets are the people I know that own dogecoin.
This whole thing gets more absurd as USD Coin and Binance USD climb to the top with Tether.
The whole space to me feels like such a massive waste of resources and brain power.
It's different in terms of inflation schedule, contract support and of course that it's not trying to be anything but a meme. Would you mind elaborating on your thoughts?
I guess I just don't think inflation schedule or contract support are particularly meaningful. And Doge is explicitly a meme, but all of them are implicitly a meme. People want crypto because they are bought into the viral idea of owning crypto. Unless you have a ransom to pay, nobody is buying it for its inherent utility.
I've seen people increasingly buy stablecoins to earn interest from lending them (higher rates than a bank or bond gives you), which I would argue is inherent utility. Plus, the idea of holding USD stablecoins in countries with poor banking infrastructure is gaining steam, which is inherent utility.
My best friend is Venezuelan and I assure you there are real humans in the world who get real value from a stable digital form of currency that doesn't require a central bank account. The only ones they can legally have are ones in their country, and the exchange rate for foreign currencies is a rigged price that doesn't reflect real inflation.
They're almost literally financially enslaved to their countries central bank, which devalues their only legal form of life savings by 25% every month by printing more and more (for government members) and no other country will give them banking access but their own, which has regulated against them using any alternative currencies than the one the central bank controls.
Just imagine if the US made it illegal to own any currency besides USD, and then started printing so much that you lost 90% of the value of your savings every 3-6 months.
They've experienced 10,000,000% inflation since 2014. That would turn someone's retirement account of $5,000,000 into $49.95.
The only option there is a digital store of wealth that doesn't discriminate against them based on their citizenship, unlike every central bank in the world. Otherwise, the rug is just constantly being pulled out from under you, and your only legal store of value is the things you can buy in the store and keep in your closet to sell later. Back to a financial system more primitive than in ancient Athens (400BC).
Americans benefit from a global banking structure that is rigged in their favor. Their government prints the global reserve currency, most countries in the world welcome them with open arms and offer banking solutions, and their hegemony is backed by hundreds of military bases armed with tanks, airplanes, and soldiers across the world, and miltiary ships across the seas.
It's very easy for all the rich tech people in this thread living in stable countries to denounce crypto as useless, because to them, right now, it is. But it is careless to denounce it as a concept.
The tweeter mentioned that it is a right wing tool. In the US that has a dirty connotation, and I agree that coming from the US, we can see first hand the dangers of unfettered right wing policy. But people coming from countries that have experienced extreme left wing governments that describe daily common horrors far worse than people peeing in bottles on Amazon's factory floors.
A little bit of sympathy for them and the real life saving use case the "right wing" tool of decentralised finance against the troubles they experience could go a long way.
All that said, I was very skeptical of the crypto community for a long time as well, because it is most of the same people who do MLM schemes. But real life experience has now made it impossible for me to ignore that the underlying tech has real humanitarian use cases as well, and those should be nurtured.
> My best friend is Venezuelan and I assure you there are real humans in the world who get real value from a stable digital form of currency that doesn't require a central bank account.
I have friends living in Venezuela, and one of them had to receive medical treatment that he could only afford thanks to a crypto transaction.
Yet, I assure you that crypto was completely irrelevant in that equation. Crypto's only role was ensuring a way for medical professionals in Venezuela to be paid through means other than domestic transactions and out of Venezuela regime's radar. This time around it was crypto, but it could as easily be a transfer to an offshore account. The end goal is the same.
And let's not fool ourselves into believing that people are in crypto to pay doctors.
A poor person could've invested $50 in Bitcoin when it was priced at $1. That poor person would now be a millionaire if they would've held on to that since. It is not all rich people marketing to poor people, or at least it didn't start that way.
I don't disagree in terms of rich people controlling the crypto ecosystem now. That is one aspect I'm not liking about crypto right now. Too much manipulation, although I think that's at least partly coming from the traditional institutions jumping in and playing the games they do with traditional markets. Plenty goes on behind the scenes in traditional markets, even though they are regulated, and yes, crypto has less regulation, so they probably can get away with more.
I love crypto technology but I think there's stuff going on behind the scenes that regular folk have no idea, and I'm starting to wonder if the grand ideas crypto people have are incorrect. I think the way it will succeed is when big institutions accumulate enough and then it's in their interest to manipulate the crypto market up. I.e. see banks in the Big Short accumulating enough of what Michael Burry was betting on all along, and at that point they revised the indices that track the housing markets, since it was in their interest to at that point.
In the end I don't think crypto is much different than what goes on in equity markets now. Rich people and big institutions control that market too. Meme stocks are essentially also lottery tickets. Way out of balance P/E ratios mean traditional fundamentals are out the window. It's all about momentum and trends now. The one difference, and a benefit I see for traditional markets, is the government will bail them out. The government would be fine if crypto crashes. I think that's the scary part about investing in crypto, but there is also higher potential for upside in crypto markets.
> and are sold to poor people the same way lottery tickets are.
Crypto has never been heavily marketed to poor people. They don't have the capital to buy in at any meaningful scale. The lottery ticket appeal is that you might win $10k or $1m off of a $1 or $2 ticket. There is no mass scale marketing effort pushing $1/$2 of Bitcoin or Dogecoin to poor people with that con-pitch. To this day poor people have barely any stake in the crypto world. For crypto, the lottery players are the small contingent of middle class persons that bother with it (which still isn't very many).
Actual lottery tickets on the other hand, are prominently marketed to poor people all over the place, front and center in many common stores.
Walk into an average convenience store or liquor store, you're telling me they have a large display of dozens of cryptos with updating price quotes appealing to poor people about how big the prizes are and how they can win a million dollars with a $2 ticket? Nope.
They are marketed to people in my experience who are relatively poor. I know a guy who has a problem making rent who has all of his savings (about 1k) in dogecoin or other gambles like individual stocks. I have also met a ton of service people like bartenders and waiters who are involved in crypto.
I have also met quite a few software engineers who are not poor but don' have nearly the level of wealth of the people manipulating these markets who have gotten involved with this stuff. These people aren't poor but relative to the scammers they are, and when they lose money in hurts. I know one engineer for example who lost his life savings on some alt coins in this mid thirties.
I know liquor stores with crypto ATMs with displays. If you log into paypal, you can buy crypto. They're absolutely marketing to people with not much money.
It's true that shitcoins are basically a casino but I don't think it's fair to generalize that to the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. We have real projects that provide real innovations and uses such as Ethereum and Monero.
XMR is essentially a credit card where it's impossible for anyone to exploit your personal information for any purpose. It's already better than everything out there. The fact it enables some crime is merely a side effect. We need more technology like this. Technology that makes it literally impossible to abuse its users in any way.
This is my biggest problem for crypto. For us power users we are fine but for the average joe and my parents I would never let them hold their own keys. You here every day people getting scammed and hacked now imagine if they could lose all their life savings because they where not 100% tech savvy.
* Buying products/services anonymously, if you don't want to have your personally identifying information, like your credit card details, leaked one day when the website you purchased from is hacked.
* Making payments to parties underserved by banks, whether it's legal cannabis dispensaries, or Wikileaks when the credit card companies blockaded them.
* Triggering financial exchanges, without the friction (and risk of PII theft associated with the identity-based accounts that centralized custodians use) of signing up to a traditional online brokerage or exchange, via crypto transfers to self-executing smart contracts like decentralized exchanges.
A large chunk of society works this way. How many products are only trying to make crowds spend money uselessly so a group of educated wealthy people make another profit (until the next trend).
Crypto is yet-another-trading-market nothing new expect maybe marketing)
Crypto is money but this time I'm the one in power instead of the government! There are entrenched powers in the government system? No problem, we can become the entrenched power in the new cryptocurrency!
Literally nobody in the cryptocurrency space is thinking about how to make fiat fair and sustainable because they actually like the flaws of fiat and just want to amplify them for their own benefit.
How do you make sure fiat is backed by the necessary amount of real assets?
Without a concrete safeguard, we would eventually fall back into the debasement scenario again.
I believe this is the problem bitcoin is attempting to solve. The asset/value is inseparable from the monetary network which makes it easily auditable.
I find that native. People with billions have more power than me on bitcoin, they can play me like a toy. cryptocurrencies aren't perfect, maybe better than fiat .. and that remains to be seen IMO, it's only 10yo.
Some crypto like Dogecoin sure. However, some crypto is bets on tech - e.g. those that try to achieve something like DEXs or synthetic assets - not that different than investing in stock or startups.
Every retail instition I know of, and appears on CNBC (a place that bankers, hedge fund guys, Jimmy Prop guy Cramer (I actually feel for Cramer. I had no idea he was having migraines over half the days in a month.), etc.) are creating their own crypto.
They are all believers now.
It does seem like they are just in it to take money from the Retail Investors investors though like they always do. Meaning I have seen to many Bull to Bear Markets, and when the switch happens--it's the Retail investor that looses everything.
(I guess we will know how it all turns out in a few years. If I had Bitcoins, I would sell. The competition is almost exponential. New crypto are coming on daily. Every money licker wants their own crypto.)
I don't think Jim Cramer is creating his own crypto. Where did you hear that? I don't watch his show but a quick google search produced no results. He has said he has invested in Bitcoin and Ethereum, but also seemed to have gotten out as soon as they started to go down.
However, I don't disagree that retail investors may end up with issues with crypto, but I don't think traditional markets are necessarily safe for retail investors either. Big money controls both crypto and traditional markets. Governments can bail out traditional markets, but in the end big money gets most of the bailout, too. Traditional markets, at least right now, are less volatile than crypto, but things like March 2020 show that they aren't for certain, either. It sounds like we don't really disagree though since you referred to watching various bull and bear cycles.
- Business and work in general makes rich people richer. Remember that rich is very relative. You are a very wealthy person compared to a random person in some countryside in China.
- Considering the previous point, are you saying that people who have some money should not do anything to make more money? Should they stay the same, or should they become poorer? What do you advocate to do this? Prevent them from working? Take money from them forcefully?
All I hear from people in the crypto world is that you SHOULDN'T invest if you don't have money you're willing to lose. Crypto investment is a dream only for delusional people who want to get rich quick. If you do that then lose your money, you don't get to complain. You're free to choose, if you choose wrong, lose, and then not take responsibility for your choice and blame others, then you're truly a loser.
I’ll take issue with your last point. Many in crypto are evangelical about it, but follow up everything with a “DYOR” as if that absolves whatever their statement was.
Michael Saylor, the most visible corporate Bitcoin warrior, advised people to mortgage their homes and borrow as much as they could to buy Bitcoin at the literal top of the market (to the day).
The number of people in crypto who believe in a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist world are on the order of 0.01% - the millions of retail traders punting Dogecoin around are just trying to get rich and don’t give a damn about the tech or some greater cause. And that’s because that is how crypto is actually marketed to the masses.
Michael Saylor did say that, it's true. I am posting this, which is the original video, since I see the other comments link to a reddit post which has a modified, sensationalized version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgqC5_eugJI&t=4470s
I take issue with him telling individuals to accrue debt to acquire Bitcoin (companies I have less of an issue taking debt on). That's also the least reasonable part of the interview though. I think overall he makes a lot of good points as to why Bitcoin makes sense in the majority of the interview. However, I'm not one of those crypto people that only looks at one side of this. Yes, sometimes ridiculous things are suggested, but there is some good to this technology, too.
If you don't even know how to google for something as easy to find as a recording of Michael Saylor saying "go mortgage your house and buy Bitcoin with it" that you confidently "lol" and falsely deny that he said it, then how can you possibly claim that YOU are even remotely qualified to "DYOR"?
Yet you scoff at other people who don't bother to do THEIR own research. Without having done the slightest bit of research yourself about what you're proudly claiming in public.
Most people are too intellectually lazy to do their own research, as you just proved. YOU are the one making stuff up.
"Well Bitcoin's the best crypto asset. What's the second best? There is no second best. There is no second best crypto asset. There's a crypto asset that's called Bitcoin, right? Right. There is no second best, ok? But take all your money and buy Bitcoin. Then take all your time, figure out how to borrow money to buy more Bitcoin. Then take all your time and figure out what you can sell to buy Bitcoin. And if you absolutely love the thing that you don't want to sell it, GO MORTGAGE YOUR HOUSE AND BUY BITCOIN WITH IT. And if you've got a business that you love, because your family works for the business, because it's in your family for 37 years, and you can't bear to sell it, mortgage it, finance it, and convert the proceeds to the hardest money on earth, which is Bitcoin." -Michael Saylor
Does that leave any wiggle room for misinterpretation? DYOR: He said it.
> Well Bitcoin's the best crypto asset. What's the second best? There is no second best. There is no second best crypto asset. There's a crypto asset that's called Bitcoin, right? Right. There is no second best, ok? But take all your money and buy Bitcoin. Then take all your time, figure out how to borrow money to buy more Bitcoin. Then take all your time and figure out what you can sell to buy Bitcoin. And if you absolutely love the thing that you don't want to sell it, GO MORTGAGE YOUR HOUSE AND BUY BITCOIN WITH IT. And if you've got a business that you love, because your family works for the business, because it's in your family for 37 years, and you can't bear to sell it, mortgage it, finance it, and convert the proceeds to the hardest money on earth, which is Bitcoin.
Bitcoin people really are a piece of work, eh? The people at the top of the pyramid sure seem like totally legit, honest people don’t they…
Its fascinating to me people take what he says literally, probably because they need to argue against proponents of the things they hate.
If you ever watch any of his interviews he rationally examines monetary policy and his reasons for liking Bitcoin. He is an MIT graduate in (Aeronautics?) Engineering, and makes analogies to closed energy systems.
He's not just saying "buy bitcoin". He's doing it himself. He's actually borrowed billions of dollars against his company to make such bets. That's skin in the game. That's conviction, as real as it gets. Still, someone people will try to say he's manipulating the market, he's only doing this to pump and dump. Maybe, but his company's is public, and so his balance sheets are public. What bigger bet could you possibly make then borrowing billions of dollars you don't have?
What he's describing what his literal path, and what he's actually done, and how he got obsessed with Bitcoin. If you think he's advising people to invest money they don't have, then I'm afraid you aren't actually paying attention to the conversation.
You're the same guy who was just denying he said what he actually did say, who didn't bother to do his own most basic simple research, and is falsely accusing OTHER people of making stuff up, which you were actually doing (and are still doing now).
NOW you're telling us he doesn't mean what he says he means, because you think you have some special insight into what he really meant, that contradicts his words you were just denying he said. Are you really expecting us to take you seriously?
So what is it? Do you believe he said it or not? Why did you think he didn't say it? Why did you think people who quoted him were making stuff up? Do you still stand by that?
So do you admit you were wrong, or not? What have you done to readjust your world view now that you realize you were wrong? Are you just digging in deeper?
You weren't just not "actually paying attention to the conversation", you're denying that the conversation took place, and then when I quoted it to you, you switched to gaslighting us about how he didn't actually mean what he literally said, now that your initial strategy of denying that he said it has fallen apart.
Do you think WE are not paying any attention to your side of the conversation, and forgot what you just said a few hours ago? Pick a lane, buddy.
"Lol he never said mortgage homes. You’re making that up." -doggosphere
"GO MORTGAGE YOUR HOUSE AND BUY BITCOIN WITH IT" -Michael Saylor
Do I have to to search through them all to give you soundbites of him saying less extreme advice like "invest an amount your comfortable with" (which is an actual quote.) Does the context of his speech even matter, or are you playing the social media game of clipping soundbites? Because that doesn't sound like you're actually giving anything else he says credit, you're providing no intellectual capital to this conversation. You're playing politics and news opinions.
The point is what are you trying to achieve by putting these one off quotes on blast? As if in the hundreds of interviews he's had, this is the most relevant and significant quote.
You're trying to cast dispersion on the popular characters behind Bitcoin because you hate Bitcoin, correct?
Edit to include the quote in above video:
"Okay, look, it's totally strange to have a financial instrument, which is scarce and capped, because you can print more tech stocks, you can print more bonds, you can mine more gold, you can issue more fiat currency. On the other hand, in the engineering world, when you're designing pneumatic systems or hydraulic systems, nobody ever built a pneumatic system with a leak, a hydraulic system with a leak. Your swimming pool doesn't even work with a leak, right? Everybody knows if there's a leak in the fuselage of the airplane, it's not going to fly, it's going to explode. So, you don't have a leak in a nuclear reactor. Do you ever try to go across the ocean and a ship with a leak?
Okay, the idea of a closed system is basic to every freshman in engineering. I'm an MIT engineer. We talk about something called adiabatic lapse. An adiabatic system is no leak. A closed system is when you have mass in the system that can either leave or can be added, and all you can do is inject energy. So, Bitcoin is the classic textbook closed system. There's 21 million coins, virtual bars of gold in the system. You can't remove any, you can't add any. There's no inflation.
On the other hand, what you can do is you can heat it up. If you're buying Bitcoin above the 4-year or the 200-week moving average, you're heating up the system. If you're buying it below the 200-week moving average, you're cooling down the system. The entire thing's like a massive monetary battery, a capacitor. It's storing energy. What we've done is created a system where I can take $100 million of monetary energy, I can put it into the Bitcoin network. It'll sit there for as long as you can imagine, and there's no power loss. That's the genius of it.
If I told you I was going to inject another million Bitcoin or two or three million Bitcoin, I'm bleeding off, I'm diluting the energy. So, when I describe it as a closed system, what I'm saying is for the first time in the history of man, we created a monetary energy network that will store the energy over time with no power loss. We've never had a money. We've never had a thing that could do that. Gold didn't do that. Copper, silver doesn't do that. Fiat doesn't do that. Stocks and bonds don't do that. So, it's really an engineering breakthrough.
But hey, he said the literal words "mortgage your house", so we'll just repeat those words out of context to show that he must be a sleazeball scumbag right.
My explanation is I don't take any remark as a literally as you do, especially in a disingenuous fashion meant to further a political argument.
Ex. Ball player says, "we're going to kill 'em tomorrow".
You: "omg this athlete says he's going to murder his opponents at the game tomorrow."
Me: "no he didn't lol."
You: "FULL STOP. Here's the quote. He literally said it. Did he not say the word "kill 'em"???? Why are you denying that he said he was going to kill people? Clearly he has communicated his intent and endorsement of murder, we need no further context for this speech. "
Of course there will be people who try to scam others into it. But how is this different from anything else in life? The world of investment is susceptible to scammers who prey on people's emotions. This is not crypto or capitalism, this just human nature and we've learned to spot it unless we're blinded by something else, and if not, then shit happens, life is not fair.
> The number of people in crypto who believe in a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist world are on the order of 0.01%
Where do you get your numbers?
> And that’s because that is how crypto is actually marketed to the masses.
Again, I don't see anyone "marketing" for it. People should understand what they're working with before selling their houses and "investing it" in bitcoin ffs. If they do that then they're dumb!
> Of course there will be people who try to scam others into it. But how is this different from anything else in life?
Because unlike everything else, crypto has been designed from the ground up such that society is unable to rectify the bad elements.
> Again, I don't see anyone "marketing" for it. People should understand what they're working with before selling their houses and "investing it" in bitcoin ffs. If they do that then they're dumb!
Aaaand there it is. A slightly longer form of “DYOR”. If you go around evangelizing something that turns out to be damaging, you’re not absolved of all responsibility simply because you add “not investment advice”. If people who promote crypto really didn’t intend it as investment advice, they wouldn’t say anything. The whole point is that maybe other people will pump your bags. And if it all goes sideways, then you can always point at “not investment advice” because the vast majority of promoters and traders don’t understand the first thing about what a blockchain is, much less “tokenomics” or smart contract code (and exploits).
You may be an expert, and not in it to get rich quick. But you’re naive if you can’t see that the huge majority around you are in it for very different reasons.
> But how is this different from anything else in life?
In other things in life, there are things like consumer protection. You can tell your credit card agency to refund you, you can use the judicial system to sue scammers. If you lose login secrets to your bank account, you can call the bank, they know who you are, the problem can be solved.
Crypto currency is designed from the ground up with the goal of eliminating all such centralized power and protection mechanisms. Anything that goes wrong is your fault and you have no recourse, and that is not a flaw that will be fixed, that is the most central thing in its design.
Society has protections for the weak, crypto is designed to remove those protections.
> Crypto currency is designed from the ground up with the goal of eliminating all such centralized power and protection mechanisms. Anything that goes wrong is your fault and you have no recourse, and that is not a flaw that will be fixed, that is the most central thing in its design.
This is hyperbolic. There are many insured custody services for cryptocurrencies, similar to fiat banks. Secure storage is a big topic in the crypto space, and it is certainly not a goal of cyptocurrencies to weaken protection mechanisms (centralized or otherwise).
Block size was a huge multi-year argument that split the BTC community. The current largest cryptocurrency is completely incapable of addressing small problems without enormous drama, let alone actually large problems. I have absolutely zero faith that the people in charge (unelected maintainers and miners) will be able to make appropriate policy changes over time.
Block size is a nuanced discussion and it was maybe a larger problem then you realize.
Argument for big blocks: Faster and cheaper transactions (lower fee), as well as more transactions per second. Can use more like cash, i.e. Bitcoin Cash. Everything should be done on-chain. They also argue that small blocks are a money grab from Blockstream so that the network is forced to adopt layer 2 solutions that Blockstream develops.
Argument for keeping block size the same ("small blocks"): Larger blocks means more hard drive space and bandwidth are required, and mining becomes more centralized based on those increased requirements. Big blocks are a money grab from the miners, since they make more money on bigger blocks. An additional concern is if the availability of hard drive space will increase in line with the growth of the network. They suggest to use the Bitcoin Core network more as a settlement layer and a store of value, and not everything needs to be on-chain. They suggest layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network to use Bitcoin more like cash and enable fast transactions, as well as increase the number of transactions per second. I understand the Lightning Network has some caveats, but from what I've heard from institutions like NYDIG and Strike, that are already using it, it is already working as is.
All I'm saying is maybe it's not just a small problem. The decisions affect a global network and some of the decisions were said to potentially cause major problems.
It was a nuanced discussion. It isn't a trivial problem. I'm keenly aware of the details. There are clear pros and cons, as you described.
The point is that there are much bigger problems in a worldwide currency than block size. In comparison, block size is small potatoes. And the block size problem split the community into two that hate each other. They don't just disagree, but consider the other side to be actively sabotaging the system.
Yeah, I don't like the tribalism either. I see this with Democrats and Republicans in the US, too. One side thinks they are right. That seems to be a human thing. I do hope that progress can still be made.
You are right though, it is a bit ridiculous. What would you have them working on instead, just wondering? Fixing the environmental issues? Adoption? What else?
Protection mechanisms do not need to be "layer 1" (on-chain) solutions, though. There are many possible forms these could take. For example, a multisig wallet gives you very secure cold storage of your BTC/whatever.
How about all the elements/layers added to the traditional financial system that probably a lot of folks here don't understand to a deep degree? We're not comparing apples to apples. Cryptocurrency is a new technology. We are a decade in. Maybe we should let it mature a bit and see what it turns into?
Or Bitcoin was fine to start with and hasn't had a good enough reason to change yet. People can disagree, some did, forked the code, and went on their way.
> how is this different from anything else in life?
There is a high concentration of scamming around cryptos. There are the obvious thefts and frauds. But a good fraction of crypto businesses make their money pushing tokens in a manner remarkably similar to pump and dumps.
That said, for the reasons described here (crypto being a wealth transfer to the wealthy), I think it is here to stay.
You're talking about fixed or restricted-supply cryptocurrencies, which do indeed almost always have some Ponzi aspect. These might represent a majority of the current cryptocurrency landscape, but isn't close to being a fundamental truth.
Algorithmic stablecoins like RAI[1] don't have a Ponzi component to them, for instance. You use the dApp and that's it.
Reflexer is collateralized by ETH which is traded 65% of the time against USDT which is backed by chewing gum and hope. This USDT trading determines the price of ETH which in turn determines the collateralization rate of RAI.
> Reflexer is collateralized by ETH which is traded 65% of the time against USDT which is backed by chewing gum and hope. This USDT trading determines the price.
What kind of logical fallacy are you trying to make here? If someone sets up an exchange for bananas/pokemon cards and it ends up grossing a majority of the global banana trading volume, that doesn't mean the price of bananas is suddenly backed by pokemon cards.
Furthermore, the mechanism through which Reflexer maintains the stablecoin's price is independent from the collateral asset. It works just as well whether the collateral asset is traded against USDT or fiat.
No, but if you had a banana farm you would be very very wary of pokemon cards turning out to be a ponzi. Bananas are nice and would be worth something regardless, but would they be worth quite as much if people weren't fraudulently printing pokemon cards to buy bananas? How much of the perceived value of bananas is a mirage caused by fradulent pokemon cards? We may never know before the house of pokemon cards collapse and the rubble clears.
The stability of U.S. dollars without the hassle of opening a bank account. Which, generously, means faster transaction times; realistically, skipping AML.
Given Tether doesn't actually hold much cash, it's more akin to a money market fund that pays no interest.
It'd be better for the discussion if you expanded on what your jargon means when someone doesn't understand it. Your comment is more of a conversation stopper...
The base meaning of stablecoin is simply a coin which has a stable value.
The mechanism through which that stability is achieved is often 1:1 redeemability for another stable asset through a central portal, but that's orthogonal to the concept of a stablecoin itself.
I didn't feel the need to expound on this as I specified "algorithmic stablecoin" in my comment and provided a link to the project's homepage which features a short FAQ entry answering that very question:
> RAI is actually one of the first stablecoins. What most people call "stablecoins" are actually pegged coins. Pegged coins are oscillating around a specific value (usually pegged to fiat coins such as USD, EUR etc). RAI, on the other hand, is not pegged to anything. The system behind RAI only cares about the market price getting as close as possible to the redemption price.
When England went back onto the gold standard in 1925 it was a form of extreme austerity. That's because the govt can't easily create more money supply if needed. That's similar to the problem with BTC and cryptos with limited availablity. It just favours the early entrants.
"Creating more money" is simply diluting existing holders of money. Capital != money, value != money, productivity != money. Printing more money does not create wealth - it redistributes it to preferred recipients. The gold standard reinforces economic discipline. America and Britain were able to inflate more effectively than others because of having a monopoly on reserve currencies and owning the rails of international settlement, by requiring all countries to settle in their currencies. Essentially they exported their inflation to all other countries to benefit their own citizens.
> The gold standard reinforces economic discipline
The gold standard actually doesn't do anything because no nation on Earth uses it any more. We have lots of evidence that when it was used, it created instability and economic chaos. Nobody who seriously studies economics things a "return to the gold standard" is a good idea. Here's an example poll of people who have studied economics at the highest level for their entire lives: https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/gold-standard/
Conspiracy theories about the gold standard are peddled on youtube/twitter because it's easier to blame things on conspiracy theories than to understand complex topics. Kind of like climate change or covid.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I’m a believer in Austrian economics. This is a a different view of economics from mainstream economics, which is universally Keynesian / Monetarist. The way I think about the world and manage my investments is shaped by my view of the interplay of a central planner trying (very poorly) to manage the economy, which is by its nature impossible to model.
The gold standard prevented governments (somewhat) from inflating their currencies. The reason we say “gold standard” is because the pound was convertible into gold until WW1. With the outbreak of the war, the bank had a rush on their reserves, which they had printed far more notes than they had available.
The solution was to ban the conversion of paper into gold, seize all additional gold, and force all international colonies to back their currencies with pounds and USD rather than gold.
This is not a conspiracy, it’s simply the history of how we went from a gold standard to the fiat standard. There are good reasons for why this happened. I just simply believe it’s a mistake and view the current strangeness in our global economies as a side effect of all the odd characteristics of a system where the lender of last resort (central banks) can print money at will. It’s a very strange system and I think it is bad. However I still myself must live in this system and think, reason, and invest accordingly.
You need to re-read your history of the gold standard. Yes, it was ended temporarily during WWI...and brought back a few years later. This resulted in massive deflation, and caused the Great Depression (and the bank runs preceding and during the Great Depression).
Ironically, while the "Austrian School" blames credit for the Great Depression...Austria's banks were the first to fail, because Austria didn't move off the gold standard as quickly as its neighbors did, and Austria was one of the hardest-hit countries during the Great Depression.
Completely disagree with the causes of the Great Depression, which is a very complex topic and primarily the result of easy money, a stock market bubble, subsequent trade barriers and tariffs, and the utter mismanagement and idiocy of governments worldwide.
But again, I have a radically different view of economic history from the mainstream, which I accept and am ok with.
This is true and I'm surprised at how little it is discussed and how long it took me to understand this simple fact.
if you have a bunch of participants with money, and create new money,either you 1) give each participant an equal amount (this drives relative wealth towards equality) 2) give each participant an amount proportional to their wealth (result: nothing changes, relative wealth of all participants is the same) 3) you give to some and not others (all youve done is funnel relative wealth from some to others, while
pretending you have created money)
in real life, 'money creation' is almost exclusively 3)
I agree with the first part. But as long as money is created, it has to be either 1), 2), or 3). And in the case of banks, it's certainly not 1) or 2).
This is fairly accurate, based on my understanding of how our reserve currency system works (in the US). However, it's not quite accurate that printing more money doesn't create wealth.
The ability of our financial system to create more money (print) allows lenders to lend more money, which translates to growth, assuming the debt created is used for something that can generate wealth (like creating a small business or buying an asset that appreciates).
Furthermore, the US centralized banking system has helped developing nations to grow, as we've lent those nations money. So - the US printed more money to lend to foreign nations, who used the money to develop their countries, improving mortality rates, poverty rates, etc, all while the US GDP continues to grow with those countries. It's not just wealth redistribution, it's wealth creation.
All that said, it's not a system without flaws. The system has effectively exported the US labor force to those developing countries. The environmental costs of exporting labor are massive. Not all money loaned out has been used well. Our monetary policy has (most likely) pushed us into wars (WMDs anyone? No? Ok. Don't sell oil in Euros).
Being able to lend money cheaply and easily by printing new dollars every time a loan is approved is a mistake. It’s called malinvestment and it enables firms that would not normally receive funding in a truly free market to do so. In a hard money system the amount of loans would be far less, and the use of equity would be much more popular over debt. This is a matter of philosophy and I understand what I’m advocating for is a radical departure from the current system.
One major issue of our debt-based, easy-money society is that everyone understands the Fed explicitly backs the regulated banking system from default and implicitly backs the shadow banking system, as the collapse and subsequent bailout of less-regulated firms has repeatedly shown us. The profits are privatized and the losses are socialized. Another problem is that all firms eventually revert to being financial services firms - it is more profitable for Macy’s to provide 20% interest credit cards than it is to sell clothes (half their revenue pre-bankruptcy) with the clothes merely a means to get people signed up for credit cards. They accomplish this by being able to borrow from the capital markets at very cheap rates, then lend their cheap money to consumers at high rates, and then securitize and resell the debt.
What I advocate and want is impossible to achieve. Instead I make my own investments and plans based upon my knowledge of the world, the financial systems, and how things shake out. For example, the 30 year fixed rate mortgage is a both a huge subsidy to the well-off and one of the few ways you can build wealth to protect against inflation. The situation with housing is complex but the end result is what you see everywhere in developed countries - ever increasing prices and society-wide view of property as an investment - not only the US but especially in Canada. Buy as much property, for as much government subsidized debt, as you as an individual can afford.
"Capital != money, value != money, productivity != money."
Yes, we know that.
But you are missing the point of Monetary Policy.
During a crisis for example, we need to 'reallocate' financing faster than the system will allow for it.
A huge natural disaster that hits an otherwise productive economic centre may mean there is never any recovery, because everyone is unwilling to re-invest.
But if the government steps in with $50B in investment, not only does that spark rebuilding directly, but is also brings back investment.
War is another example: if you're invaded, the economy won't react quickly enough to form some kind of physical defence force. That's why you have civic functions i.e. the Army, which needs direct investment, maybe from lose monetary policy.
In normal times, the central bank can made adjustments much more quickly than the economy can react with higher or lower wages.
France/Spain lose competitiveness because their salaries might be too much. Nobody will accept a pay cut. But a little bit of loser monetary policy will take care of that.
Obviously, printing money doesn't cure anything, just like 'Making A Law' doesn't cure anything.
Monetary Policy can be abused just like the Treasury, just like the Judiciary just like Security Forces.
It's just a form of governance, that's it.
But using 'Gold' you lose the ability to have any governance and are guaranteed to fail during disaster like board that you nailed from your boat to the dock will break when the tide comes in. You'd use a rope in that scenario, i.e. 'monetary policy'.
> When the govt "prints money", the govt takes on new debt against which it issues the currency notes, isn't it?
No you don't have to take on new debt to issue new currency.
Let's say you're a dictator running a banana republic. Your currency used to be modestly stable, prior to your coup. It even stabilized for a while after your coup, as you made a lot of fake promises around stability and economic improvements that the West wanted to hear. Then you begin your authoritarian implementation, you start breaking things to maintain your grip on power. The currency begins to devalue, slowly at first, and then more rapidly. The economy starts to shake apart, you implement price controls and various regulations to restrict & control supply chains. Things just keep getting worse, tax revenue isn't what it used to be and keeps getting worse. International debt markets are no longer believers, they don't trust you to repay anything. Now you're struggling to pay for routine governmental things including salaries for workers to keep the government functioning, or police & military to maintain order (which you're rapidly losing control of as your nation spirals into chaos). So you turn to rampant printing of your nation's already badly weakened currency (you order the printing presses from the Germans, Giesecke and Devrient GmbH). There's no need to issue debt as you do it, you just print new fiat bills and give it to whomever is still willing to accept it in exchange for goods or services (and you definitely force it upon your government employees, which they promptly ditch - at an increasingly steep conversion fee - in pursuit of USD). The word is out, everybody knows what you're doing to the national currency, it proceeds to sink like a stone. You just keep adding zeros on to the new bills as you print them. Maybe you get more desperate and fake-outlaw USD and turn its use into a black market (in reality you and your cronies, and the elites, will still be utilizing USD freely; and the USD black market will be understood as a common presence, it's just that now you can arbitrarily smash people that go near it for any reason at any time, everybody is now a criminal).
> "You can believe that 99% of crypto is bullshit while also believing that the 1% that isn't will change the world"
Is this a quote from someone?
Because you can believe anything, believes are not a good method to find what is truth. But it is part of the pump and dump strategy, make people believe that something is valuable and them dump on them all your worthless assets.
It's from Preston Byrne (added this in my original comment).
The reason I think it's relevant is that posts like Palmer's attack only the "scam side" of crypto (the 99%) without acknowledging the "new paradigm" (1%) side
Yes there are scams, yes there are pumps and dumps, yes there are insiders who control too much liquidity. But you also have to do justice to the promise of the tech.
It was not previously possible for anyone with an internet connection to take out a loan via a decentralised protocol (MakerDAO), or exchange assets via a decentralised contract (Uniswap), or have a digital proof of authenticity (NFTs). And all of this without middle-men taking fees, opaque leverage throughout the system (see Archegos) and gating access to only certain participants (the richer half of the world who have a bank account).
Looking forward to the responses handwaiving your comment and saying these aren't real use cases, they don't solve anything, you don't need this stuff unless you're doing illegal activity, tradfi is better, only reason they exist is to better enable scams, [insert any other ignorant argument].
It really is hilarious how similar the naysaying here is to the internet/email says.
Change the world in some as-yet undiscovered way? I have much less than 1% confidence that any of the crypto ideas I've heard so far will change the world.
My wife and I paid off our student loan debts with a 0% interest loan and no need to go through a bank. Our position is well over-collateralized and interest generated from other DeFi lending positions will pay off the loan in full.
Not to mention, Ethereum as a settlement layer for stablecoins is gaining exponential adoption. There's a non-insignificant chance it disrupts the traditional banking rails (i.e. ACH, wire, SWIFT, etc.).
I take this comment to mean that you had crypto investments that worked out well for you, and then you took a DeFi loan against them to pay off your student loans?
If so, that doesn't seem that groundbreaking. You could have simply liquidated enough of your gains to pay your student loans off. Instead, you're now in a leveraged position. It's very possible that your collateral could drop below the LTV threshold, causing a liquidation, which would magnify the losses you'd have if you weren't levered. There's no free lunch.
It's certainly interesting that DeFi creates new schemes for creating leverage, with minimal intermediation, but I wouldn't call it groundbreaking. It's an incremental development in financial engineering.
EDIT: read some of your other comments that you made while I was writing mine. It sounds like you're using stablecoins as your collateral, which seems like a smart move, and you've effectively converted your student loan into a DeFi loan at a lower rate. But I'd still be concerned that while your more mundane risks aren't that high (like asset prices and interest rates), you may have exposure to more complex risks.
Why move the goal posts, they weren't speculating on “price go up”, they took a capital efficient loan from an automated world bank instead of dealing with a boutique lender that wastes everyones time
Your edit captures the situation pretty well. I used stablecoins as collateral and this was effectively a migration of the debt on my balance sheet to a lower (even negative) interest rate.
And yes, there are definitely risks; it's not for everyone!
...if you paid it off with an over-collateralized loan, then surely you must have already had enough money to pay it beforehand. Also may I ask what DeFi platform facilitates 0% loans? I thought they all had some low interest
I did have sufficient funds but drawing a loan is more capital efficient. I responded to another comment in this post explaining why.
Also, this was not my scenario but a common view: it can make sense to draw a loan so that you're not liquidating long-term holdings. Imagine I hold $100k in bitcoin and need to pay off $15k in student debt. If I sell my BTC, I'll incur capital gains tax and also have a smaller long-term holding. Alternatively, I can borrow $15k against the BTC, pay no tax, and keep my BTC position in full. There are various ways to then generate interest on the BTC and pay back the borrowed funds.
Some platforms offering 0% loans include Liquity and Alchemix.
I mean given crypto coins are going to the moon, every payment they make will have a higher USD(T) value than before. Deflationary currency is great for lenders!
In fact this “DeFi” thing should have a negative interest rate to compensate for the fact that this borrower will be paying them more and more each payment.
I'm not disputing that it's made some people rich by allowing them to place big bets, but I don't think that's world changing. So did Bernie Madoff if you were lucky enough to get out early.
And I'm not increasing my overall debt position on my personal balance sheet. Rather, I shifted the debt from student loans at ~5.5% to a DeFi protocol where the borrow rate is effectively negative.
Your use-case sounds really interesting. Would you mind elaborating a little bit more? Sounds like you’re using compound.finance or liquity in some way …
I do use both of those protocols, but for this specific use case I'm referring Alchemix. I deposited $30k DAI and borrowed $15k alUSD against the deposit. Traded the alUSD for USDC and withdrew through Coinbase.
I didn't go into detail in the initial post since it sounds a bit crazy, but the loan will actually pay itself off since Alchemix is depositing my $30k into Yearn. The yields generated from Yearn gradually pay down my debt automatically. Other interest bearing positions (apps like Compound and "yield farming" on various new protocols) will also help me pay off the loan faster.
The alternative to this is that I could've taken $15k from the initial $30k and paid off our loans outright. But, using Alchemix is more capital efficient. Student debts are now paid and I also have $30k of capital generating yield instead of only $15k if I had simply paid the loans upfront.
How did you come to trust Alchemix with that much capital? I'm not familiar with them, but just checking their site doesn't give me a lot of confidence about sending tens of thousands of $ to them.
It's all open source. You can see the contracts yourself, or read an audit that someone else created. The beauty is that you don't have to trust them, because you can see exactly what can possibly happen with your money by looking at the code.
My collateral is currently yielding 6.5%, which is gradually paying down the debt. At this rate, estimated maturity is 02/28/2029. This will vary depending on APYs for DAI in the Yearn protocol. But personally, I'll use other income streams to pay it off much sooner.
Bitcoin has been around longer than the iPhone. When it started I think we were all still in Windows XP.
If Bitcoin hasn’t yet discovered a killer app, when will it?
But yeah yeah, it took tens of thousands of years between humans seeing lightning start fires and the charcoal grill… if it took that long, I'm sure it will be tens of thousands of years before Bitcoin finds a use. Better keep buying and holding!
Well, it was pretty early days: Bitcoin was released a few months after the iPhone got an app store, and a few months before the iPhone got copy & paste functionality.
That’s kind of like saying “the Nokia brick phone has been around forever, if it hasn’t discovered a killer app, when will it?”
Bitcoin was just the first blockchain to really find adoption, it’s nowhere near where 99% of the innovation in crypto is happening today. Far more interesting projects that are providing actual value today.
My feelings of meh about crypto have nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the fact that I can't think of a problem it solves in my life or any way it makes my life easier, more enjoyable or more interesting.
Interesting read. One thing I don't understand is that he still presents decentralization as something to strive for (as lots of people in the crypto space do), but then he criticizes the consequences of decentralization:
> Despite claims of “decentralization”, the cryptocurrency industry is controlled by a powerful cartel of wealthy figures who, with time, have evolved to incorporate many of the same institutions tied to the existing centralized financial system they supposedly set out to replace.
> Cryptocurrency is like taking the worst parts of today's capitalist system (eg. corruption, fraud, inequality) and using software to technically limit the use of interventions (eg. audits, regulation, taxation) which serve as protections or safety nets for the average person.
From what I understand, people in that space seem to think that because something is decentralized, people will automatically distribute equally between themselves power and authority. That seems really naive. As with any "free for all" type of space, the law of the strongest applies. The "cartel" that he speaks of taking control of crypto is a natural consequence of decentralization. An important part of central authorities in the modern world is to guarantee some freedom from exploitive forces. Democracy, unions, laws are a way to achieve that goal.
I wonder if it's a consequence of people thinking about the state as fundamentally bad? I often see criticism from some people, both left and right-wing, that the state is good for nothing, but it seems clear (in the view of the author) who wins when the state can't exercise its authority. Maybe it's time for some people to review their views about decentralization and its consequences.
Yes, that worldview, i. e. that the intangible structures created by societies (governments, laws, banks) are inherently bad is rather popular with the tech crowd. Witness how they approach free speech issues, putting all their stock in technological solutions (Tor) while generally either complaining about relevant laws or cynically dismissing all initiatives as corrupt.
With regard to central banks, the community is at about the level of the 1920s, where monetary policy was arguably worse than some default law of physics, like the availability of actual gold, might have been. That ignores the bit of history that came later, and the progress that’s been made. That’s why they’re all afraid of runaway inflation, although it has not happened within anyone’s lived experience in western democratic countries.
It’s fun to remember how paranoid the crypto community was at the beginning of being targeted by governments for encroaching on their power. When, in reality, the response was mostly just benign curiosity, and governments only reacted when there were tangible harms to prevent, such as fraud and, more recently, skyrocketing CO_2 emissions. It’s almost as if the FED isn’t a shady private institutions owned by the Rothschild’s out to exploit the common man.
I don't think there's a powerful cartel controlling the industry. If you'd imagine that, they would be controlling the market, not the industry per se, it's production..
Anyhow, most industries are controlled by few players outside of crypto. Perhaps the right question would be if the existence of crypto as a new component of the system can somehow decrease injustice in the system as a whole. I don't know the answer, but I would gamble it's No - for now. The way I see it in the near future (maximum 10y) we'll get obvious reasons to answer Yes, though.
Well it's easy to argue that most crypto projects are get rich quick schemes by their creators. A lot of people haven't even heard of OneCoin [1], but I think it's what most of the crypto community actually looks like when you remove the whole "progressive" or "building future" branding.
I think he describes the current crypto landscape accurately, but I'm becoming more and more bullish on the long term decentralized finance vision. Imagine solving open source funding by OSS developers selling insurance for their projects on decentralized programmatic insurance markets.
> selling insurance for their projects on decentralized programmatic insurance markets
One of the problems with crypto is people treating it like fairy dust. There are remarkably few, perhaps vanishingly so, business models that do not work centralised that do decentralised.
This is one. What is the pay-out? Who makes what guarantees? How are they enforced?
If a business plan requires crypto—as opposed to being enhanced by it—it’s probably dead on arrival.
This is a super undeveloped idea, but I was thinking about something along these lines:
1. OSS users pay a monthly premium for insurance on the software (incl transient dependencies) that is critical to their business.
2. Part of the cash flow from premiums is pooled into an insurance fund that pays interest to OSS developers. The rest is payed out directly to OSS devs.
3. If there is a bug in an insured OSS project, policy holders have a claim on the pool. The magnitude of the claim depends on the severity of the bug and the time it remains open. Future payouts to the OSS project with the bug are directed to the fund until the payed out insurance benefit is covered.
The hardest part is coming up with a decentralized consensus mechanism for establishing the existence, severity and resolution of bugs, but there is a lot of experimentation going on in DeFi to solve similar problems.
As to why it should be decentralized, it's the same reason OSS is decentralized: you don't want a single actor to control OSS funding.
> you don't want a single actor to control OSS funding
You’re replacing a single actor you can sue in court with a dynamic, pseudo-anonymous committee one can lobby that will make its decision based on rules or whims. That sounds like a step backwards.
Separately, why would anyone pay the premium? If you want a bug fixed and are willing to pay for it, you’d get the job done faster hiring the dev on freelance.
Swapping this to a simple insurance model exposes the flaws. Unfortunately, there is a lot of this going on in crypto. (Though I am of the belief that people are free to lose their money, as long as it doesn’t become a political problem.)
> You’re replacing a single actor you can sue in court with a dynamic, pseudo-anonymous committee one can lobby that will make its decision based on rules or whims. That sounds like a step backwards.
This is exactly the problem that decentralized oracles are trying to solve. Consensus courtesy of cryptography and game theory.
> Separately, why would anyone pay the premium? If you want a bug fixed and are willing to pay for it, you’d get the job done faster hiring the dev on freelance.
Nothing solves bugs faster than the original dev being financially incentivized to fix it ASAP.
> Consensus courtesy of cryptography and game theory
This solves the vote tallying problem. But that’s not the real problem. Trusting the people making the decision is. Cryptographically guaranteed kangaroo courts don’t help anyone.
> the parent comment is ignorant of how decentralized oracles work
I probably am. But I get pitched a project that involves one about every day. Multiple oracles, staking...they solve a fake problem--counting votes--while leaving the real problem--who the oracle(s) is/are and how they make their decision--untouched.
If you're measuring something objective, like a stock price or weather report, fine. Whatever. But a bespoke, subjective output? Requiring specialists to be done correctly? Like a decision on whether an insurance pay-out is warranted in a specific case?
We could create arbitration with extra steps, which is what ChainLink and friends are doing. But again, you've replaced a centralized actor governed by law and reputation with a centralized set governed by reputation alone. (Staking doesn't solve this problem; it just dilutes and punts it.) And if you're pulling from a predictable pool of specialists, you can bet your ass they'll be lobbied.
> Multiple oracles, staking...they solve a fake problem--counting votes--while leaving the real problem--who the oracle(s) is/are and how they make their decision--untouched.
The point is really to not to have an oracle. To be clear, I think this is still an open research problem in crypto, but I expect the solution to be a combination of making it very expensive to lie and to make the rewards that can be obtained through lying worthless. (I won't discuss specific projects here.)
Ofc there are no guarantees that we'll have a solution, but I'm also not aware of any theoretical limitations. The rewards are enormous which drives a lot of experimentation in the space, and hey, who would've thought that we could solve the double spending problem 15 years ago?
> making it very expensive to lie and to make the rewards that can be obtained through lying worthless
Lying is a small, small subset of commercial disputes. When a party loses in front of the Supreme Court, it isn’t because someone lied. It’s because they interpreted the facts differently. Solving for lying could be helpful, but it largely returns us to square one.
> who would've thought that we could solve the double spending problem 15 years ago?
Admire the enthusiasm. But note that the Byzantine general’s problem was solved well before Bitcoin.
All this would work much better with simple old fashioned money.
OSS isn't decentralized at all, there's always at least some group of core devs who hold the commit rights and who make releases. And they will want to control their funding.
> All this would work much better with simple old fashioned money.
That's the thing, on the internet, simple old fashioned money is not like simple old fashioned money. Keeping accounts and transferring old fashioned money between peers on the internet is not trivial.
Discounting the on-boarding problem, crypto is way closer to cash than payment processing networks like Visa, Mastercard, Paypal. Accepting crypto for any kind of work is trivial, you just generate a standard address/QR code that can be read by any other standard wallet, and receive a standard crypto that can be exchanged freely.
My read on this is "Patreon for OSS/corporate relations".
Start a Patreon-like business where corporations/users can sign up to give a monthly donation-subscription-contribution to a slew of OSS developers, anywhere from $1 / mo to $$$. Reduce the friction of financially supporting every tiny project you make use of. Throw in a nice suite of uniform communication channels for bug requests and version announcements.
Individual OSS projects aren't decentralized, but the process of building and distributing OSS mostly is (leaving GitHub is relatively low barrier). See iOS for a centralized ecosystem.
If there was a central entity controlling OSS funding they could for example prevent forked projects from succeeding.
There are some solid ideas behind cryptocurrency and perhaps your example is an illustration of how those good ideas could work. Many of the proponents of cryptocurrency describe such use-cases and it seems perfectly sound and air-tight on the surface.
But the current reality is that the OVERWHELMING use-cases of crypto-currency are wild get-rich-quick shell-games, illicit trade and tax-avoidance schemes. This is showing no signs of sobering up, in fact it has become worse. People keep saying that it will "settle down" but there is NO EVIDENCE for that.
The truly disturbing thing about cryptocurrency is that it reveals the possibility that "money", as a concept, is NOT necessarily a medium to exchange goods and services. It is something much more complex and fluid. Cryptocurrency, as a currency, takes all the awful and volatile hidden features of money, accelerates them and makes them overt and central to it's operation.
I think many of us find that idea repulsive. If crypto (as it currently exists) becomes the money of the future, it will mean that the vast majority of the population who earn money by exchanging their labor will find themselves at the mercy of wild and random fluctuations in the value of their labor. Their labor will mean less or more not because of what they actually do, but because of completely unrelated fluctuations caused by "millionaires" and institutions acting on whims, or even joking around. You could argue that it happens now with dollar money, but that kind of fluctuation has been almost always slow. Crypto promises to make crazy fluctuations the norm.
Vitalik Buterin, for example, famously donated ~1 billion "dollars" towards India COVID relief. Except that it wasn't really dollars, it was some cryptocoin that he was gifted ("shiba-shitto" or something like that). That value plummeted almost immediately. I don't know what it is now, it seems the news orgs have lost interest in the story. I do hope that India COVID relief got something out of it, but would have been better if they didn't have to hire crypto people to process that "money" into something useable when they're dealing with a pandemic.
Here’s the SHIB donation, looks like it’s quoted at 350,000,000 USD now [1] and the relief fund has a transparency page linking to their wallet and bank and grant transactions [2]
I agree with you btw just wanted to link to context
Any insurance that can only pay out in proportion to the premiums already paid in seems like a red flag. That's a savings account and not a genuine transfer of risk. Unless the bug that triggers a payout is extremely circumstantial, it seems likely that any single claim would trigger a flood of claims, so I don't buy that pooling premiums received makes an insolvency-inducing run less likely.
Yeah, the way I presented the idea above, it's closer to a cooperative than an insurance company. I think it's more important for the buyers of the "insurance" to get their bugs resolved quickly than it is to receive monetary compensation, so the purpose of the payouts is really just to incentivize OSS developers to resolve bugs quickly by penalizing their future earnings if they fail to do so.
But if real insurance with real payouts is desirable, then that's solvable by raising capital for the fund in an ICO and directing some of the cash flow to investors. If I'm not mistaken this is how you'd start an insurance company today: you'd need to meet some capital requirements before being allowed to sell insurance to the public and you'd do that by raising money from investors.
OSS dev: I'm frightened of the personal risk of having bugs in my code suddenly mean that money is hoovered out of my bank account since it is extremely difficult be confident my code contains zero bugs.
Insurance usually goes the other direction. Large organizations can amortize risk. Individuals need to mitigate risk. Having somebody buy insurance on my code makes me less likely to want to release it rather than more likely.
So, I've developed some software, gotten a bunch of users and developed a bit of an income stream, then there's a big bug and now I have no chance of future earnings from that software. I'd probably abandon that project and move on to something else instead; maybe get a job at $BIGCO or become a turnip farmer. So some people got an insurance payout, but the software they were using and considered important enough that they would pay for insurance on is now abandonware for them and for any other users that happened to be out there.
> The hardest part is coming up with a decentralized consensus mechanism for establishing the existence, severity and resolution of bugs, but there is a lot of experimentation going on in DeFi to solve similar problems.
Pretty much. Getting real world data like this onto a blockchain such that the representation of it on the blockchain can be trusted is as yet an unsolved problem. Blockchains are great at managing data created internally in a trustworthy way, but not data created externally.
What what you want is a kind of business or foundation where:
1. users pay monthly fee/premium
2. part of that is kept in a pool, part is payed to the developers
3. when bugs happen, funky stuff happens with the pooled money.
See, I didn't need any crypto for that.
Maybe one day crypto can reduce the legal overhead, maybe not.
The hard part is getting people to actually pay for things that they could have for free.
Do you know what the reminds me of? RedHat. RedHat sold (and still sells, I guess) Open Source software together with maintenance contracts (pretty close to what you call insurance).
They needs lots of marketing and sales staff to attract customers. Who replaces the marketing and sales people in the crypto world? Who does the convincing?
> The hardest part is coming up with a decentralized consensus mechanism for establishing the existence, severity and resolution of bugs, but there is a lot of experimentation going on in DeFi to solve similar problems.
What are those DeFi projects? If someone can figure out such high level consensus mechanisms that would be fascinating.
I won't link to projects to avoid the perception of a shill, but the keyword is "decentralized oracle". To be clear, I don't think this is a solved problem yet, and as always with crypto, just because a project claims that they've solved a problem, doesn't mean that they have.
The problem with OSS funding isn't the technical mechanism that money is sent. The problem is that people don't want to pay period. The ONLY viable crypto use case is currency. The blockchain can't solve issues that require attachment to the real world.
Like the tweeter points out, they're not really all that decentralized. They're controlled by an anonymous cartel that's not accountable to anyone. At least national currencies are controlled by central banks that are accountable to governments that are in turn accountable to the people.
DeFi does not exist without CeFi. So I agree wholeheartedly that there is an inherent problem with the cryptocurrency world today. But I'm still fascinated by decentralized concepts and the explosion of creativity around this. I think even if 1 percent of what's being created has long lasting implications for our world, then we've done well...
So many attack on capitalism ITT. I wish we could have rational discussion about whatever word problem while at the same time not trash the idea of private ownership, competitive markets and investment for profit.
Mind you, every successful country today runs on a MIXED economic system, and communism (or anarchy for that matter) failed every time it was tried.
> After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology
?
> It doesn't align with my politics or belief system, and I don't have the energy to try and discuss that with those unwilling to engage in a grounded conversation.
Like himself. Given what he just said about cryptocurrency being 'inherently right-wing' which that is completely baseless.
Obviously it is heavily manipulated and it is not exclusive to cryptocurrencies, just like forex and the stock market but the main difference is that it is highly unregulated. I expect more exchanges to use more than just KYC, AML checks and the rise of implementing CBDCs to drive cryptocurrencies past the wild west stage that it is today.
Good luck trying to ignore it because it is here to stay. (Even if you are the creator of a meme coin)
Yeah, I suppose you could associate the tech with the libertarian/anarchist crowd (which are nonetheless a minority in that space nowadays, compared to those simply interested in making money), but right-wing? If he was truly willing to engage in the discussion, you’d at least expect him to look up some definitions.
I guess the question here is if he conflates being a statist crony with "right-wing". Clearly he misses the fact that the fed is controlled by people who don't even delineate their political affiliation and only seek to control and manipulate. It's really quite funny that this guy wrote this whole self-abating sob story on twitter...
Extremely based and succinct rundown of why crypto is trash and should be avoided at all costs. Yes, the original vision was noble and worthwhile, but like nearly every nice theoretical idea, it was co-opted into the capitalist ecosystem to be just another vassal of greed and corruption, with some throwback wild west vibes.
Cryptocurrency like all right-wing idealism is based on a belief in the supernatural. They preform these ritual calculations and anoint each other with imaginary tokens, claim value has been created and write that off on their taxes, the big difference with crypto over the regular voodoo is that you can actually make money doing it even if you don't believe the fundamentals are sound. You attract the worse of both worlds, the crazy idealists and the complete scam artists and when you get to the core of what crypto is really about those groups are basically the same.
I think you’re referring to the monetary policy? How could monetary policy that no one is supposed to control not be conservative in the literal sense?
I think we're not understanding each other here. Let me rephrase this.
Science and technology shouldn't have a political valence, and efforts to politicize science can end quite badly, like the Soviet Union banning the study of genetics on the grounds of it being "anti-Marxist". Technologies and their use can be debated on ethical grounds, but to assign valences is silly and potentially harmful.
I don't think anyone is taking issue with the Blockchain technology itself, it's about what cryptocurrency manifests in the real world. That's an argument about economics, not technology.
But why? Not every cryptocurrency has rich-get-richer dynamics. Lots of chains have blessed authories or validators involved, and don't incentive holding money. Bitcoin and Ethereum are like this. But there's so much more out there.
> I think we're not understanding each other here. Let me rephrase this.
That's much better. Because to understand what you meant by example one needed to know reasoning behind the example.
> Science and technology shouldn't have a political valence
It should not. I agree.
Do you agree that atomic bomb is political? At which sate atomic bomb development stops being science and starts being political? At theory level? Experiments? First device? First use of device?
At some stage we start observing that cryptocurrencies impact start having great consequences regardless of the science behind them. Great volume of electricity, centralization of power at hands of middlemen, promises of great future where benefits are reaped by early adopters already today.
Some people feel like looking at cryptocurrencies and blockchain purely from technology perspective, advocating for them, brings more harm than good. And I can understand this position of the author well.
> Some people feel like looking at cryptocurrencies and blockchain purely from technology perspective, advocating for them, brings more harm than good. And I can understand this position of the author well.
This is assigning a valence, that's what I mean. We can well debate and choose to ban the mining of PoW energy-heavy cryptocurrencies, but to tar the entire field as harmful is assigning a valence.
> Do you agree that atomic bomb is political? At which sate atomic bomb development stops being science and starts being political? At theory level? Experiments? First device? First use of device?
Fission can be both beneficial (fusion power reactors) or it can be a weapon (nuclear weapons). Should we ban the research of nuclear altogether because of its potential to be used for a weapon? Then comes the question of where to draw the line. Should fission research be banned but fusion research be allowed to continue? Should we stop researching atoms altogether? What if banning research into fission stops us from understanding a key way to generate cleaner energy and overcome climate change and non-renewable energy usage?
This is exactly what happened with the Soviet Union and genetics. Remember that at the time the Soviet Union placed a ban on genetics research, genetics in the West was heavily associated with eugenics. By banning genetic research altogether, the Soviet Union missed out on the chance to derive many drugs beneficial to human health, though their heart came from the right place (banning the idea of eugenics and social darwinism altogether).
Cryptocurrency is pretty damn close to the libertarian ideal and a lot of the community embraces that. I wouldn't call it "right wing" in the context of the USA left/right though.
Agreed. I have no problem with that alignment as a political philosophy. But calling it "right wing" in US context implies the typical left/right divisive/alienating politicization. The entire thread is very delusional.
Right wing is not politicized. It reflects an ideological scale. If he had characterized it as Republican, then sure. But calling crypto right wing is pretty fair.
I agree but it is the anti-authoritarian potential for crypto that has always made me curious.
In that regard figuring out crypto is like every other idea that needs to be vetted to insure it is not an authoritarian measure being marketed as anti-authoritarian.
Crypto seems to have the potential to avoid being subject to state power. Does it have the same potential to avoid corporate power or surveillance though? That is the question I have found myself trying to sort out.
I am American, living in the UK. I know what it means in the US. I also know what it means to the rest of the world. Like I said, right-wing in most of the world is used to describe ideologies, not to out specific political parties.
There is the price argument which I think will remain , given how historically inflation scares people.
But it's just exciting as a social enviornment. All the young kids who are into crypto today...they might move on tomorrow, but the connections you can make while you are in this amazing melting pot will last forever.
And it's not like they are dumb connections either..
Crypto is a college experience 2.0 ,or... for those who are not American the chance to experience US College environment for the first time
This is why Musk jumped in it head first before doing a 180 after realizing the fact that this thing was in fact not built by him and thus had to be destroyed.
The various flavors of crypto can be compared with the different colleges.
Bitcoin...I imagine it as a weird mix of University of Miami, Stanford, MIT and George Mason
You do know that other countries have colleges and universities as well, right?
And the experience is quite similar for most of them: first time living away from parents, first serious relationships, first time taking LSD, and finally starting to appreciate the intricacies of French or the Citric Acid Cycle.
None of which strikes as particularly close to what I gather is the daily life of cryptobros.
You miss the Us v Them rivalries with other schools which explodes in things like the Ohio State v. Michigan 'Civil War'.
It's not the same thing without top notch sports. Other countries don't have that. If you are a 'cryptobro' with a decent following that's not that different than being the QB of Michigan or Ohio State given the median age of people which are into BTC.
Okay there are very few girls and no cheerleading...that's a bummer, but it's still early , maybe they'll arrive now that Bitcoin Central has moved to Miami
He calls "corruption" "one of the worst parts of capitalism". Maybe I should have paid more attention in class and less to Civilization, but I did think that corruption was not generally seen as much of a problem with capitalism as more centralized economic systems.
Corruption is always a problem everywhere, but it would seem to get worse with greater centralization of control.
Capitalism and centralization of control are not incompatible. The entire point of platforms is to centralize control up to the point of having full control over proprietary markets like Apple with it's App Store.
I haven't ever seen a more glaring example of corruption as the Soviet black markets for food in the 1980s.
By the late 1980s, Soviet price controls and centralized distribution rules, incentivized black market growth by providing opportunity for tremendous profit. Ultimately, it overtook the regular gov't markets - resulting in the famous empty shelves we iconically associate with the collapse of the USSR.
Most gov't officials participated in these black markets. This also led to massive organized crime groups, which became so profitable, that they became the oligarchs who ultimately took over the country when the gov't collapsed from bankruptcy.
The notion that capitalism creates corruption is laughable with these massive recent examples.
> The notion that capitalism creates corruption is laughable with these massive recent examples.
The most corrupt nations throughout modern history have always been on the Socialist spectrum, without exception. Including National Socialist Germany, Communist Cuba, Communist China, Communist Vietnam, Socialist Iraq, Communist North Korea, Theocratic-Socialist Iran, Socialist Syria, Socialist Zimbabwe, Socialist Venezuela as well as Soviet Russia, all of which were/are Socialist derivatives.
"I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing..."
No need to further read. After such nonsense the opinion of this person has no credibility left.
If you have to put politics into every f*** thing you express then I pass on anything you have to say.
I can disagree with someone calling something "evil" but there is no disagreement possible if people feel the need to mix politics or other unrelated topics in their way to express an opinion.
Ccryto can not be right-wing just as it can not be sexist or racist or whatever nonsense people come up with to "describe" it. It just as absurd as if someone would say HTTP is right-wing, browsers are inherently racist and HTML sexist.
>I don't know (or care) what this person politics are, but there's something to be said for speaking the language your audience is listening in.
Neither do I but its on twitter so hes probably catering to the general twitter audience.
He discredits himself almost immediately when he asserts that right wing views and capitalism are synonymous. But more importantly, he was only involved in publishing a meme-copy of bitcoin, so who cares at all what he thinks? Especially after he made fortune off of the thing he's denouncing.
Wait, so how does he expect to fight capitalism, if all he'd be allowed to do was always logged and observed bank wire transfers?
Thats rather shortsighted.
A lot of people thought that, at the dawn of the crypto era.
I think an effective way to fight capitalism would be to rethink the banking system. We need public banks which will invest in the productive sector like manufacturing instead of speculating. That's how banks used to operate actually. Well yes crypto definitely won't get us there right now.
Economist Michael Hudson has written about it, his point of comparison is usually the german banks of the 19th century which financed rapid development of their industry to US banks post 1970 which mostly speculated and invested in Finance and Real Estate (FIRE sector)
rather than arguing which side things fall on i'd rather like to mention that painting every aspect of life as either 'left' or 'right' is at best a vast over-simplification of life and surrounding politics, and at worst a willful method by which to gain mind-share or allies to a cause.
it's rarely useful for any level of civil discourse; it's general usage these past few years is to inflame a side or draw a border between Them and Us.
Isn't the entire point of cryptocurrencies that it's right wing? It's built on the concept of market competition, and the complete lack of government restrictions. It's an incredibly neoliberal concept, which has been the economic policy of the right for decades.
> Isn't the entire point of cryptocurrencies that it's right wing?
No, its libertarian, not right-wing. They are basically on orthogonal axes (the US’s superficially unidimensional partisan divide and the fact that the right-wing party is the more prone to try to sell itself to libertarians may confuse Americans about this, though.)
No they could be socialists, anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, communists.
Much of leftist political theory is coming at libertarianism from the view that liberalism provides necessary but not sufficient conditions for freedom. We have to go further than classical liberalism to get more freedom.
Capital L Libertarian is a very right-wing political faction in the USA, but libertarianism is not that.
They would be broadly similar to the liberal democracy solution, with perhaps the implementation of cooperative ownership of production so that the owners, being ordinary people, are vulnerable to climate change. But certainly some kind of legislative solution would be needed, though the government structure would be different.
Here's one in front of you, but personally I and most people with a similar ideology think that crypto is worse than tradfi in principle and not any better in implementation.
You can definitely find some folks into crypto that identify as libertarian socialists or left anarchists, but I think they're a minority.
Not exactly. In France the Front National is usually recognized as the most right-wing party, but LREM are way more economically liberal than them, and are considered center/center right. This is why using "right-wing" or "left-wing" is often useless and serves only to create more division.
Because the left wing position is that a democratically elected government should be deciding how money is distributed, while the right thinks government should be stripped of this power. Think of blockchain as the privatization of money supply.
I don't think that's necessarily the case. With that criteria, the concept of a society without money at all would also be a 'non left wing' position, and I don't think that's the case. Decentralised currency doesn't strip the government from the ability to redistribute money --- it can still do so via taxes, even without control of the printing machine.
Hell, the right implementation of the decentralisation of currency (obviously not what we have right now with bitcoin) could be more equitable than what we have right now with centralised currency.
Can’t really talk beyond Europe viewpoint, so might be different elsewhere, but here in the UK the left often talks of removing Westminster central control and empowering smaller local politics. I’m left wing/labour/union/coop worker and work in crypto, same with my colleagues. I really disagree with the projection that it is right wing ultracapitalist. It’s one of the best tools I’ve seen for cooperatives and community organisations
I guess there creator of dogecoin always saw it as a joke, so this isn’t surprising.
Cryptocurrency is about choice and voice. Coordination and communication tools. There are American right wingers with their tokens and systems they’ve designed. But there is also things like CirclesUBI which is much more socialist and gaining momentum in the Berlin indie art scene.
Of course if you aren’t engaging with the space you just see speculation and hear about hacks and crime and people who became millionaires. what you will hear about is what Silicon Valley vcs pour millions of dollars into things they want you hearing about.
But actually engaging with devs in the space and the different subcultures you can find people you get along with. You can find communities and daos doing things you are interested in and share your political alignment.
Most people I know working in the space have European left wing leanings.
Also a reminder. You don’t have to spend any money to be involved. Write code, join chat rooms, work on things you enjoy and want to make. That is going to obviously be much more rewarding than gambling on the back of VCs bags.
I think he never really understood Bitcoin, which led him to create Dogecoin and now this. He is right about the whole "crypto industry", but that has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
There's an ideology called Bitcoin maximalism or toxic Bitcoin maximalism, which defends the truth and the ideals of cryptocurrency against this greedy and manipulative "crypto industry" he is talking about. Bitcoin maximalism is basically the free market / "hyper-capitalist" answer to all the scamming that's going on in the industry.
It's like the early Internet. There were a lot of scams on the Internet, and also early Internet companies which were pump&dump-scams. It gets better when people get more educated and learn not to trust anyone. I'm not sure what are his suggestions, but authoritarianism certainly doesn't solve this issue.
>He helped make Dogecoin in 15 minutes, at a time when people thought “launching a blockchain” was complicated.
It wasn't at that point though. Litecoin was already created by tweaking btc and I was seeing people on irc do the same for fun with ease. Launching a btc-copy with different params wasn't the big achievment he had, attaching it to the right meme and getting people into it was.
IIRC, Litecoin seemed like significant work, but after that, you could create a Scrypt altcoin by copying a source tree and doing not much more than changing the name (and pre-mining, because that's probably the point).
If I recall a bitcoin core dev back in the day made a website where you could just change a few variables: name, block time, block size, block reward, etc. And it would spit out your customized fork of bitcoin core. This is basically how easy it is to make an erc20 token these days.
It is literally a fork of Bitcoin with extra tweaks and a famous internet meme. Any Joe, Jane and, Jimbob can do just that in 15 minutes, hence the reason why the cryptocurrency market is still in its infantile stage and very unregulated.
8 years later its gotten easier for the retail investors signing up at major exchanges to buy it right now. The whales who accumulated however...
What a strange set of opinions, not that I find cryptocurrencies as particularly valuable right now, besides cases like having something reasonable in a country with huge inflation or crappy banking system that makes online payments and bank transfers hard. Crypto misses basic services like ability to revert transaction in case of mistake, charge backs, etc.
But:
"I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents"
Wow. Right. Wing.
"Despite claims of “decentralization”, the cryptocurrency industry is controlled by a powerful cartel of wealthy figures who, with time, have evolved to incorporate many of the same institutions tied to the existing centralized financial system they supposedly set out to replace."
Ok, sounds a bit like conspiracy theory (who are those wealthy figures? Elon Musk was playing with cryptos, yes, but this is Elon Musk, and he does all kind of funky stuff like electric cars or space travel), but yes, at some point cryptos might be somehow institutionalized and it will be done to avoid issues that crypto currencies have. Oddly enough the author lists them in the same twit:
"Lose your savings account password? Your fault.
Fall victim to a scam? Your fault.
Billionaires manipulating markets? They’re geniuses."
So, actually it would not hurt to "incorporate many of the same institutions tied to the existing centralized financial system".
The bad thing that happened to cryptos was that they become an investment instrument, not the mean of payment. They were supposed to be "a better gold" of old times. But right now everything is an investment instrument. The other thing are technical issues that bitcoin has (other cryptos are small players right now), slow transactions, energy consumption and the risk that someone finally manages to gather 51% of digging power and will take over the network.
I am unclear how audits, regulation, taxation serve as protections or safety nets for the average person.
Seems like the kind of thing large corporations can manipulate and avoid whereas individuals cannot. I'm not a crypto person but it seems like crypto at least has the potential to offer some of those protections to individuals that were once the province of the powerful.
You can put fiet money ($€£) in a western bank and earn a fixed interest and be sure you can get it out when you want, if you forget your account number or password you’ll be ok and if the bank goes bust, you’ll get (upto ~$250K in US and similar around the world). You can spend those dollars instantly anywhere around the world - as cash or online.
Buy Bitcoin purchasing items is a pain, the value may be higher or lower than last week or yesterday, seemingly manipulated by unknown whales totally legally. If the money is in an unregulated exchange it can be lost with little recompense. Buy one of the more exotic coins you may make a fortune or loose everything overnight because of a coding error or just because.
Banking, at high level, is not complicated and it is very interesting to see how regulation keeps a safe and sound economic system and how failures to regulate make markets collapse. For a historical perspective you can study The Great Depression, as many regulations were created to avoid similar systematic failures.
Cryptocurrencies are an open-source alternative to the traditional financial system. There are problems of course, but remember that this industry is still very young. Unless crypto gets totally banned or over-regulated, it's going to have a bright future.
hm, yet crypto allowed him to "exit" the industry while the traditional system doesnt; and for all the talk of "control" are people really coerced to use a cryptocoin?
> Lose your savings account password? Your fault.
> Fall victim to a scam? Your fault.
> Billionaires manipulating markets? They’re geniuses.
So the problem is that there's no 'daddy state' offering to save people from themselves. I guess nobody offers that, you 're on your own currently but nobody also pretends like it's safe either. In the end these rants are like an open admission that "people are stupid and they don't even know it and need to be protected at all times". This is well known but technology has a chance to change it by empowering and arming the individual
People should read "The Internet of Money" by Andreas Antonopolous, in it he describes how much of the criticisms levied against crypto are similar to criticism levied against the internet in the early days. Many of the internets early adopters were actual criminals, and its detractors talked about how it "couldn't scale", was bad for the environment, etc. What sort erroneous conclusion might you have drawn during the tech bubble at the turn of the century? Similar criticism were pushed on the automobile, the airplane, and even electricity.
It might not seem like now, but we are still in the early days of crpytocurrency, being this overly hung up on the current state of things is missing the forest for the trees.
> Many of the internets early adopters were actual criminals
the early adopters were college students and professors since that's where it was available. as far as "criminals" it would have only been those pesky "hackers" who were mostly acting from curiosity. there wasnt any big opportunity for financial fraud on the "internet" because there was no commerce on the internet. the commercialization had to happen first and that required massive buy-in long before criminals could have any fertile ground to operate upon.
> and its detractors talked about how it "couldn't scale",
ive never seen such a thing, in the early 90s most of us didnt even have terms like that queued up
I was an early adopter and I don’t recall anyone saying the internet was bad for the environment, or that it couldn’t scale. Quite the opposite actually! And there was very little fraud or criminality - most new applications and ideas were genuinely innovative and immediately and obviously beneficial. Yea the financial hype took over in the late nineties but the fundamentals were always sound and the potential was obvious. And over time that potential grew, it didn’t shrink like it has for cryptocurrency.
Actually, yes. It's had almost 13 years to prove itself as a store of value, medium of exchange, and/or unit of account. It has failed to do that in any functioning economy because despite all the hype, it's remained worse than what we already have.
The fact that after all this time proponents are celebrating it being made legal tender in a tiny dysfunctional country is a very good sign of how the horizons have narrowed. After 13 years of the web no arguments about "potential" were even needed - the evidence was embedded in all our lives.
He has a lot of good points, but, he leads with a political trope. This is a sure-fire way to lose most of your audience from the start.
His primary argument is “A is bad”. But then he adds “B is bad, and A is associated with B”. But B is tautologically half the audience, so you lose them, and this becomes support for A. Then there are those that think A is good, but B is bad. Presumably this is the intended audience. You just told them that they are associated with B, so you start out with ideological antagonism instead of making a direct point. You are left with only those that hate both A and B, and of course they will re-tweet, but in this case, it’s still just a bunch of opinions, no personal account or facts that could be used to direct change.
In the bigger picture, cryptocurrency is a confluence of technologies that are not going away. It can be used for almost any ideology, and some of those will be popular and some of those will be violently opposed and some will be made illegal. But, in the long run, the one that will survive, for any specific group, is the one that facilitates the strongest social organization. So ultimately, opinions of ideological taste, one way or another, are irrelevant.
Let me reiterate: I think he has some reasonable points within his opinions, and we should consider them even if we disagree.
I find tweets 3 (centralization) and 4 (predation) to be particularly incisive. This may not be obvious to everybody, because these things are meant to be well-hidden.
Although, I will say, those points massively contradict with the second tweet in ways that are even less obvious, but significantly more enraging if they are well-understood. If you look into all of his complaints, the main offenders are the institutions that have been given some form of legal monopoly to do so.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/14/dogecoin-co-creator-jackson-...