Once again I am asking those who say crypto is good "in theory" or that it "makes sense" to please fucking elaborate exactly WHAT their use case is for crypto actually doing something of NOVEL UTILITY. I've never seen a serious reply to exactly what crypto is supposed to be able to accomplish that either isn't a misunderstanding of what crypto does, or is more easily accomplished with non-crypto means.
Feel free to make up your own society in order to answer this, as I'm pretty convinced that even if you were able to construct an entire world to make your crypto dreams make sense, that it'll still be stupid.
:graeber:
Edit: I love this site. We have the best emotes, no contest
Feel free to make up your own society in order to answer this, as I’m pretty convinced that even if you were able to construct an entire world to make your crypto dreams make sense, that it’ll still be stupid.
To make the world fit around your ideals and to not make your ideals fit the world is another form of liberal idealism.
Let's say your home country government falls for whatever reason. You can escape to wherever in the world and have your assets follow you rather than abandoning them where you just fled from.
:data-laughing: lol no. Imagine having all your assets in fucking bored apes for the sake of economic stability
When my country fell, my grandfather lost his egg monopoly. He tried to sneak a laying hen with him on the US helicopter but couldn’t due to it interfering with the seatbelt.
please burn two hundred billion tonnes of coal so that my grandfather and people like him can take their money digitally and engage in capital flight.
Egg monopoly, literally all the eggs in one basket
If only there was some way to have seen it coming, be strong
Let’s say your home country government falls for whatever reason
yeah, like, to communism. So rich people can be above the people even as more and more countries switch to socialism.
I think one issue is conflating blockchain with crypto, at least to me. Im not computers, but from what I’ve read blockchain is very promising for data distribution and privacy…? So medical records, etc but also potentially streamlining supply line and other economic functions. Without making a total idiot out of myself I guess it could help realize the promise of Allende’s CyberSyn.
Of course crypto is just a money application of blockchain so I really have very little hope for that aside from maybe some way to develop non-state MMT…? idk
I know you're just kinda spitballing here, but in order for this to be a compelling argument, you'd have to show how those systems are failing, and how the blockchain would fix those issues without creating worse ones.
Yeah for sure, I’m not one of these crypto or blockchain salvation people. I’m more just thinking about how it might be broadly useful and to not dismiss it out of hand. But I have zero interest in implementing or putting effort in defending it lol.
It’s actually useful to see people dunk on me because I’m mostly parroting what I’ve seen others say.
Blockchain, as in a decentralized ledger that is extremely difficult to tamper with, is not in theory tied to cryptocurrency, but the only currently known way to do it is with cryptocurrency. It might be possible to do it another way but it would require a theoretical breakthrough.
Now just to break down what this is in its purest form, is the basic idea that you have a long list of entries that include a hash of all the previous entries (and I'd assume all the previous entries and itself as well) using a deliberately inefficient and slow hashing algorithm for the explicit purpose of making it cost prohibitive to create an altered version, but then there'd have to be some more efficient way to quickly verify that as well so is it some particularly weird and clever method that makes it hard to generate but easy to verify? And then that just gets mirrored across a bunch of hosts via some networking scheme that works on consensus, to further confound attempts to introduce falsified records?
The big question then is why? It's trustless record keeping, but you still have to trust whatever is creating the entries and you have to trust whatever will honor the entries, which are all much bigger problems than preserving an untampered-with database. Like what is an actual use case that would benefit specifically from creating a database that can't be altered enough to offset the cost of making it expensive to alter or even write to in the first place?
imagine getting a socialist paradise, where you no longer have to pay $250 to your medical insurance to see your doctor, but instead you have to pay $250 in energy costs to validate your medical records hash
The database doesn't have to be expensive to alter, that's a consequence of one particular type of scheme, proof of work, and there are already good alternatives or there will be shortly, with more coming. For use cases of a trustless distributed computer/database, see my other comment.
Of course you can theoretically do anything you can do with cryptocurrency without it, as long as you have full trust in some central authority who is willing to implement the thing you want. Two big problems with this, first not everyone trusts the same authority or even any authority, so we all have to use different systems that are difficult and expensive or impossible to connect. Second, the institutions which currently process financial transactions are very much not willing to implement whatever code you want on their servers. I can't deploy an automated market maker or prediction market to chase bank, I can't ask them to use zero knowledge proofs to reveal something about my assets to a third party while keeping something like my account balance a secret. I for sure can't ask them to do more communisty things like create a form of money or asset that automatically redistributes itself. There are a whole bunch of applications that are currently happening on blockchain that absolutely could not exist otherwise, not because the technology is tied to blockchain, but because governments and corporations aren't interested in them.
I can’t deploy an automated market maker or prediction market to chase bank
at last crypto will free us from the oppression of Chase Bank not letting everyone set up anonymized stock trading robots on their servers. surely the future is bright now that crypto has solved this problem
I'm giving examples of things that are currently happening on blockchain which you can't practically do any other way, what the parent comment asked for, not saying these are good things we definitely should do.
thank you for earnestly and knowledgeably replying to the question i posed. what i assumed implicit in the question and your answer is that any reply given would be for things that are good and should be advocated for. apologies for the snark and misunderstanding
Unfortunately most of the really good stuff isn't happening, I admit that the majority of people interested in participating in crypto are... not friendly to socialism, but as OP shows it's not 100%, and I can tell you from interacting with the community there is a lot of ideological diversity on the margins and even among the top influencers. The good stuff as I see it would be having a borderless communist economy in which all powerful institutions are under public or worker control, with automatic and continuous redistribution of wealth, and which cannot be easily couped from within or destroyed from without. I don't see an obvious way to get there at a scale that matters, you need a lot of people to participate, but I also don't see any reasons why growing such a thing would be impossible, and putting it on the blockchain has the advantage of giving it protection from hostile actors while it's still in early stages and unable to defend itself with military force.
first not everyone trusts the same authority or even any authority
I think capitalism had a rather distasteful, yet supremely effective way of dealing with this problem at the beginning.
One more thing I’ll add is LivAgar had an interesting medium post on crypto from awhile ago. I don’t remember all the details (it wasn’t positive but said we need to anticipate and critique future capitalism not just fight current forms) but I’ll just leave it here if people want to look at it.
https://livagar.medium.com/cryptocurrency-and-the-end-of-capitalism-1-2-f11db6a4815b
stop saying listen to this podcast you know damn well I'm not going to do it. Summarize what it said
Stop recording all this podcasts, can't you fucking write an article?
bitcoin is a right-wing technology
It's funny how the currency has a habit of collapsing every time Chinese policy changes.
That said, "right-wing technology" isn't a thing.
Well you don't even have to go there. Remember the WSB comm in here? Someone posted that the whole gamestock thing is revolutionary lmao
I made at least two alts to post shit like that during the gamstoop carnival because of how hard it made some nerds here freak out lmao
When I see a lib, I am contractually required by Nintendo to dunk on that lib.
If you’re having an emotional meltdown over people shitposting about gamstoop idk what to tell you 🤷♀️
I mean, how else do you think the "establish communism" button works? It's not just hydraulics, you know.
The only way we're going to program ourselves to communism is Cybersyn. :cyber-lenin:
I have to agree, crypto is about as accelerationist as it gets. :amerikkka:
NFTs are really demonstrating how arbitrary IP is too in a way.
It's a red herring that's sapping technically skilled socialists from doing any sort of useful work for the liberation of man. I wouldn't have any problem if it was a side hobby, but this is their entire existence on the Left.
Doing irreversible ecological damage to feel good about myself. Organising kinda gross doe
:fedposting:
It wouldn't surprise me if feds (or some finance thinktank) came up with the idea to use crypto as a method to get leftists into finance that then leads them into gaslighting people into NFT pyramid schemes because it's in their financial interests to do so, followed by becoming a finance-bro on WSB.
I saw someone post on here recently that the literal translation of “Satoshi” is “intelligent”, and “Nakamoto” is “central”. That and the “coin” in Bitcoin could just be COIN, as in COunterINsurgency.
It’s way too on the nose to be real, but it’s pretty funny nonetheless!
I mean, yes they fell for a scam. But it was very deliberately framed with the intention of targeting them by hedging it inside anti-establishment and anti-capitalist rhetoric.
i don't know this just seems too stupid to be a conspiracy. Also it's got anti-establishment rhetoric because it's popular with teenagers
what, you're gonna tell me giving a chimp an AK-47 is a bad idea next?
That's contextually dependant, in addition to the added risk you yourself get shot by the chimp with the AKM
I dunno, I can kinda see it, but I've never seen it explained in a form of a tweet and I don't care enough to read a medium article...
Right, that's the whole problem with cryptocurrency. It can only be popular if people can make money off of it, which will inevitably just recreate capitalist relations and speculative investment and so on. The other types of servers that people run are either like web or video game servers that companies make money off of or which are funded through donations because people actually get utility or entertainment value out of them. The scenario where crypto would actually work is if it was operated by government servers as a worldwide currency that a single government can't dictate the price of (unless they have a disproportionate amount or ban it in their country), but that's what all these crypto-nerds hate since they're all just little capitalists.
Cryptocurrency can be used for good in theory, but as it stands it’s meant to buy drugs
Buying drugs can be a good thing.
All these years and not a single nerd has come up with a solution for refunds, disputing transactions,
There are solutions such as "multi-signature escrow" used on some markets.
or reducing volatility
There are "stablecoins" that have their value pegged to USD or other asset.
These people are certainly crypto- something, that’s for sure. A very slow linked list whose only practical use is money laundering and currency speculation isn’t going to change who owns the means of production.
Why the fuck do we live in both the dystopian and cringe timelines?
