I'll admit to some nerd shit and say that the Mars trilogy was an important part of my becoming a leftist. It got me to question my capitalist realism and think that maybe a better society is possible. I'm reading his most recent book though and he has this long, weird riddle thing where the answer was blockchain and I found it super off putting.
Cryptocurrency is good, actually.
Don’t get distracted by all the creeps and grifters who have latched onto it because they see easy money. The concept of a decentralized monetary system that you can’t lock someone out of is necessary if we want to break the system of global capital. We need to be able to move money around without big banks or federal agents getting in the way.
Also, it’s cool to be able to buy drugs safely.
It'd be cooler if the proof of work system didn't require the equivalent electric usage of entire countries
Yeah, that shit is indeed a disaster. It’s not inherent to crypto currency though, only to certain implementations.
Something like burst coin uses like 1/500th the energy as Bitcoin does.
Proof of Stake is a good alternative that ethereum is pursuing, hopefully that works out.
That blog post reeks of “computers are just a fad, they’ll never catch on. They’re too expensive, and nobody has room in their house for something the size of a mainframe!”
It's not ridiculous to point out that blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. There's very little that blockchains are good at that a centralized database can't do better. In certain cases, where trust is important between two parties who don't know each other, blockchain is great. Anything else? Eehhhhh
I don't know most of the people in the world, and trust is important in any transaction, so "cases where trust is important between two parties who don't know each other" covers a lot.
