Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.
Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.
People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.
Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.
Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.
Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions—things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis—while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrency is the online equivalent of the neo-Nazi bar.
You know how the story goes, with the bartender who tells the customer “you have to throw out neo-Nazis as soon as you see the uniforms or the tattoos, no matter how polite and well-behaved they are. Because if you let Nazis stay and get comfortable they’ll invite their friends, and word gets around that Nazis can drink comfortably at your bar, and customers who don’t want to drink with Nazis leave, and suddenly you have a Nazi bar”. You all remember that story?
Well, cryptocurrency in online spaces - especially futurist spaces and technological spaces - it’s a lot like that. Cryptocurrency supporters are constantly looking for opportunities to promote cryptocurrency. And they obviously see a movement like solarpunk, which talks a lot about decentralization, and mistrusts the global financial system, and so on, as fertile ground for shilling cryptocurrency.
And if you let cryptocurrency supporters hang out and talk about how awesome cryptocurrency is, they will inevitably start shilling their particular flavor of cryptocurrency. And that’s inevitably a capitalist scam and will inevitably harm anyone stupid enough to fall for it.
And the problem is not just that cryptocurrency is a capitalist scam. It’s that, if you don’t shut down cryptocurrency talk aggressively, you get more cryptocurrency supporters. Because the crypto bros see that cryptocurrency discussion is allowed, and they join in, and they invite their friends, and they start shilling their scams. And then you get crypto spammers and scam bots and the personal messages inviting you to elite investment opportunities and all the other scummy garbage that infests cryptocurrency websites. You either block cryptocurrency talk or you get a website full of crypto garbage.
In other words, cryptocurrency supporters need to be shut down as quickly and ruthlessly as any other bots and spammers. Because if you don’t you inevitably get a website full of bots and spammers.
Because the crypto bros see that cryptocurrency discussion is allowed, and they join in, and they invite their friends, and they start shilling their scams. And then you get crypto spammers and scam bots and the personal messages inviting you to elite investment opportunities and all the other scummy garbage that infests cryptocurrency websites
At this point any cryptocurrency discussion space by necessity has strict policies against promotion, people who like to talk about cryptocurrency have realized it’s generally rude and unwelcome to shill their bags outside of designated areas, and crypto scam bots don’t limit themselves to only those spaces. Not every group of people you don’t like is the equivalent of Nazis.
pedonazi instance
Yeah this doesn’t seem like a great take. I think there’s severe selection bias.
I like a narrow band of crypto projects. I think the vast majority of things you hear about are scams. There’s a ton of bad actors in the space. My advice to people is just to be careful, but I don’t promote crypto because I don’t promote things that you should have a good understanding of before investing in them. I’m not in the business of risking other people’s money. I’ll talk about the tech, but usually uninterested in a specific token.
I don’t think your brand of zero tolerance will work on such a broad scale. I do think you should aggressively shut down any specifics about [token or project], but it’s not inevitable that people go towards shilling.
I was one of the top users of a crypto subreddit, and it got over run in the way you are talking about. Shills and people talking about price, etc. I wanted to have real conversations about the tech and implications. I left because it wasn’t what I wanted anymore.
There are people who can talk about those topics with the nuance required, but I agree many cannot.
Aggressive moderation? Good idea.
Zero tolerance policy? Bad idea.
Given the above you’ll retreat to “so a little Nazi-ism is OK?” - and if you can’t figure out the difference between the two and your view is that polarized, I don’t think we’ll really find any common ground here.
This is an emotionally charged post, yet everyone you disagree with is secretly trying to influence everyone else? How the fuck are you going to compare people who like a type of software to literal Nazis? Anyone who relies on emotional arguments like that is clearly not a rationalist.
How do you achieve communism without authoritarianism? This sub says they like decentralization, but if you decentralize based on computers, how do you stop adversaries from performing a Sybil attack? How do we establish command and control for a decentralized network, without letting authoritarians seize that command and control? How do you establish a decentralized identity system, without also establishing a decentralized system for data management and governance?
Now, should a Blockchain be that? Maybe not, I’m not trying sell whatever to you. I get being annoyed by all the advertisers, but to go an extra step to say that the principles of cypherpunk is something to compare to Nazis, is just proof you care more about emotional arguments and setting narrative.
So everyone that talks about crypto is akin to a Nazi? Lmao
Looks like you’ve been dubbed One Of Them.
I just wish people who complained about it would spend at least 5 seconds trying to think about an alternative way to achieve p2p electronic cash transactions that lacks the problems they see in cryptocurrency. But nobody ever does. At the very least, don’t try to convince me that the problems that cryptocurrency purports to try and solve aren’t real problems.
So I’m not sure I see how crypto is preferable to the non-crypto banking system? I don’t support either of them but if you can show that it’s better, then maybe it has some uses temporarily until we find a better solution.
It’s going to have to be a lot better in other ways to get over the issues around scams, volatility, and energy use though.
It only works better on a global scale and only for certain cases. And if you ignore problems present in the current banking system.
My examples would be:
people traveling (or refugees fleeing) across multiple countries would benefit from some kind of cryptocurrency in that their assets would be easier to access globally. No having to convert their money as they cross borders or dealing with banks and credit.
People living in places with unstable government and financial institutions would maybe benefit from having access to a decentralized global system to store some of their money in a system their government doesn’t have a hand in or control over
Cryptocurrency is still a new technology and idea. Centralized banking has existed for thousands of years.
Capitalists did what capitalists do and tried to prematurely scam and squeeze as much money out of the idea as possible. Potentially forever ruining the image and possible impact the tech may have had.
Im pretty salty over what happened with NFTs. There were a lot of exciting things it could have been applied to. But no. It turned into money laundering with ai generated images.
These examples are wishful thinking based on some anecdotes at best.
Crypto-currencies are a multi-billion dollar business largely run by the worst people from the existing banking and investment sector and people are surprised that it is predominantly used for bad stuff?
It’s not only an image problem and a few bad apples that spoil the rest, the technology itself is structurally predisposed for these kind scams and acts like a magnet for people with bad intentions, because they know this technology shifts the playing field in their favour.
Always a recommended read on this topic: https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disaster.html
…did you respond to the wrong comment? Cryptocurrency is available from wherever you are - that’s more of a core feature than wishful thinking.
It’s wishful thinking that crypto-currencies have ever been used for those purposes by any significant number of people. Those are anecdotes to whitewash crypto.
On, yeah, no argument from me there. I thought you meant those things aren’t feasible, not that they aren’t the primary use case.
One could argue that narcan has never been used for legitimate purposes by any significant number of people. It’s used primarily by criminals.
I hope we both agree that it’s a good thing and the criminals should be able to obtain it.
Denying goods and services to minorities just because a majority has no use for it is simply wrong.
Nice trolling attempt, but being addicted to drugs is not a crime.
Cryptocurrency is available from wherever you are
As long as both parties have trusted devices, power and an internet connection.
With a bank card only one the recipient needs that and with cash nobody does.
I have yet to hear of a possible use of NFTs that would actually be useful. Stuff that was floated like in-game purchases or concert tickets don’t solve any problems compared to the current system.
NFTs died out because scamming was the only thing they were useful for.
Aside from all the scams, the other use I’ve seen is corporations trying to use them to create artificial scarcity of digital goods, essentially making NFTs a new flavor of DRM with an added, desperate hope of making DRM and FOMO marketing tactics seem cool, techy, and hip.
I don’t like DRM, I don’t like artificial scarcity, and the basic premise of NFTs reminds me of those old infomercials where someone promises to sell you the rights to name an actual star, except it’s only in their proprietary database and you have to go to their website to see that anything has changed. I’d rather just have a copy of the digital image itself than a receipt someone gave me claiming that I own it.
. . . someone promises to sell you the rights to name an actual star, except it’s only in their proprietary database and you have to go to their website to see that anything has changed.
That’s one of the best descriptions of NFTs I’ve heard, and really brings out its fundamentally scummy nature.
Art, actually, once the BS has settled.
Copyrighted works that give owners a small sliver of resale purchases. Buy a used book/audiobook from someone, 2% automatically goes to the author.
Inventory tracking.
Fair trade proof of sourcing.
There are plenty of good uses, and plenty of bad ones.
Like anything, though, you have to apply effort for change. Crypto isn’t some panacea that solves the world’s problems. It is a tool that will be used for dystopic purposes, and can and will be used for more sound reasons.
They do solve problems though. If there was a simple app that musicians could sell tickets direct to customers, you can loose all the predatory middlemen
You don’t need NFTs for that app. You can just make it with a frontend attached to a database and a payment system.
Venues are contractually tied to TicketMaster and the like. You can’t solve that with NFTs.
You don’t need it because we have ticketmaster? That’s your argument lol? It’s to prevent the next one.
It won’t work because contracts. Try to read next time.
So all you can come up with is some edge cases where traditional banking can’t be relied on? Seems like a very convoluted way of saying that crypto is usually worse than traditional banking.
Also just wait until you hear that if you can buy crypto, you can probably participate in forex as well. I know people who come from countries you describe, and they just use euros or dollars because a highly volatile currency with astronomical payment processing fees is the opposite of what one needs for daily life, no matter how much what the SV techbros wish it weren’t the case.
Imagine telling a refugee he’s an edgecase not worth optimizimg for :D
Read my message again. The optimization is “use euros or dollars (or yuans or whatever is most applicable regionally)”. Your “optimization” is a solution looking for a problem.
Imagine telling a refugee that jeopardizing their life-savings in a ponzi-scheme is the best they can hope for.
I’m only responding this to point out that I never said that it was preferable to the current banking system.
Well I guess I don’t understand why you want peer to peer cash transfers if not to avoid the banking system which already allows various methods of transferring money.
Or maybe you are saying both are bad and we need something better? If so I agree but otherwise I’ve lost what you’re trying to say here.
That’s not what peer to peer means. P2P means no middle man, nobody taking a cut eg.
I didn’t do a good job in my messaging, I was agitated. but really I was just trying to say these things
-
The global banking system represents a far bigger fish to fry, maybe like 100 to 1000 times bigger (it’s quite difficult to assess, but the total wealth held by private banks is frequently estimated to be in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. Compare this to the total value of literally all cryptocurrency)
-
I probably see a dozen posts that are just writing the same criticisms of “cryptocurrency” over and over again without ever actually addressing why people are drawn to it in the first place, for every one post that’s complaining about banks. despite the fact that banks have screwed over orders of magnitude more people than any crypto bro could ever dream of
-
When you don’t actually clearly spell out the problems that drew those people in in the first place, and at the very least empathize with them explicitly, all you do is alienate those people and you don’t actually get them to stop using cryptocurrency
-
You sure are going to bat for it as though it were
How do you figure I’m “going to bat” for cryptocurrency?
I’m extremely tired of criticisms of cryptocurrency without a very least acknowledging the problems with the global financial system that drew people to it in the first place
It’s weird to request that criticism of something first do PR work for said thing, that’s why
OK so you think that anybody who wants people to criticize the global financial system earnestly is doing PR work for cryptocurrency? Seriously? Please tell me I am misunderstanding you.
Enough of your reason. You said something that might put cryptocurrency in a positive light, and you have been judged justly as bad. That’s what makes us all feel good, and that’s what we’ll do. More downvotes for this guy please.
In case it’s not abundantly clear: this is sarcasm.
deleted by creator
I’d like to just point out that systems that don’t use Proof of Work, such as Eth which uses Proof of Stake, use only a tiny fraction of the energy.
There are a ton of proof-of-stake cryptos out now. Cardano, Tezos, algorand, solana, for a few.
Pure proof-of-stake systems don’t use more power than any other typical internet service.
Gnu Taler is doing this. No new currency, no mining, and no fraud. https://taler.net/en/index.html
Okay but who gets left to hold the bag? What kind of hyper-volatile get-rich-quick scheme is this anyway?? /s
Its not a currency, you dont buy it. Its a way to transfer money safely
From the link:
“Customers will use traditional money transfers to send money to a digital Exchange and in return receive (anonymized) digital cash. Customers can use this digital cash to anonymously pay Merchants.”
They may be calling their monetary units the same names as their fiat counterparts, but this is clearly a different digitalized currency with exchanges as middlemen. Furthermore,
“in practice a fraudulent Exchange might go bankrupt instead of paying the Merchants and thus the Exchange will need to be audited regularly like any other banking institution.”
@xnx
A good explainer campaign of how it works practically is essential if it hopes to be adopted for sure. I know a bit, but still not clear on it. At some point credits need to be purchased. And as far as I understand it’s not something that is connected to a bank account.I was curious of how it was supposed to function as well, this presentation cleared it up pretty well, and more specifically, the part at 10:24. The process involves sending money to an exchange bank, which then gives you the tokens of the amount sent to the bank. The tokens can then be sent to a merchant/person anonymously, who gives them to the exchange bank. The exchange bank then sends the real money to the merchant’s bank.
@ProdigalFrog
Thanks!!:)
Thank you for sharing this.
I don’t see where this post did that, though? It criticises crypto for failing to solve the problems it claims to solve and for adding additional problems on top, not for trying to address things that aren’t problems
It’s just the vibes i get after seeing the 30th mini essay with the same exact content as this, in which nobody ever actually acknowledges any of those problems as being real nor ever proposes a better idea. I guess it literally doesn’t try to convince me they aren’t real problems, but you sure can’t conclude from anything the author has written that they think they are real problems.
I’m pretty sure that nobody describes something as “a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation” in a positive way
I’m a little confused by your response. What gave you the impression that I thought there was anything positive about what the author wrote?
I’m responding to the part of your comment that says “you sure can’t conclude from anything the author has written that they think they are real problems.” I mean that the author describes the extreme centralisation of power in currency in that manner; crypto is criticised for accelerating us towards that, but it’s clear that OP regards that situation as bad regardless of whether or not we end up in it via crypto. Sorry if my own comment was unclear.
Actually if you just take what they’re saying at face value and don’t make any assumptions or inferences about what they must believe, all you can conclude is that they don’t believe that we’re currently under the control of a Tyrell-esque corporation, and that it’s going to be cryptocurrency that gets us there. But personally I think that’s highly naïve and I do think we’re currently living in a global financial system which might as well be controlled by the Tyrell corporation
They don’t have to believe that we’re currently living in such a situation to believe that it would be bad whether crypto put us in it or not. I think you’re making more assumptions about their beliefs than you’re stating, here.
Personally I agree that we’re not in a position as extreme as that at the moment, because the ultimate powers over currencies are governments rather than corporations. Now, how much of a difference that makes absolutely depends on how democratically accountable the given government is to the populace, but for corporations it’s always zero accountability to anyone but shareholders, so there is definitely room for difference. And, of course, just because things can technically be worse doesn’t mean there are no problems with how things currently are.
Your last sentence
Excuse me, but they were describing a problem they perceived with cryptocurrency not with the current financial system. And all I’m saying is I’m extremely tired of criticisms of cryptocurrency without a very least acknowledging the problems with the global financial system that drew people to it in the first place, and making it very clear that they are indeed problems that we need to address, and that it’s gonna take a lot more than just complaining.
Well I think that’s a very limiting way to have a conversation. You are now placing an expectation on everyone to spend time to make their posts about topic A longer so it can include topic B. That makes it less likely people will engage because post length is a big factor in attention.
Secondly, many of the people excited by crypto, and nearly everybody engaging in solarpunk discourse, recognize the problems with the current system. So OP addressing people who have been led into thinking crypto will solve XYZ is a good thing. Those people know we need change, they just got excited about the wrong change, OP trying to steer them in the right direction is a good thing.
Yeah exactly. There is a problem, crypto is a solution. Fiat currency is also a ponzi scheme.
Sounds like you want a system that is distinct but similar to what we have. But that’s extremely un-solarpunk. Solar Punk is about imagining a better world that doesn’t rely on bad systems anymore. Crypto is still a tool of the capitalist system at the end of the day, and that makes it the enemy.
I’m honestly quite bewildered by your comment and I don’t even understand how you can make a single inference about my values based on what I wrote other than I think banks controlling the money supply is actually bad and that we should do something about it and if we don’t like crypto, we should think of a better idea
We do have a better idea, it’s called communism as imagined in the solarpunk movement
That is beside the point though. Crypto is very polluting, that’s really not compatible with solarpunk ideas.
How polluting is it?
That’s just Bitcoin though. What about other implementations of crypto?
deleted by creator
I think there are good things about it, insofar as some kind of currency is necessary for a society to function at scale.
I like the decentralization, and the open-source nature that allows platforms to be built on top for things like streaming and splitting funds with no middlemen.
Apart from the flaws inherent in any form of currency, and potential environmental impacts of some implementations, I haven’t really heard any compelling arguments for why cryptocurrency is “bad”.
Honorable mention: the GNU Taler project
https://taler.net/en/index.html
Could be a better alternative to crypto.
There is so much misinformation here, it’s hard to know where to even start. Yes there are crypto scams, yes legacy technology consumes way too much energy.
These are all solved problems, but it you only know about crypto from scams you might think there is nothing else. Crypto solves real problems with our current financial systems.
Wouldn’t hurt to read from time to time. Solar Punk is as much about technology, as it is about knowledge.
crypto is just our current financial system but worse. more risk, more volatility, faster consolidation of wealth, slower transactions, and less actual utility. more than a decade on, there are only a very small handful of things you can actually buy with bitcoin, let alone any other cryptocurrency. what problem does that solve?
i do at least admire the utopianism of it - i’m not exactly going to bat for our current banking system - but if you see crypto in 2024 as anything other than a failed experiment at best then you’re just delusional, it has completely failed to solve any of the problems it set out to solve and it has verifiably made the world a worse place
If you’re actually asking what it solves:
Trust. Blockchain technology eliminates the need for trust where typically it would be required.
Sadly blockchain doesn’t even to that. It just shifts trust to a nebulous cabal of large miners in the case of Bitcoin or the big oligarchs in the case of Etherium.
Actual transactions for banks take longer than it shows, that how overdrafts still happen or bounced payments even though an accounts shows a recent deposits. They will show what SHOULD happen and over a couple of days the accounts process
Its why VISA was looking at using some of ETH smart contract stuff to potentially handle some of their payments on the back end, as well as the reason why central bank digital currency (CBDC) had some legitimate studies being done on it.
Its not utopianism, its basically just harm reduction.
Crypto is vast my friend. It is not a financial system per se. At its core it is tools for human coordination which, by necessity contains a financial system.
It is indeed an experiment but it’s a little premature to say that it has failed. The cake is still in the oven.
It’s true that plenty of crypto projects have failed. That’s to be expected in a bleeding edge experimental space. People try things out and sometimes they fail. That’s how it works. There are however, plenty of projects that are still going strong fueled by very talented developers working tirelessly to address all of your criticisms. It just takes time. This is complex stuff. It’s the merging of cryptography, economics and computer science among other things. It’s going to take a little while.
Where’s the solutions? Don’t say “proof of stake”
Proof of steak.
Prime rib only.
Excuse me friend but why not say proof of stake? It seems to me as if that IS a great solution. I’ve never mined any type of crypto currency but I do run Ethereum validators. I run them on an Intel NUC mini PC. When I first switched them on I started with 6 validators all running on the same machine. I noticed no discernable difference in my household power consumption. Then I increased to 12 and then later 27 validators, again all on the same machine and again no discernible difference on my power bill. I can repeat this for hundreds of validators all on this one mini PC and not use any more power than I’m currently using. To do the same on a proof of work chain I’d need one specialized, dedicated machine that would use orders of magnitude more power for each miner.
Because it’s not as robust or secure as it’s claimed to be, because it concentrates power to those with more money again, etc.
I see. Could you elaborate on that at all? What are the claims vs. the reality? How is power concentrated to those with more money? Genuinely interested.
All the decentralized concensus algorithms rely on some kind of way to “score” different branches of history versus others, Bitcoin uses an approximation of spent CPU cycles via proof of work while proof of stake uses money holdings over time used to vouch for a branch.
The problem is proof of stake is not rooted in something outside the chain itself, nothing is truly irrevocably spent so it’s possible to vouch for multiple branches with the same stake (“nothing at stake”). Most nodes (wallet owners) will also not be online all the time so they try to use delegation (risky because it centralizes power), and to coordinate block creation (because it doesn’t have an algorithmic timing source) all mining nodes are connected in a pool and track each other’s “liveness” (online status and connectivity) and pass around the right to create the next block (which is vulnerable to being gamed, your chance is proportional to how much money you have in the system which controls how many nodes you can enter). If you gain enough of a majority of online nodes at any point in time ever then you can permanently assign yourself as the next person to create a block and control all future blocks to doublespend or block transactions.
And if you can steal enough private keys including old long emptied wallets then you can create a new parallel history indistinguishable from the real current one to any new nodes because there’s truly nothing making the two chains distinguishable if you don’t know any existing nodes (which would require trust in a third party).
Thanks. That’s interesting. How many nodes would be required to gain control? How much would that cost? And why would anyone want to do that?
I imagine once someone managed to secure control it wouldn’t go unnoticed by the users. It would probably trigger a mass exodus from whatever chain it happened to occur on, effectively tanking the token price. The controller would have spent a considerable amount of funds only to be left with a dead chain and worthless tokens.
Doesn’t really seem worth it unless I’m missing something.
It’s a high percentage of the pool of known live nodes. It wouldn’t necessarily be expensive if you can steal keys by hacking as well as DDoSing a handful other nodes which would be voting against you to artificially boost your fraction of voting power in chain selection.
It might be noticed eventually, but it would take hours to weeks just to confirm it really happened and exodus would take weeks to months. You could make many small trades to increase the volume of coins through your wallet, then reverse all outgoing transactions from your wallet, then make a big payment, get something valuable, reverse the payment and keep what you bought, and repeat until it simply stops working.
Proof of time and proof of burn are both interesting alts to me.
Proof of burn especially if it could be coupled a limitless mining pool that increased or decreased based on the number of transactions on the network. Basically a currency with that grows based on used and has a deflationary mechanism otherwise.
Haven’t heard of proof of time. Proof of burn sounds to similar to proof of stake with the same problems making it infeasible to resist long term manipulation of concensus.
Solarpunk is not just about technology, it’s specifically about being critical toward new technologies with a special emphasis on the social and environmental impacts they have.
The single largest blindspot that cryptocurrency enthusiasts have is in not recognizing that their systems are inseparable from computers, and that computers in and of themselves are an environmental disaster.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/the-monster-footprint-of-digital-technology/
That, I can agree with.
I’m an anarcho-communist, so the future I would like has no money in it, virtual or otherwise, but we aren’t there yet, and as long as we live under capitalism, I see no issue with making use of tools there to create parallel systems to those of the existing institution, to not only undermine them, but create a secondary system independent of the state to rely on (aka dual power).
It should be expected that capitalists would co-opt these tools, but that doesn’t make our use of them less valid (or theirs desirable).
Them turning it in to an investment doesn’t mean you do - if you’re not buying (or mining) it to accumulate it, all it is is a token that allows you (if done correctly) to move money privately and securely, without capitalists knowing who is involved nor taking a cut or involving the authorities. I’m sure you can think for yourself of reasons why this would be beneficial for anarchists and other radical and revolutionary groups and individuals around the world, and the networks they create.
I don’t know the podcast you’ve mentioned, but I agree that marketing crypto for profit definitely isn’t punk in any way shape or form, but it’s the marketing for profit part you should be taking issue with, not the tool they happen to be using to make the profit with (AI being a perfect example of another tool that can be used to either free or enslave us, dependent on who is in control, not on the tool itself).
Edit just to be clear: crypto is a big vague term that covers all manor of sins, I’m not an advocate for all or even most of it, but again - used correctly, it can be a really useful tool to have at our disposal.
“… it’s not secure, it’s not safe, it’s not reliable, it’s not trustworthy, it’s not even decentralized, it’s not anonymous, it’s helping destroy the planet. I haven’t found one positive use. For blockchain, it was nothing that couldn’t be done better without it.”
—Bruce Schneier, Bruce Schneier on the Crypto/Blockchain Disaster
Bruce Schneier, dubbed the “security guru” by The Economist, has been decrying the value of blockchain and all its offshoots for more than a decade.
lol
I don’t know. I mean, the fact that if you forget your password, you can lose your life savings and you can’t go to any court is not a benefit to it. That’s the reason why governments issue currencies (and) why wildcat banks have been illegal for 107 years
Guys never heard of backup seedphrases?
It is not just because governments are mean and want to control. It’s because it’s really good reasons. What? You don’t want individuals minting money. You can’t just toss away all those centuries of banking regulation that really know what you’re doing.
Yeah, kk.
CPM—What about smart contracts?
Schneier—The contract where you make a typo when you lose your life savings? Yeah, I hate that. That seems dumb.
CPM—I’ve wondered about it because a smart contract is, number one is legal terminology. So you can get a lawyer that can help you with the terminology.
Schneier—And if he makes a mistake, there’s no recourse.
Oh no typos will ruin your life. Pretty sure if your lawyer makes a mistake without any block chain or crypto it can still ruin your life.
This dude sounds like a mouthpiece for the banks and offers no good arguments against cryptocurrency beyond his apparent disdain for blockchain
Them turning it in to an investment doesn’t mean you do - if you’re not buying (or mining) it to accumulate it, all it is is a token that allows you (if done correctly) to move money privately and securely, without capitalists knowing who is involved nor taking a cut or involving the authorities.
By participating in the market you provide liquidity to it, and that’s the most important thing the ponzi scheme needs as it perpetuates the illusion of others that their coins are actually worth something. Sure, there are rare situations where someone would have a use for crypto, like fleeing an authoritarian state or so, but in the end any kind of interaction with these systems is like frequenting a business where you know it is used as a front for money-laundering by criminal enterprises.
but in the end any kind of interaction with these systems is like frequenting a business where you know it is used as a front for money-laundering by criminal enterprises.
So most large corporations and banks then…
Look, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, I made it very clear I don’t support holding on to any crypto, just using it to circumvent oppressive systems, focusing on rejecting a tool (and one that can be specifically extremely useful in enabling revolutionary movements) because you don’t like how others use it, instead of a system where any and all consumptions involves multiple levels of unethical practices, seems like completely missing the point to me. ¯\(ツ)/¯
This kind of reasoning is too reductionist. Sure every tool can be used one way or another, capitalism is bad etc. But if you have clear evidence that a tool is predominantly used for criminal activities (and I mean that in a actually ethically harmful sense, not legalistic), and the legetimite uses are basically a rounding error, then there is really no point in reasoning that way.
Edit: also, currencies are a social tool, and not like a hammer that you can use in your shed and not care about what other people use their hammers for. A currency directly derives its function from how others use it.
But maybe this disagreement also stems from the fact that I see really no way crypto currencies could in any shape or form enable “revolutionary movements”. The most benign I can think of is them being used as a tool to opt out of some societies, but that is pretty much the opposite of revolutionary.
I see really no way crypto currencies could in any shape or form enable “revolutionary movements”.
I guess theoretically, if a state was persecuting a political faction, part of neutering that movement would involve blocking access to bank accounts of anyone suspected of being involved, similar to how Justin Trudeau froze the bank accounts of anyone linked to the ‘Freedom Trucker Protest’ (not that I have any sympathy for that movement).
Then again, cash or gold/silver would also function in that scenario (or maybe the GNU Taler project that @xnx@slrpnk.net mentioned?)
According to this article, Rojava is supposedly experimenting with using crypto to avoid high fees associated with using cash in neighboring countries (unsubstantiated claim). But the article is written by a pro-crypto news site, and is clearly trying to greenwash its extreme environmental downsides:
“You need technology to spend less water, you need technology to have an equal relation with the earth, you need technology to use networks, like the blockchain. We see blockchain as a practical network in society that people use,” Serdem said.
So their claims are suspect at best.
I think you’re right, I think you seeing crypto exclusively as a tool used for “criminal activity” (who is telling you this? who decides what’s legal and why?), but not fiat money and the capitalists who benefit from it (not criminals?) is where our disagreement stems, and I can’t help you with that…
If we’re taking about actual cryptocurrencies with fundamentally limited minting, then consider this:
The inflation we’re facing right now as a society is fundamentally due to the printing of money. Literally, this is a way for governments to take value from your existing pools of money, and redistribute that value as they see fit - not in some agreed-upon, standardized, UBI-esque kind of way, but in the ‘suck it bitch, I’m spending this for you’ kind of way.
Take the inflation rate for the last ten years. That’s the amount your savings has been reduced, and that your paycheck has been cut.
With a real, hard crypto, nobody gets to just print money, and if there is printing, it’s at a known pace. Bitcoin obviously has terrible power consumption issues, but the actual monetary aspect was superb. The miners get a reward, for running the network. Over time, the granted reward decreases, and the amount of bitcoin created decreases.
Proof of stake currencies that have a similar model are a good, solid option, because they only take the amount of power needed by any at-scale internet service. Low power usage, and governments can’t just print money.
A democratic government being able to quickly raise a lot of money for emergency relief is a feature of fiat currencies and not a bug.
The artificial scarcity that crypto-currencies enforce is (besides the obscene energy use) the worst part of them and only benefit those that hoard them.
P.s.: if your paycheck has been “cut” because of inflation, then your boss is engaging in wage theft.
It’s nice that you think that the government should be able to print money. They can make a token where they have the rights to print as much as they want, and the value will speak for itself. It’s also important to have value that is independent of that malleability, because that can be (and has massively been) abused.
The power usage of crypto is a non-issue technically speaking. There is no need to use power-hungry algorithms for crypto. But humanly, there is a lot of inertia and real value tied into existing power-hungry implementations of crypto, and that will be difficult to eradicate, precisely because of the real interest in crypto. When there’s a proof-of-stake bitcoin equivalent, though, bitcoin may wane - and illegalization of power-hungry cryptos may help in that regard.
Re: your ps: wage theft? No, not unless someone is literally paying less-than-agreed dollar amounts using inflation as an excuse. So if you’re talking literally, you’re just wrong. If you’re talking allegorically, then sure. The cost of labor has gone down massively in relation to the payment provided to ‘top tier’ jobs that simply squeeze the world for gain - and that’s some shit that will hit the fan at some point. But that’s not really related to inflation, other than the fact that unless you’re making almost double in wages what you made five or ten years ago, you’re making significantly less than you were in actual value.
What is relevant to inflation and theft is all of the bailouts. Largest thefts in history.
You are not going to solve shitty government decision by switching to crypto-currencies. All you will achieve with that is to prevent potentially good decisions in the future. Or to put it differently: crypto-currencies are deeply undemocratic.
And yes it is wage-theft in any way you can look at it because after inflation they earn (nominally) more from the same labor you put into it, but are not (nominally) paying you more. So in very real terms they are paying you less for the same labor. There is no need to beat around the bush on that one, it’s as clear as it can get.
A sane perspective… …I wasn’t really expecting that here.
Removed by mod
Valid points all.
if you’d like a fantastic example of how Crypto is going to fuck up power supplies, just look at Texas - they can’t keep their statewide grid running, shit on their renewable strengths constantly, and cut deals with cryptochuds so they’re PAID to stop mining. SO FUCKED-UP.
Thanks for emphasizing this. I was a bit disappointed in that episode. I don’t remember any mention of decentralization which is integral to solarpunk. One of the hosts seemed to just respond to the other with a lot of whataboutism and negativity that just revealed a lack of understanding of solarpunk’s relationship to technology. For example, promoting electric cars instead of public transportation and reducing the amount of cars on the rode. Maybe that was the both-sides-ism to create discussion but it seemed like a missed opportunity to really dive into solarpunk technology. Maybe someone from this community could reach out about our approach to technology. They seem like they’d be open to hearing different viewpoints from the solarpunk community.
I totally agree solarpunk and crypto should be separate.
however just talking about power usage - chains using “proof of stake” us something like 99.9% less power than “proof of work”. Ethereum (PoS) vs (Bitcoin) PoW power usage for example
Doesn’t really matter in this context, since anything above 0% is wasteful for something as completely unnecessary as crypto.
PoS doesn’t use any more electricity than it takes to write to a hard drive, which is minimal, and its also not a “race” in the same way PoW is for solving an increasingly difficult problem.
Proof of stake also rewards the biggest holders of the currency with the biggest payouts. It’s an inherently regressive system designed to give more to the haves at the expense of the have nots.
Crypto is cypherpunk not cyberpunk.
You can create new alternative economic systems outwith existing monetary systems. Global mutual credit, local exchange trading systems, etc. There are plenty of solarpunks and leftists in crypto and have been since the start.
Not really. This usecase is infinitesimal compared to speculation.
For now.
“I am a solarpunk in crypto because I want to burn the entire energy output of a second Ecuador in order to help criminals extort ransoms out of hospitals and libraries.” - An idiot
Literally a children’s hospital in my city had their shit locked up by “hackers” – they were using pen and paper to schedule appointments for weeks, using handwritten notes to pass health details from ER to ICU, etc. It could still be down for all i know, I haven’t checked in a while.
I don’t know exactly how much pain and suffering this has caused kids, or how many died because of it, but i know how hard it was when my son was in the hospital for months when he was little, and that was with a fully functional hospital.
It’s fucking disgusting. And I’m like kinda pro-crime a lot of the time…
Why would Satoshi do this
Confidently incorrect.
Removed by mod
Ransomeware is a pretty small segment. Much dodgier shit happens with cash.
PoW can be used to store energy. Geothermal farms in remote areas mining energy credits. Spending energy on important stuff is also fine. We spend much more on inane nonsense. US tumble dryers use more energy than bitcoin. Other countries just use drying racks
Unfortunately an economic system is only as useful as its buy-in, and that’s the hard part. If you want you fight financial hegemony, don’t give wealthy people another lever of control.
What about local exchange trading systems?
Cryptocurrency is just fossil fascism disguising itself as anarcho capitalism. Anyone who took one good-faith look into crypto and didn’t instantly become a communist as a direct result is full of shit.
What is fossil fascism and how does it apply here?
TIL
https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/fossil-fuelled-fascism-and-the-lessons-for-the-greens/
TL;DR modern fascists have ditched the progress/science cult of yesteryear and now engage in performative anti-environmentalism.
I don’t think it’s the best name though. It makes me think of either applying fascism historically or a reference to the specific fascist movements of the 30’s as differentiated from modern inbreds, but, on the other hand, I can’t do better.
Gas fash? Crudeolinis?
Crudeolinis 😂. That’s a fun one.
Not all cryptocurrencies are the same. Sounds like you don’t quite understand their differences and just want something to rage about.
You’re right, some are ponzi schemes designed to burn the entire amazon and rest are ponzi schemes designed to only burn half the amazon.
Can you please explain how all cryptocoins are ponzi schemes?
Ask anyone who talks shit about crypto for anything besides a meme, and you’ll still get a meme. That’s how their perception of it was established. They probably don’t know the difference between the internet and their web browser, let alone decentralized vs centralized, or all the many reasons why the economy has gone to shit the last few decades.
But they do know memes! The same two memes that have been told since Bitcoin was priced under $10k
If we look at other types of investments/stores of value there is always something:
Stock -> Company
Personal loan -> Work
Gold standard currency -> Gold
Fiat currency -> Taxes *
Crypto -> ?The only way for the prices of a thing to go up is investment or the thing providing value to someone. Therefore the price of Bitcoin is either the result of speculation or the value it provides as a currency. Bitcoin is to slow and expensive for normal use and I don’t think it provides billions of dollars in value to controlled substances market.
A system of investment where the only money comes from new investment is considered a Ponzi scheme.*It can’t just be trade because all the others could work. Is it ease of trade? No, otherwise everyone would use USD. It’s the ability to pay taxes and settle legal debt in the country you are in.
They never do.
To expand on this, there are crypto such as Nano, which take very little energy and time to crunch transactions. I wouldn’t expect most people talking about crypto to be talking about that kind of coin, though. Bitcoin and Etherium are the heavy hitters, and they are incredibly wasteful.
I’m not going to get behind the finger pointing on the comment I am replying to, though :)
Bitcoin has a market cap comparable to apple. It’s not going away anytime soon. You should do your own research and not let the mainstream media establish your perception. It’s not like the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on crime, or the opioid/Xanax crisis were complete blunders by the media, right? But now, they’re opinions on a crypto asset that fundamentally threatens their status quo is not full of shit?
Ok here’s the thing, crypto as a concept it’s not a completely bad idea the main problem is that the entire ecosystem was kidnapped by scammers and vcs, most of projects are scams at this point and it’s extremely difficult to even talk about the concept without talking about bitcoin, which is the worst offender. But there are small projects like nano that tried to bring back the original concepts after fixing the principal flaws like mining and by extension the transaction fees, of course as you might guessed this project isn’t popular among crypto bros because there’s no profit to be made from the currency itself. I think all of this is still in it’s infancy and has potential to develop in a positive way, what it needs is to remove the idea of easy money and systems that prevent users from earning from trading, in other words remove capitalists from the equation
I’m sorry but I have to disagree on this one.
Core to the design of the public-ledger blockchain system that powers all crypto is the idea that you have to have a proof-of-work mechanism. That’s actually the big innovation that Satoshi Nakamoto brought to the table. Blockchain systems have been around forever, but blockchain in the crypto context came about because of the idea of proof-of-work. Before that you didn’t have a way of securing the public-ledger against bad actors.
Proof-of-work is a system that gives control to whoever will put in the most “work”, and work in this case is measured in computing power. That means that, by design, the system has to produce endless and unfathomable amounts of e-waste. It’s a system that rewards infinite growth and exploitation; to be the dominant power in the crypto ecosystem you have to be constantly expanding the amount of compute power at your disposal. That means endless resource extraction, for one thing. This is as fundamentally un-solarpunk as you can get. It’s also why a reward scheme is built in; there have to be incentives for providing that compute power, and payments to balance out its cost.
(By the way, all of the alternative schemes, like proof-of-storage or proof-of-stake, either have the same problem of endless resource costs, or just hand even more power to those with the most resources)
But if you take away the reward structure, all you’ve done is change the incentives, not remove them, because there’s still the reward of being able to control the system as a whole. If you own the bulk of the processing power, you get to decide what the authoritative version of the chain is. You can decide to change the rules of how transactions are processed, or just roll-back transactions entirely. Without a monetary reward, you’ve now simply handed that control to the people who already have the wealth required to simply throw at it for the sake of the control itself. Your public-ledger blockchain is now owned by Jeff Bezos. You could have a state step in and use its combined resources to prevent this from happening, but then why run it as a public-ledger system at all? It’s already publicly owned if it’s being done by the state, so just have a central bank with an authoritative database system that wastes far less energy and far fewer material resources.
-
Who are you to define solarpunk? It’s fine to disallow talk of crypto in the sub but I don’t know that any individual or group has the right to define solarpunk at this point.
-
Many coins are indeed scams, and many NFTs are scams. This does not mean the underlying technology is a scam. Many scams use the dollar. Somehow we have to get from here to there, from an exploitative unsustainable capitalist world to a solarpunk world. This will almost certainly mean many years in a state of transition where money of some sort will still be needed. Crypto currencies could be a tool on the path, I don’t know but I’m not ready to throw out a whole technology because of some scams. In fact, it’s usefulness for scams might actually be a sign of it’s utility, just like cash.
-
Fiat currencies also take massive amounts of power, and they are exclusively controlled by the bad guys. Banks have racks of servers and/or use cloud services, financial exchanges also run racks of servers and build microwave towers for fast communication.
-
I know this one will sound incredulous to most, but have you considered that those with billions invested in the current system spend money to influence communities like ours and social media to make something that could be their kryptonite have a bad reputation? Isn’t odd how the anti-crypto crowd is so uneducated on the topic and yet so rabidly against it? Why would people interested in changing the balance of power not have interest in a tool that has potential there?
Maybe crypto is not strictly solarpunk but that doesn’t mean that it cannot be a useful tool in the transition away from capitalist control to solarpunk.
Those against crypto, how do you propose we get to a solarpunk world from here? What is the path? What are the tools?
- Anyone can define solarpunk as they wish.
- All coins are used for speculative investment, there’s very, very little practical use going on.
- What a silly thing to say. Banking servers wouldn’t use a fraction of the power mining operations do.
- Sorry mate this one is a bit kooky. Anyone who didn’t drink the koolaid can see it for the ponzi scheme it is.
Anyone can define solarpunk as they wish.
Pretty much, but it still has a general meaning. Just like the word “punk” itself. If Blink 182 said “This is punk”, Minor Threat and The Romones might have something to say.
All coins are used for speculative investment, there’s very, very little practical use going on.
This is mostly true now but doesn’t have to be. I’d say a large part of why it’s stuck is because of people’s negative attitudes towards it. Faith in a currency is critical.
What a silly thing to say. Banking servers wouldn’t use a fraction of the power mining operations do.
And you know this how? How are you measuring the electricity the modern dollar requires? What about crypto-currencies that don’t use proof-of-work and instead use a consensus algorithm like Raft?
Sorry mate this one is a bit kooky. Anyone who didn’t drink the koolaid can see it for the ponzi scheme it is.
No worries, it’s expected that heavily propagandized people view the claim they are propagandized as kooky.
heavily propagandized people view the claim they are propagandized as kooky.
you seem like a prime example of this phenomena.
likewise! :)
Obviously, terms like solar punk are subjective, it’s a bit dramatic to claim “x is not solarpunk” but it’s equally so to declare “you have no right to define solarpunk”. Just imagine they said “x doesn’t align with my values”.
I’ll concede that crypto doesn’t have to be all speculative. IDK how to get to somewhere useful from here though and I’m not sure it’s possible really.
Consensus and PoS or PoA or whatever are not the norm. Bitcoin needs to be mined which consumes energy, fiat does not. There’s no question that crypto is wasteful. Again, maybe it’s possible to fix this with some future iteration but that doesn’t seem likely.
We are all of is “propagandised”, but that doesn’t make my assertions any less valid.
Just imagine they said “x doesn’t align with my values”.
But they didn’t, they said “X isn’t solarpunk”.
Consensus and PoS or PoA or whatever are not the norm
Ethereum is arguably coin #2 – https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pow/
Those against crypto, how do you propose we get to a solarpunk world from here?
Hold up, there’s a huge leap of logic in this question. Are you saying there is a path if only we embraced cryptocurrency? If not, then why even phrase the question that way?
My answer, then, would be “Mu”.
Are you saying there is a path if only we embraced cryptocurrency?
No, I’m saying if we actually plan on making progress, maybe use available tools and don’t let purist thought, groupthink, and propaganda take our tools from us.
OK, so we probably want to avoid crypto if we don’t want groupthink.
Why would avoiding a technology help you avoid groupthink?
You’re conflating communities full of idiots that crypto tends to attract for a technology. These are not the same.
Solar panels are technology that attracts lots of idiots and scammers (scammy companies abound if you’re not familiar), should we avoid solar panels? No, because solar technology doesn’t have anything to do directly with scammers right?
Because cryptocurrency is as much a culture as a technology. Solar panels are not.
So if a culture grew up around solar panels that you don’t like, we should avoid them and suffer the negative environmental consequences of throwing out one of our best tools to fight climate change?
Smart
Since crypto isn’t our best tool for anything, the analogy falls apart.
Keep in mind that the leftist answer to currency is quite possibly none at all.
So you propose we move from one fiat I can hold in my hand to a different fiat that I can no longer hold in my hand. You propose we move from having bad guys we know controlling the system to change to bad guys we don’t know controlling the system (see mystery whales).
There is no viable use case for crypto that has not already been solved by other, less power hungry, means.
And if you think the big banks, venture capitalists, and private equity don’t have disproportionate influence on crypto, something is very wrong.
“Solarpunk is an art movement that depicts nature and technology in harmony, and is also a subgenre of speculative fiction, fashion, and activism. The term was coined in 2008, and aims to tackle climate change, galvanize the community, and deploy existing technologies for the greater good of people and the planet. Solarpunk aesthetics include: Renewable energy Technology that disappears into the environment Lush green communities with roof top gardens Floating villages Clean energy transport Hope-filled sci-fi tales”
I’m not saying crypto talk should be explicitly banned here, but should at least be limited to the context in which it is applicable to the topic.
So you propose we move from one fiat I can hold in my hand to a different fiat that I can no longer hold in my hand.
You don’t know what fiat means. Learn about money, and the technology behind before having such a strong opinion.
I’m not saying crypto talk should be explicitly banned here, but should at least be limited to the context in which it is applicable to the topic.
That sounds appropriate. Cryptocurrencies, when considered without the layers of misunderstanding and propaganda could be a useful tool in a transition to a more sustainable future similar to other imperfect but still at least temporarily useful technologies we might not ultimately want in a solarpunk future such as electric cars or tall buildings with trees all over them.
There could be implementations of crypto that don’t consume a small country’s worth of electricity and water just to work. Even the credit card industry uses a ton of energy and also continually funnels money to a small group of people who use it to prevent the sort of change we want to see.
Decentralizing the means of exchange and store of value is, I think, a very solarpunk thing. Crypto as it’s been implemented isn’t solarpunk at all. But the idea of alternative currencies and means of exchange that are more in line with the greater good of the people is solarpunk.
I, for one, like the idea of Ricky’s hash coins.
I, for one, like the idea of Ricky’s hash coins.
Nice!
Sure. It’s not “Technically” a fiat currency. A government doesn’t back it’s value. But that just means it’s literally fucking worse. It’s so detached from the idea of representing anything that it is only worth something because someone believes it is. At least a gold standard is backed by something that has value. But I’m not fighting for a change to that either.
I just don’t see the point of replacing one meaningless strip of paper with a meaningless strip of 1s and 0s in the context of solarpunk futures. At the current point in our timeline, cryptocurrency has NO valid use case for which there is not already a better system out there, even if that better system isn’t the one we are currently using.
Also, fuck off. I’m entitled to my opinion, and I don’t particularly believe anyone when they say that crypto is a force for good or useful. It’s only been a way to rip people off.
it is only worth something because someone believes it is
Uh… ya… money
At least a gold standard is backed by something that has value
We don’t have a gold standard (in the U.S. or most western countries).
Also, fuck off. I’m entitled to my opinion
me too ya?
We don’t have a gold standard (in the U.S. or most western countries).
Did I fucking say you did? A gold standard. General case you myopic fuck.
it is only worth something because someone believes it is
Uh… ya… money
What the fuck are you talking about? A backed currency has value from the item it is backed by, a fiat currency has value from the government it is backed by. Crypto has value from…??? Burning GPU time? Proof of stake is better, but there’s no guarantee that it won’t just all lose value tomorrow. But, I hear you protest, so could all money? Yes, but you know, people generally have a vested interest in keeping their government running for a multitude of reasons and to that point, other countries have a vested interest in keeping other countries afloat. Crypto? Not so much.
Look. There’s nothing wrong per se with the technology itself. I just do not see it realistically being a necessary component for a solar punk future. Which was the point of the entire post.
I just do not see it realistically being a necessary component for a solar punk future. Which was the point of the entire post.
And I was asking who are you to make this decision for solarpunk, which was a major point of my response.
But I see you’re upset so no more responses.
-
Yeah, I’ve worked on a wind farm that powered a Bitcoin mine built right next door, and another one that powered an oil refinery. Both felt pretty messed up.
