This article conflates NFTs with cryptocurrency, in a way that looks to me to be intentional in order to bolster his argument that crypto is for rich people to conspicuously consume and to pump and dump on the plebs.
NFTs aren't money, or currency and just because they can be created on some blockchains doesn't make them so.
I also don't see a genuine effort from the author to really understand why proponents think that this technology will positively change the world. You might not agree with them, but at least then rebut their arguments instead of creating straw men.
Bitcoin is open source, the original founder is nowhere to be found, there were no VCs involved in its creation or in the distribution of the coins and the entire network is run out in the open. The Bitcoin network is a commons.
The permissionless, decentralized, p2p and stateless aspect of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is as revolutionary as it was 12 years ago, and in these 12 years "normal" (i.e. non-rich) people had access to them as much as anyone else. Heck, 10 years ago there were faucets that would hand out 5 bitcoins if you solved a captcha.
The people who are today involved in the creation and distribution of fiat money have incredible power, a power which is largely hidden from view, but which actually drives and shapes a lot of what we see. Of course these people won't take an open source competitor lying down.
Not really a revolution when most people just trade it (mostly via fiat money). The original idea was for Bitcoin to be a currency, unfortunately the "hodlers" won, now its only reason to exist is to be more expensive. Boosters are still milking the original premise as some revolution they're supporting, when of course, if you ask how much of their crypto assets they've actually used/spent, the typical answer is 0%.
Satoshi is dead, the dream is dead, people are just trading the corpse
What has happened in those 12 years has been a great deal of scams, get rich quick scheme a and instability. Bitcoin has also become dominated by a few major players and is a power structure in itself, not really benefitting ordinary people much at.
> Bitcoin is open source, the original founder is nowhere to be found, there were no VCs involved in its creation or in the distribution of the coins and the entire network is run out in the open. The Bitcoin network is a commons.
Hmmm. You've conveniently danced around any suggestion or mention of the fact that the "creator" of bitcoin mined 1.1 million - 1/20th of all bitcoins that will ever exist(!) - coins in private before launching bitcoin publicly and holds them to this day.
May be I am too old but completely fail to see any value in the notion of NFT. I do see value in Bitcoin. Bitcoin has basically thrown a wrench into all government controls on cross border payments. I don't know if Bitcoins will be very successful or not, but I am pretty sure the concept will last very very long.
NFTs on other hand appears to be equivalent of selling Golden gate bridge to tourists.
I don't see any such conflation, nor do I see any rejection of cryptocurrency's future potential. This article is primarily about what is happening with cryptocurrency right now:
> Whatever cryptocurrency might someday be For All Mankind, it is most urgently and avidly in this moment something that people tell weird lies about in hopes of getting richer.
You seem intent on spreading such get rich quick and utopian dreams on cryptocurrency. How much do you have invested in the ecosystem?
Edit: In my opinion, people who genuinely care about the revolutionary potential of Bitcoin need to avoid feeding the hype train that helps normalize the sketchy lieing behavior in the ecosystem and simply work on building that future instead.
yea bitcoin is open sourced, but with a substantial stake already mined by the founder (anonymous and which could also be an individual, VC, country etc who knows) so while the most popular is not exactly the best defense of the blockchain tech.
I was involved in a blockchain (DeFi) startup. All the blockchain companies are mostly a huge pyramid scheme. The company I worked for has a lot of big claims, raised millions, wanted to solve world hunger, prioritized partnership, marketing, while having no working implementation. Others in the eco system are the same.
The NFT scene is even more BS. It could destroyed uninformed people's life, just like gambling. However, this kind of gambling is public on the internet with little regulations.
I hope more tech people speak about this instead of just ignoring them.
> I was involved in a blockchain (DeFi) startup. All the blockchain companies are mostly a huge pyramid scheme. The company I worked for has a lot of big claims, raised millions, wanted to solve world hunger, prioritized partnership, marketing, while having no working implementation. Others in the eco system are the same.
I agree that there are lots of scammy "blockchain" startups, but I don't think it's fair to paint them all with that brush. There are also plenty that are actually building cool projects, without pumping their coin, and announcing light interactions with a company as partnerships.
If you have 20% of companies being scummy, but churning out 80% of the news, your assumption will be that all of the companies are scummy.
I feel the IPFS blog post gave me a glimpse of how blockchain can be cool. In certain cases, the need for decentralization is so strong that it makes sense to build a blockchain system for it (or other secure P2P network thingy).
For example, authentication/identity using blockchain technology seems interesting to me.
The only two known usage of blockchain that actually seem to offer a clear advantage over some other strategy (running the thing centralized, not having coordination at all, etc) are A) solving double spend (a la Bitcoin) B) solving zooko’s triangle (a la Namecoin, or the clone you mentioned from ipfs).
Identity on blockchain beyond resolving zooko’s triangle (I.e. stably mapping pseudonyms to pubkeys) typically does not offer an advantage over (partially) centralized identity providers. E.g. putting anything related to government ID on a blockchain is pointless because you might as well have the ID issuer run a central or federated service.
Authentication using the blockchain makes a great AI-resistant alternative to signups with captcha. The same account could be used by multiple independent services and this removes the need for a signup process altogether. It also removes the need for password management since you can use a single account/passphrase to log into various services without revealing your passphrase to any of these services; you can simply sign a message to prove to any service that you control an account (and know the passphrase) without actually revealing the passphrase to any of the third party services.
> Cryptocurrency is something people tell lies about in hopes of getting richer
An amazingly succinct title. Absolutely true. Whenever someone hypes up cryptocurrency, it is almost always for their personal gain, directly or indirectly.
This statement is actually quite similar to what I used to hear people say at a stock technical analysis class. In speculative financial markets, one person's loss is another person's gain. So almost no one is going to give you any advice that will help you.. more likely they're helping themselves by misdirecting you.
Cryptocurrency gives people something they want. At best it might a new decentralized leaderless censorship-resistant free-as-in-freedom finance platform. At worst it might be a new decentralized leaderless pyramid scheme where we don't even need a Bernie Madoff because now we have The Algorithm.
If I am simultaneously cynical and hopeful, maybe it will have an adolescence of B and mature into A.
Except its not very decentralized and leaderless. It is dominated by a few ultra rich players, to an even greater extent than the stock market. And that didn't democratise finance either.
This article argues that they are currently used transactionally to launder money. Not the only way to launder money. Not an easy way to promote prosperity among the poor, either. Not even a heuristic to tell the good sources of money from blood-stained ones.
To get to (B) from here, we must endure some path dependence that takes us through an era of unaccountable wealth transfer.
I must be getting old because I just don't get NFT's. They look stupid and I don't get why anyone would buy them. Declining tech companies and startups seem to be trying to crowbar them into their products much like Blockchain when it was new and shiny. Perhaps younger me would of seen something I can't anymore.
It's not just ugly gifs. It's digital art, your online game items, concert tickets, supermarket vouchers and so on.
Quote from statista: "In 2020, global gaming audiences spent an approximate 54 billion U.S. dollars on additional in-game content". But the players don't own their purchases. You don't play the game anymore, servers go down or you get banned and all your stuff is gone. Think about that.
Edit: Of course my comment got nothing but down votes again on HN. Was worth a try anyway.
I didn't understand NFT storm as well then I made a 10K collection of NFT images with my friend (I wrote the smart contract) in three weeks and earned $3M from that. I made a lot of money and now I'm part of the creator community but I still sometimes ask "Why?"
I have a rule, which is that by the time I dream up an idea, plenty of other people have already had the same idea. So, when I proposed selling NFTs of the rehearsals of my band, and told my son about it, he said: "Dad, a million people are already doing that sort of thing."
The problem with NFTs and blockchain is that they purport that anyone can have access to it…the whole decentralized thing.
Except all these NFT stores require an invite from another artist. As someone who loves taking photos but isn’t socially connected because it’s a passion and not a job, it seems very elitist. Maybe it’s that way because I don’t have access to it and my brain is just playing tricks. But it seems like one of those “you aren’t good enough for this” kind of thing. Some of the online stores like Foundation app have become gatekeepers rather than outlets.
Someone sees cryptocurrency as exactly what it is, and at some point in the future we will know who.
But in the interim, lets not compare crypto to some utopian world that doesn't actually exist. In the current world which we inhabit, the many major currencies are either controlled or heavily influenced by people who:
1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people.
2) Advocate that governments can spend potentially an infinite amount without consequences because they control a printing press. And looking at the actions of, e.g. the US government, it is easy to suspect that the people who understand the nuance there aren't the ones in control of the money supply.
In such an environment, the crypto folk are reasonable. Even if in a perfect world they would clearly all be scammers.
Selling a future that hasn't happened is fine. If you saw the initial version of the internet or a cell phone you'd likely dismiss them.
Crypto is rebuilding the same things that already exist but that process has the chance to remove people from a system who used to provide services and replace them with an algorithm. Most people would dimiss a NFT but some of the use cases could be great. If most laws/rules were enforced in code for business transactions would you need to spend as much money on a lawyer in your lifetime? That's the future of money and it's exciting. Will that happen? Maybe not, which is why it is speculative.
The problem is that a large majority of people who are speculative and most crypto assets are highly centralized, which defeat the point of decentralization to remove a few large actors from having control. Plus the scams and idiots in the space that income without labor always attracts.
Everyone imagines "just imagine if I invested when BTC was < $100 just a few years ago. I could be sailing near my own island now.
And with everyone from celebrities to investors constantly promoting it, it is hard not to jump on the craze.
All "doom and gloom" has bounced off the market. I am still expecting a massive crash, but to be honest, if I invested a few years ago I would be sitting at 3-20x my investment.
In absence of real economic growth winning at zero and negative sum games is the only realistic chance at making it in the broadly defined West. The ponzi trend is only going to grow until the whole system collapses under itself. People not playing the game are going to lose the most, as unfair as it is, because rich executives are going to exploit their positions and dump their bags on public companies they control. In more corrupt cases, countries instead of companies. It's only going to grow.
Even so, arguably crypto ponzi games are harmless compared to more socially accepted ways of wealth extraction. Facebook, twitter and other mass social media destroyed society and utilize best ai/ml in existence to steal people's attention, at this point they should be viewed as human hostile ais. The lost potential of years wasted on pointless flamewars and mindless clicking is immeasurable. So many smart people wasting their best years on making ads even more effective instead of creating actual wealth.
In the good timeline there was no bailout in 2007 and the global financial system completely disintegrated, deleting most of fake wealth and unsustainable liabilities in the process, but without long term damage to real productivity.
This is the bad timeline in which wealth extraction dominates until there's nothing left, after which everything stops with no system energy reserves. That's how Soviet Union ended.
The rebranding of MySQL as blockchain was a brilliant move for sales. Bit torrent is decentralized and it doesn't use "blockchain". "Blockchain" only works for money and nothing else
> the insistence that cryptocurrency is a boon for all of humanity quickly collapses into the assertion that it will become one
This one annoys me in tech discussions all across the board. Someone justifies some piece of tech as good, others give counter evidence, and then the proponents say that it doesn't actually matter because it will be true some day. Social media is healthier than other media (well, it could be). Self driving cars are safer (well, they will be). Crypto is better for the people (well, it could be). Or my favorite, seen this morning in another thread: bitcoin isn't bad for the environment (well, it could be better, therefore it's fine).
New technology often goes through a phase of wild speculation, touting by liars, and impractical business models that people throw money because they are afraid of missing out. The bubble eventually pops. But people keep improving the tech and it becomes practical and eats the world.
I won't pretend I'm a computer genius or anything, but I feel like I understand tech at least more than the average Joe - at least, I'm the designated IT guy for computer problems faced by anyone I know.
The fact that, despite having it explained multiple times by multiple sources multiple ways, I still can't seem to wrap my head around how crypto functions... Makes me suspicious. It feels like the whole idea is to obfuscate it's functionality to the point it becomes this incomprehensible enigma - by design.
If it's not easy to comprehend, and instead a strange mystery number that moves between even stranger mystery-er numbers, someone is bound to think those numbers must be worth something - otherwise it wouldn't exist, right?
Basically what I'm saying is cryptocurrency sends me into an existential spiral of thoughts about how all value is just perceived and agreed upon and 90% of what we call "the economy" is just fake. Look up fractional reserve banking and join the existential crisis with me!
The title is 100% true for much of the cryptocurrency sector, but the body of the article is a shameless bad-faith attempt to rationalize an extremely heavy handed government response that would criminalize entire classes of voluntary interactions between consenting adults, and turn the future of the internet into a much darker place with much more government repression.
Only a deep-seated ideological precept, that idealizes the supremacy of the state over all aspects of the lives of private citizens, could motivate such a dismissively mean-spirited article. There isn't an even an attempt by the author to give the subject an objective treatment. Usually this would sit fine with me, as a useful counter-force to the mirror negative that exists in the deluge of crypto hype from profit-motivated speculators, but the advocacy for illiberal laws that would prohibit financial privacy and imprison peaceful individuals makes the article unconscionable.
I was thinking like the headline until I witnessed that a government seized assets of thousands and left them pennyless in a very short time. After coup attempt in Turkey, 1.5 million people are investigated with accusation of being a member of armed terrorist organization (population of Turkey is ~80 million). Lots of people who could run away found their assets were frozen, and eventually legally or illegally seized. All of a sudden they were poor. Were they kept some of their assets in Bitcoin, they could easily move them out of the country. Yes, the state can still go after them but it becomes much more difficult. This alone is sufficient for me to "invest" a percentage of my assets in Bitcoin in case something bad happens. Yes, it is unlikely but anything that makes a state stronger bully should be done.
> The hucksterish utopian rhetoric and blustering ambient scuzz of the broader cryptocurrency thing as it exists in this moment—the clammy slew of posturing experts, the open mendacity and barely concealed rube-running bad faith, the actual criminality and simple goonery that define its day-to-day—do the idea at the center of it no favors, but that is, more or less, the thing that always happens to any idea once people get ahold of it. Again, this is something that most people understand without really understanding how they understand it. At some point, when you are being lied to all the time and everywhere, you just know when it’s happening.
There are way too many words in that article, yet the author manages to say almost nothing that hasn't been said before. I suggest removing all adverbs and adjectives, then re-writing.
I think NFTs are really dumb, a scam, and/or vectors for money laundering. Then again, I think the same thing about multimillion dollar private artwork and politicians' "nonprofits".
I think most cryptocurrencies and tokens are really dumb or a pyramid scheme. Then again, I think the same about multilevel marketing and much of the modern real estate and stock markets.
But I also see the really exciting potential and promise of blockchain tech. People are working on expanding access to capital and systems to countries with unstable currencies. They're working on the future of the corporation beyond capitalism with DAOs. Enabling micropayments for creators. Much more. It's tiring seeing all these articles harping on the downsides without acknowledging or looking into the upsides.
Probably because the system works fine for these authors -- they're somewhere with a stable currency, their 401k is going up, etc. Blockchain is a space where people are actually dreaming of something different and better instead of accepting the status quo. Meanwhile in the U.S. we have a Fed printing trillions of dollars to prop up asset prices, we have wars to support USD hegemony. In other countries their wages inflate away before they can spend them, etc.
I don't know a lot about all this stuff but I really respect the part of the blockchain space which is about broadening access, decentralizing power, and envisioning new systems.
[+] [-] jcbrand|4 years ago|reply
NFTs aren't money, or currency and just because they can be created on some blockchains doesn't make them so.
I also don't see a genuine effort from the author to really understand why proponents think that this technology will positively change the world. You might not agree with them, but at least then rebut their arguments instead of creating straw men.
Bitcoin is open source, the original founder is nowhere to be found, there were no VCs involved in its creation or in the distribution of the coins and the entire network is run out in the open. The Bitcoin network is a commons.
The permissionless, decentralized, p2p and stateless aspect of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is as revolutionary as it was 12 years ago, and in these 12 years "normal" (i.e. non-rich) people had access to them as much as anyone else. Heck, 10 years ago there were faucets that would hand out 5 bitcoins if you solved a captcha.
The people who are today involved in the creation and distribution of fiat money have incredible power, a power which is largely hidden from view, but which actually drives and shapes a lot of what we see. Of course these people won't take an open source competitor lying down.
[+] [-] boh|4 years ago|reply
Satoshi is dead, the dream is dead, people are just trading the corpse
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpedu|4 years ago|reply
Hmmm. You've conveniently danced around any suggestion or mention of the fact that the "creator" of bitcoin mined 1.1 million - 1/20th of all bitcoins that will ever exist(!) - coins in private before launching bitcoin publicly and holds them to this day.
[+] [-] KorematsuFredt|4 years ago|reply
NFTs on other hand appears to be equivalent of selling Golden gate bridge to tourists.
[+] [-] shkkmo|4 years ago|reply
> Whatever cryptocurrency might someday be For All Mankind, it is most urgently and avidly in this moment something that people tell weird lies about in hopes of getting richer.
You seem intent on spreading such get rich quick and utopian dreams on cryptocurrency. How much do you have invested in the ecosystem?
Edit: In my opinion, people who genuinely care about the revolutionary potential of Bitcoin need to avoid feeding the hype train that helps normalize the sketchy lieing behavior in the ecosystem and simply work on building that future instead.
[+] [-] didntknowya|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CynicusRex|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cfup|4 years ago|reply
The NFT scene is even more BS. It could destroyed uninformed people's life, just like gambling. However, this kind of gambling is public on the internet with little regulations.
I hope more tech people speak about this instead of just ignoring them.
[+] [-] xur17|4 years ago|reply
I agree that there are lots of scammy "blockchain" startups, but I don't think it's fair to paint them all with that brush. There are also plenty that are actually building cool projects, without pumping their coin, and announcing light interactions with a company as partnerships.
If you have 20% of companies being scummy, but churning out 80% of the news, your assumption will be that all of the companies are scummy.
[+] [-] ngokevin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotlog|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overlaid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanniabu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mettamage|4 years ago|reply
For example, authentication/identity using blockchain technology seems interesting to me.
[1] https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-root/
[+] [-] wyager|4 years ago|reply
Identity on blockchain beyond resolving zooko’s triangle (I.e. stably mapping pseudonyms to pubkeys) typically does not offer an advantage over (partially) centralized identity providers. E.g. putting anything related to government ID on a blockchain is pointless because you might as well have the ID issuer run a central or federated service.
[+] [-] cryptica|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ansil849|4 years ago|reply
An amazingly succinct title. Absolutely true. Whenever someone hypes up cryptocurrency, it is almost always for their personal gain, directly or indirectly.
[+] [-] bitcoin_anon|4 years ago|reply
What was Satoshi lying about? What has he done with his riches?
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
This is not the motivation of someone trying to get richer. It's someone who cares deeply about humanity.
Is it so hard to believe that there are others in the space with similar motivations?
[+] [-] esalman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aceazzameen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowapple|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianolson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttyprintk|4 years ago|reply
To get to (B) from here, we must endure some path dependence that takes us through an era of unaccountable wealth transfer.
[+] [-] marban|4 years ago|reply
Bad taste of the bored rich is not a new thing, but I hope NFTs won't become a noble tradition.
[+] [-] TomGullen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skinnyasianboi|4 years ago|reply
Quote from statista: "In 2020, global gaming audiences spent an approximate 54 billion U.S. dollars on additional in-game content". But the players don't own their purchases. You don't play the game anymore, servers go down or you get banned and all your stuff is gone. Think about that.
Edit: Of course my comment got nothing but down votes again on HN. Was worth a try anyway.
[+] [-] oefrha|4 years ago|reply
* Real charities, not those billionaire tax avoidance schemes.
[+] [-] sercand|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iscrewyou|4 years ago|reply
Except all these NFT stores require an invite from another artist. As someone who loves taking photos but isn’t socially connected because it’s a passion and not a job, it seems very elitist. Maybe it’s that way because I don’t have access to it and my brain is just playing tricks. But it seems like one of those “you aren’t good enough for this” kind of thing. Some of the online stores like Foundation app have become gatekeepers rather than outlets.
[+] [-] hammyhavoc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trystfest|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcpham2|4 years ago|reply
Most of the influencers are shilling something, obviously
[+] [-] xwdv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roenxi|4 years ago|reply
But in the interim, lets not compare crypto to some utopian world that doesn't actually exist. In the current world which we inhabit, the many major currencies are either controlled or heavily influenced by people who:
1) Believe prices constantly rising is good for poor people.
2) Advocate that governments can spend potentially an infinite amount without consequences because they control a printing press. And looking at the actions of, e.g. the US government, it is easy to suspect that the people who understand the nuance there aren't the ones in control of the money supply.
In such an environment, the crypto folk are reasonable. Even if in a perfect world they would clearly all be scammers.
[+] [-] useful|4 years ago|reply
Crypto is rebuilding the same things that already exist but that process has the chance to remove people from a system who used to provide services and replace them with an algorithm. Most people would dimiss a NFT but some of the use cases could be great. If most laws/rules were enforced in code for business transactions would you need to spend as much money on a lawyer in your lifetime? That's the future of money and it's exciting. Will that happen? Maybe not, which is why it is speculative.
The problem is that a large majority of people who are speculative and most crypto assets are highly centralized, which defeat the point of decentralization to remove a few large actors from having control. Plus the scams and idiots in the space that income without labor always attracts.
[+] [-] Justsignedup|4 years ago|reply
Everyone imagines "just imagine if I invested when BTC was < $100 just a few years ago. I could be sailing near my own island now.
And with everyone from celebrities to investors constantly promoting it, it is hard not to jump on the craze.
All "doom and gloom" has bounced off the market. I am still expecting a massive crash, but to be honest, if I invested a few years ago I would be sitting at 3-20x my investment.
It is insanely profitable.
Thats the fun part of all this :)
[+] [-] nootropicat|4 years ago|reply
Even so, arguably crypto ponzi games are harmless compared to more socially accepted ways of wealth extraction. Facebook, twitter and other mass social media destroyed society and utilize best ai/ml in existence to steal people's attention, at this point they should be viewed as human hostile ais. The lost potential of years wasted on pointless flamewars and mindless clicking is immeasurable. So many smart people wasting their best years on making ads even more effective instead of creating actual wealth.
In the good timeline there was no bailout in 2007 and the global financial system completely disintegrated, deleting most of fake wealth and unsustainable liabilities in the process, but without long term damage to real productivity.
This is the bad timeline in which wealth extraction dominates until there's nothing left, after which everything stops with no system energy reserves. That's how Soviet Union ended.
[+] [-] space_rock|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago|reply
This one annoys me in tech discussions all across the board. Someone justifies some piece of tech as good, others give counter evidence, and then the proponents say that it doesn't actually matter because it will be true some day. Social media is healthier than other media (well, it could be). Self driving cars are safer (well, they will be). Crypto is better for the people (well, it could be). Or my favorite, seen this morning in another thread: bitcoin isn't bad for the environment (well, it could be better, therefore it's fine).
[+] [-] 99_00|4 years ago|reply
First there was Railroad Mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
After the initial bubble, rail roads changed the world
First there was the dot-com bubble, and then internet changed the world.
Both sides can be right in this debate. Crypto can be a bubble and a scam and it can also change the world.
[+] [-] HelixEndeavor|4 years ago|reply
The fact that, despite having it explained multiple times by multiple sources multiple ways, I still can't seem to wrap my head around how crypto functions... Makes me suspicious. It feels like the whole idea is to obfuscate it's functionality to the point it becomes this incomprehensible enigma - by design.
If it's not easy to comprehend, and instead a strange mystery number that moves between even stranger mystery-er numbers, someone is bound to think those numbers must be worth something - otherwise it wouldn't exist, right?
Basically what I'm saying is cryptocurrency sends me into an existential spiral of thoughts about how all value is just perceived and agreed upon and 90% of what we call "the economy" is just fake. Look up fractional reserve banking and join the existential crisis with me!
[+] [-] CryptoPunk|4 years ago|reply
Only a deep-seated ideological precept, that idealizes the supremacy of the state over all aspects of the lives of private citizens, could motivate such a dismissively mean-spirited article. There isn't an even an attempt by the author to give the subject an objective treatment. Usually this would sit fine with me, as a useful counter-force to the mirror negative that exists in the deluge of crypto hype from profit-motivated speculators, but the advocacy for illiberal laws that would prohibit financial privacy and imprison peaceful individuals makes the article unconscionable.
[+] [-] tradertef|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aazaa|4 years ago|reply
There are way too many words in that article, yet the author manages to say almost nothing that hasn't been said before. I suggest removing all adverbs and adjectives, then re-writing.
[+] [-] bo1024|4 years ago|reply
I think most cryptocurrencies and tokens are really dumb or a pyramid scheme. Then again, I think the same about multilevel marketing and much of the modern real estate and stock markets.
But I also see the really exciting potential and promise of blockchain tech. People are working on expanding access to capital and systems to countries with unstable currencies. They're working on the future of the corporation beyond capitalism with DAOs. Enabling micropayments for creators. Much more. It's tiring seeing all these articles harping on the downsides without acknowledging or looking into the upsides.
Probably because the system works fine for these authors -- they're somewhere with a stable currency, their 401k is going up, etc. Blockchain is a space where people are actually dreaming of something different and better instead of accepting the status quo. Meanwhile in the U.S. we have a Fed printing trillions of dollars to prop up asset prices, we have wars to support USD hegemony. In other countries their wages inflate away before they can spend them, etc.
I don't know a lot about all this stuff but I really respect the part of the blockchain space which is about broadening access, decentralizing power, and envisioning new systems.
[+] [-] cube00|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cratermoon|4 years ago|reply