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.
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.
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.
In S5E3 they invite on a guest in favor of crypto. The hosts do nothing to counter his statements. Even if they had on that episode, it would have been a zero-sum game. They could invite more guests on who oppose crypto. That still would fail to undo the damage of introducing crypto as something that deserves debate, rather than consistent and clear condemnation.
“Debate me,” is the rallying cry of the alt-right. You absolutely should not debate them. Those ready to argue in bad faith of the indefensible know the power of muddling issues, of eroding moral clarity, and creating uncertainty when there should be none.
I expect solarpunk media to have enough clarity of vision that they present a future that is better than a zero-sum game. And I expect them to do better than being permissive toward crypto. I have lost faith in the ability of “Solarpunk Presents” to deliver bold and radical truth. I have canceled my Patreon support and unsubscribed from their podcast.
There is time and place for everything.
For starters, most modern cryptocurrencies (not Bitcoin, though) use Proof-of-Stake or a similar validation model, which pretty much solves the energy hogging problem. But the issue of laissez-faire capitalism persists, and crypto, in my opinion, is poorly equipped to deal with it - that is, assuming it wasn’t meant as a perfect money model to force unregulated capitalism over everyone’s throats.
And that is why it shouldn’t suddenly become the main means for payments. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean crypto doesn’t have legitimate use cases. There are cases where anonymity, immutability and quick settlements matter, be it financially supporting protesters, moving money across borders, or, say, my use case of evading sanctions when trying to send money to my brother over the Russian border (outside of Russia, mind you).
But the issue of laissez-faire capitalism persists, and crypto, in my opinion, is poorly equipped to deal with it
I mean, proof-of-stake protocols didn’t exist until 2012, and that was a hybrid protocol. Exclusively proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies weren’t available until long after that IIRC. There’s a lot we still don’t know about what blockchains are capable of, and it’s entirely possible that we figure out how to regulate them effectively.
But you point still stands;
And that is why it shouldn’t suddenly become the main means for payments.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Editing the original post as follows, in response to their latest episode.
Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, Solarpunk Presents 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.
On their Patreon, the “Solarpunk Presents” hosts admitted they interviewed crypto-and-web3 bro Stephen Reid because listeners asked for him. The hosts should have known better. They should have ignored those requests, as probably those listeners/Patreon donors are invested in crypto and are trying to shoehorn it into the conversation. The hosts should have known crypto is unnecessary for a solarpunk present or future. Instead we could be talking about real solutions like mutual aid, free stores, and library economies. The hosts failed to do the right thing.
Barring that, they should have refunded the money of Patreon donors asking for this speaker, saying that ethically they cannot platform crypto. The hosts failed to do the right thing.
They should have challenged Stephen Reid when he made fallacious arguments in favor of crypto. The hosts failed to do the right thing. After recording, the hosts should have realized their conversation wasn’t substantive and valuable. They could have refrained from uploading it or edited out the unopposed statements in favor of crypto. The hosts failed to do the right thing.
At the least they should have interjected context about those arguments, adding counterpoints and why crypto may not be the only solution or not a solution at all to any of solarpunk’s goals. The hosts failed to do the right thing.
They should have added a prelude or epilogue to the episode talking about any reservations about crypto or how the general conversation did not represent their solarpunk values. The hosts failed to do the right thing.
I have no confidence they will do the right thing in the future.
Honorable mention: the GNU Taler project
https://taler.net/en/index.html
Could be a better alternative to crypto.
Thanks for highlighting it! Never saw it, and now looking into it.
For all I understood, it essentially resembles the banking system, except you have a digital cash option. But other than that, isn’t it just integrated into traditional finances, with national currencies and everything? Or is that the point?
Also, from all I understood, Taler is currently a demo and not an actual system for real-world transactions, right?
Or is that the point?
Kinda. You can think of GNU Taler as a standardized “Paypal” that your bank can self-host and that vendors can implement without having to do something special for each individual bank. In addition it offers cash like privacy protections for buyers.
The EU is currently funding a pilot with two cooperative banks (in Germany and Hungary) to scale this up a bit and NLnet is offering grants for projects like open-source online shop software to implement GNU Taler support.
But it could also be used for things like cash-less payments on music festivals, similar to how you often have to buy paper tokens on those. And of course it is not linked to a specific currency, so you can have many different currencies (even unofficial ones) in your Taler wallet, similar to how you could do that with cash.
Thank you!
I certainly don’t like the fact commercial banks are still part of the equation here. To me, the system should either be controlled through a central bank, or use a network of decentralized middlemen (like crypto does), though the latter may be inefficient. Commercial banks are cancer.
I’m also riddled with the technical details of it, in that transactions rely on blind signatures instead of blockchain.
How do blind signatures replace some sort of ledger? Or is it still kept somewhere somehow? Did Taler solve the issue of locally storing money in a way that they can’t be tampered with?
Central banks could certainly also be Taler exchanges, in fact the Swiss central bank published a paper on exactly that and their outcome was: yes feasible but we don’t need that right now.
As for commercial banks: I think it is worth differentiating there a bit. IMHO cooperative banking is exactly the kind of decentralised structure you seem to want, yet technically you lump them with other commercial banks. Currently both banks that participate in the GNU Taler pilot are strong examples of coop banks. I was quite positively surprised when they announced the participation of these two banks.
As for the technical questions: you are looking at it through the warped perspective of blockchain. None of these issues are real and in fact had been solved long before block chain was even invented. They only become an issue when you enter the realm of “let’s pretend you can create an trustless system”, but that’s starting from a wrong premise.
It’s Cypher punk, not Cyber punk. Ones a movie genre about swords and dystopian tech, ones a decentralized trustless protocol powered by encryption
I’ve been a fan of cyberpunk for years, and I feel like an unsecured currency backed in computational waste (proof-of-work style) is a perfect fit for a cyberpunk setting. If I’d read it in a story years ago I’d have said it was a little on the nose
How is it insecure? Schnorr signatures and the txID system literally make it quantum resistant. Even if you cracked a transaction’s key, you’d only have access to already spent funds. Like a receipt instead of a debit card, with no certainty who has the money until they spend it.
Oh, and in terms of computational waste, the fiat backed inflation based currency system we have now, has incentivized a world of endless growth which isn’t sustainable. Switching to an asset with finite supply like Bitcoin would remove those incentives. There’s other costs to using deflationary assets, but if you actually value the environment, switching to Bitcoin would economically inventivize a world where people are encouraged to save more instead of spend more
Unsecured, as in stuff like mt gox where the nearest thing to a bank for crypto just closed one day and stole hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins with no recourse. Unsecured like watching the crypto scene reinvent/rediscover financial regulation one theft, scam, or disaster at a time. That’s a perfect fit for a cyberpunk setting.
Unrelated to my point about the genre, I’ll admit I’m especially skeptical that it’s the devaluation of currency is what’s responsible for the endless growth mindset of capitalism, or that systems that seem to be used more like investment stocks than a currency are structurally capable of fixing it.
I’m sure the some of blockchain technology has some practical uses, there’s probably a way it can work as currency, but I have a hard time seeing any way to separate the modern cryptocurrency scene from investment capitalism
Edit: I really do wish you luck in doing so though
I’ve listened to their podcast since the beginning and I’m a proud supporter on Patreon.
They have made it a point to interview people and I don’t get the impression that they agree with all of their interview subjects. I also don’t agree with them on everything. But that’s what an intellectual debate is. Just because they talk about an idea does not mean that they endorse it. Just because you hear about it does not mean that you must go out and buy crypto.
If you are going to look at a movement as diverse and amorphous as Solarpunk, you can interact with multiple ideas and learn more. But just because you learn about something, it does not mean that you must accept it or integrate it into your worldview. As I see it, understand where people are coming from - even if you disagree with it. Understanding does not equal acceptance.
(For full disclosure, I think that crypto makes very little sense. I’ve tried understanding what it is and why it is important but I just feel like it is a solution looking for a problem.)
For general blockchain tech but built around leftist goals I would check out [The Blockchain Socialist] (https://theblockchainsocialist.com/)
Tech isn’t evil, its a tool, building tools and using them for our goals is what matters.
That website is giving me serious wolf in sheep’s clothing vibes. In fact, I think it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s trying to bundle blockchain with various leftist concepts to make the grift less apparent. In this article on the website, under the ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)’ section, it says:
In Part 2 we discussed a bit about smart contracts, which are contracts written onto a blockchain in computer code. It can take many types of actions based on some predefined criteria. This is interesting for the Left because of blockchain’s immutability and it can offer trustless interactions between parties that can give certain protections to its participants. If we take this concept a step further, we see that it’s now not too difficult to say that you can create entire organizational structures on the blockchain which are not owned by a single person or entity. Or in socialist-speak, it creates an avenue to encode organizations where workers own the means of production removing Capitalist middlemen.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are usually one or a collection of smart contracts on a blockchain that interact with each other to represent an organization. That organization could be a company, a cooperative, a political party, a social fund or just a group of friends, there really is no clear limit to the type of P2P collaboration that could be made with a Turing-complete language. What makes DAOs special especially for socialists is that we can create organization with encoded Leftist principles based on inclusion and democracy.
This immediately triggered alarm bells from what I’d seen about DAOs in Folding Ideas video on NFTs.
TL:DW, DAOs are a scam, or if done with good intent, are easily exploited, and don’t really solve anything.
Tech isn’t evil, its a tool, building tools and using them for our goals is what matters.
This tech is so obtuse and reliant on specialized knowledge, that it appears to almost exclusively be created and run by those with ill-intent. It may be possible to use, very briefly, in certain scenarios, as a useful tool. But it really isn’t worth propping up as a good thing/tool, and we should be seeking better alternatives to any form of Crypto.
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
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.
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.
Not all cryptocurrencies are the same. Sounds like you don’t quite understand their differences and just want something to rage about.
Why not both?
Yeah I don’t get why solar punks hate on crypto? Do they like the wastefulness of fiat? Do they understand how much non renewables are used to process a single credit card payment? Or do they have a better form of money?
Crypto could be solar punk, just requires people to use… Solar power… Or am I missing something?
For me, it’s because crypto is manufactured scarcity. That’s the whole way crypto creates “value”. For me solar punk is about not putting artificial limits on things to create scarcity.
This is a big part of it, yeah. One of the least well understood aspects of crypto is the fact that - by design - it is inherently deflationary, and a deflationary currency is one that is designed to reward the wealthy. Basically, a deflationary currency is one where the value of your existing assets increases over time; the more assets you hold, the more you get. Since the wealthy can afford to hoard more of their income, they gain a greater benefit from this. People who live paycheck to paycheck get nothing, because they’re forced to spend what they make as soon as they make it.
Basically, crypto was designed to give the greatest benefit to the wealthiest members of our society. That is the least “punk” thing imaginable.
A single credit card payment takes a tiny fraction of the energy it takes to process a single crypto transaction.
You didn’t read the post at all. Crypto doesn’t work to achieve anything desirable with solar punk, it’s just a waste of resources meant to grift the next bag holder in the line.
It’s not just about power.
First off, solar power still comes at a cost to the planet. It’s not an infinite energy hack. You have to build solar panels, which involves a lot of labour and resource extraction. That should be going to things that will make the world a better place for everyone. Is a really inefficient database really the best use for those resources?
Second, that’s not the only physical resource involved. Modern crypto mining is done on ASICs, single purpose chips designed for only running crypto mining apps. These chips burn out after about two years of continual use, and they cannot be recycled or repurposed; they can only be used for crypto mining. That means that crypto, as a whole, generates an absolutely staggering amount of ewaste. This is a business that demands infinite growth, because the difficulty of the chain scales with the amount of compute power applied to it, so the miners are all locked in an endless arms race, and that infinite growth comes at the cost of infinite resource extraction.
That’s exactly the kind of thing we have to get away from if we want a green future. We cannot keep building infinite growth engines and expect to have a livable planet.
Monero and many other coins do not mine on asic chips.
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.
“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
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
Not really. This usecase is infinitesimal compared to speculation.
For now.
