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.
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.
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.
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.
They only got those contracts because there was no alternative. Try to infer using your common sense next time. Lots of cities had contracts with taxi companies before uber. And some on chain app will eventually remove the remaining parasitic component.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m only responding this to point out that I never said that it was preferable to the current banking system.
You sure are going to bat for it as though it were
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
Gnu Taler is doing this. No new currency, no mining, and no fraud. https://taler.net/en/index.html
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.