Reminder: crypto isn’t solarpunk. It’s cyberpunk.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Thanks for the answer! I'll do my homework on that.
If a government is backing it, color me skeptical on the privacy claims.
Its all open-source and well documented, and they make it very clear that sellers have strict built-in transparency, which is really what governments care the most about (for tax purposes).
So the privacy protections for buyers are very real and something most democratic governments actually support, no conspiracy required.
That's still a very different understanding of governments than I have.
The lack of privacy is one of the founding principles of the project. There is no privacy for the merchants.
This presentation does a good job of explaining it. The gist of it is:
But I just learned of it from this thread as well, so that's just what I've gleaned so far.
Thanks for the link!
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).
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;
I agree wholeheartedly.
Thanks for added info! Yes, crypto market is turning for regulation, since its continued growth relies on getting institutional investors aboard, and institutions love clear regulations instead of a "grey zone".
'Didn't exist until over a decade ago'.
Just saying, this isn't exactly a fresh meme.
You’re not wrong, but it took a while to figure out how to eliminate proof-of-work entirely. The only reason I’m not giving a year is I’m not sure who was first.
Aside from that, integrated economic regulation isn’t a particularly “flashy” area of research, nor is it lucrative, so naturally it will progress more slowly. That doesn’t mean anything about the possibility or practicality of it, though.
Fair enough.
I call it ponzipunk
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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
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
@xnx
I really hope some larger #foss projects team up with them for use as a donation platform at some point...the only issue is, where to buy taler w cash🤷♂️
@bloup
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.
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?
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".
Yeah exactly. There is a problem, crypto is a solution. Fiat currency is also a ponzi scheme.
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.
https://www.tpr.org/technology-entrepreneurship/2023-09-06/texas-paid-a-bitcoin-miner-more-than-30-million-to-power-down-during-heat-wave
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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
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.
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.
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 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 @[email protected] 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:
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.
Solarpunk Presents Podcast is on Mastodon: @[email protected]
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.
It doesn't have to be a wasteful if it's generated with clean energy. It doesn't have to be a scam, either. Just because it is those things IRL doesn't mean it has to be in fiction.
Instead of computing hashes you show proof how much of the sun’s energy you harvested this transaction block.
Boom I just solved blockchain and green energy. You’re welcome.
You could say a new algorithm was made that makes it barely use energy at all, too. It's fiction. You can basically do whatever you want if you write it. lol
But that energy could be used for anything else. Those chips could be used for anything else.
Oh. So the past two hundred years or tailorized bullshit and monkey paw globalism haven't made a single energy intensive process geographically fungible? Huh.
I guess solving a lot of social problems will be easier than I thought!
I'm not trying to sound clever, and this requires zero knowledge of crypto mining. It is, in fact, about every other industrial process from the past two hundred years.
You didn't refute my point. You just said I sound smart and called me an idiot about an entirely irrelevant topic.
That seems like a pretty irrational defense, in that it completely avoids addressing anything I actually said. Do you think that's going to convince anyone of anything other than 'cryptobros are vicious irrational little goblins'? You're not making your cause look good.
No I just think very few of us are dim enough for cryptocurrency.
You seem to have responded as if I said something, so you didn't read it as a question. Youre being extremely disingenuous here. Which is pretty standard for you sort, but I'd like to hope for better.
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.
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.
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.
Where's the solutions? Don't say "proof of stake"
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.
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.
That, I can agree with.
I own Bitcoin and solar panels. The two technologies don't have to be enemies.
Crypto is Fecespunk
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.
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.
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.
Removed by mod for providing an example of a counterpoint that's eco friendly?
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.
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
That's the problem with fiction. Unlike reality it needs to be believable.
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:
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.
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.
Its been two years since that video, do you mind breaking down what the DAO critique was again?
Basically, DAO's aren't inherently evil, just useless, because they cannot solve any of the problems they purport to solve; you can't code away human behaviour. Well, useless, and in the right circumstances actively harmful.
A DAO is, in theory, a system of governance where you have a token used for voting, and a set of "smart contracts" which are programs that operate on the blockchain (more or less). The smart contract part doesn't work, because thousands of years of contract law have proven that there's no such thing as an unambiguous contract, so a computer can never be allowed to automatically execute the terms of a contract. That will always create issues. The voting token doesn't work unless you tie them to a real world identity (in which case the whole purpose of the public-ledger aspect is meaningless), because as long as they can be traded away in some form or another you've now opened up the possibility that a wealthy person can directly purchase voting power. The public-ledger aspect of blockchain also makes DAOs a terrible idea for purported left-wing uses like union organising, because it's not actually that hard to tie a crypto wallet back to a real world identity, so now your future employers can all see your union voting history.
Everything that DAOs purport to do, leftist groups have already been doing for forever. It's just techbros trying to reinvent the wheel we made and sell it back to us.
I would personally think most things like voting be off chain so you can do things like secret ballots more easily, but also just the cost. The use would be use the on-chain contracts to establish the org, governance and the off chain systems to establish an external root of trust. Its was also a growing development to tie the DAO to a matching legal structure so that things like taxes but also state enforcement of contracts. This means you can issue tokens with legal stipulations like (one token per member).
I agree that trying to use this to solve all problems of building an organization is fool hardy. In the same way I don't think worker and community coops solve everything (but I do support them!)
They don't solve everything, but the evidence does seem to indicate they are an objectively better way to operate, with virtually no downsides compared to regular corporate structures.
The problem, basically, is that everything you can do with a DAO can be done just as easily without one. Working out the legal particulars of contracts is still a job for lawyers, for example. That job doesn't get better, easier or cheaper because you now have to pay a lawyer and a programmer. It's all just added complexity for the sake of added complexity.
I don't agree, its the same benifit expressed in the idea of policy as code for encoding security policy of IT systems to be turn into reusable and programtically accessible checks.
You could have a team of cyber professionals that know compliance standards and deeper knowledge answering every question and reviewing every deployment or you could add some relevant programming skills to that team and catch known things automatically.
This seems like a pretty big barrier for adoption, not to mention an added layer of bureaucracy. If every single deployment has to be reviewed, you're creating a new bottleneck and adding a centralizing factor. Catching known things automatically sounds overly optimistic, considering automated testing for other programs still doesn't catch every bug.
Honestly, I'm really struggling to imagine scenarios that are either only possible with DAO's, or where they are so massively better than just a normal voting system. If organizations remain small and federated, and if there are no owner/employee dynamics (replaced with coops), its likely that voting fraud would likely be extremely minimized, since everything could just be transparent to begin with.
It just feels like the equivalent of having smart-lights in your home. It's a little more covenant than getting up and pressing the switch, but now I have an operating system, program, and wifi protocol inserted between me and turning a lightbulb on, introducing many points of potential failure and potential security implications for the most minor of conveniences.
Can you give me some examples of things that have been a big problem for an organization that you've been involved with that would definitely be solved by DAOs?
To be honest, I don't think I'd be able to do it justice. The video link is timestamped at the relevant DAO section, I'd recommend it when you have a spare moment to reacquaint yourself.
I get it! Its a good detailed video tbh, I do vaguely remember have some critics of the technical aspects but the general dismissal of a the grift that was building up at the time was well warrented.
I will give it a shot sometimes to go back over it. DAOs are one the more exciting structures to me for me, potentially covering the gap between small very personal coops and large buerocratic ones, as well the exciting possibility of IT administration accomplished via democratic means vs the wink knod power dynamic that exists today.
The link takes you straight to that chapter in the video, it’s less than 20 minutes
Oh thank you! That helped to know. I remembered it being very thorough and just didn't want to commit to a full rewatch
What are the alternatives though? Currently much of the scaling of organizations hit the issues of Dunbar's number results in big (and exclusive) clubs, cat herding, and Kafka problems.
The value points I see are: codifying bueracracies into actionable contracts prevents the current problem where rules and doctrines are written but selectively enforced as a personal choice. I don't disagree on the need to explictlt account for failures to predict all outcome of a rule though, but I would rather be something fixed upstream then selectively prescribed.
A root of trust built on a transparent system using a mathematical proof as the underpinning to explicitly state and enforce the structure of power.
I don't disagree on the difficulty part though
Federation of smaller groups? Rojava is a living experiment in that way of organization.
Bottom-up decentralized power does not require management if people are allowed to self-manage. Combined with some form of cybernetics (cybersyn style), an organization could likely scale pretty effectively.
Isn't all of that just things happening on a computer, though? It still has to translate to meat space, and there, you can still ultimately selectively enforce things. The blockchain won't stop social clicks from forming.
Unless everyone becomes educated enough to fully understand the implications and inner workings of how all that operates, how would they be able to trust what the blockchain says if it involved controversial things, or things of significant weight? They would either all need to be programmers to understand what the code is doing, or personally know a programmer they trust to verify the code is legit and actually doing what they collectively agreed upon.
I mean in general smaller groups and bottom up organization seem like the moves but I imagine this tool being specifically part of a cybernetic type system like cybersyn was imagined. The guy I mentioned actually introduced me to project cybersyn first and I watched the video not long after wanting more details on the subject.
What I mean on actionable could be the configuration of the IT systems that mediate decisions between memebrs. If a jury system is supposed to be in place then the DAO could orginize the digital apparatus for deliberating votes, apply penalties for failures to appear, hold the configuration for the agree apon forms and inputs, etc etc
All of that today is done by people interpreting regulations and codes and implementing thus enforcing themselves.
That is true of any system, but a system with roots in mathematical certainty, when given enough understanding, lead to the same understanding. That just can't be said of other systems. The fact that people may rely on experts for complex systems seems inevitable (lawyers for example are that for our current political systems, union reps for the union, the coop evangelist for that system, etc, etc).
The part where you said "people interpreting regulations and codes" is really, really important, and I don't think you quite understand why. This is where the advocates of DAOs and smart contracts constantly trip up; they think that the interpretation of law is a failure, and not a feature.
This is exactly why we don't allow police officers to judge guilt and assign sentences. It's why we have an adversarial court system; because no law can ever perfectly encapsulate all of its own implications. Laws will, inevitably, need to be interpreted at some point in time, because sooner or later you will encounter a scenario that could not possibly have been envisioned when the law was written.
This is why you cannot programmatically enforce regulations and contracts. There must be room for interpretation for any community or society to be able to act in a manner that is truly equitable and just, because - inevitably - most often the least imagined scenarios will involve the most marginalized members of that community.
I mean we don't disagree on the idea that we need flexibility and the ability to allow for remidiation even in the face of uncertainty.
Its just that I think that where we can be certain we should be. If we can be certain that we want officials that are accountable to the people, we should be.
There is tremendous value in this beyond what is made possible by DAOs. For example many people prefer the set price system set by stores both owners and customers as compared to haggling and bartering for every exchange.
The adversial court system, I personally think, is a great institution but it is very expensive to operate in so the default is too avoid using as much as possible. Its good to have if you need it, and we as a society do need it, but most administrivia doesn't and shouldn't be done there.
This is annoying in its inaccuracy. Crypto is a variegated set of technologies that are competing with each other.
Bitcoin, ethereum, etc all use proof of work, which is ridiculously energy-intensive, and not required for crypto to function.
..but there are lots of other cryptocurrencies out there that don't use proof of work, and are no more energy-intensive than any other typical internet service.
It's hard enough to get people on board with social movements that directly help them and have no downsides; you're going to have a hard time promulgating a financial system that undermines the wealth of the people who dominate the standard financial system, especially when the more wealth you've accumulated (in the standard system) is directly proportional to your ability to spread propaganda to support your wealth.
There are better, more winnable, battles to fight than the global financial system.
While i agree that a victory there would be huge, part of the reason it would be so huge is because of how very, very unwinnable it is.
That said, if you're super stuck on finance as the issue you want you be involved with, imo, the best thing you can do is communicate the questions -- the problems with contemporary finance, of which there are so very many -- and don't waste your time offering solutions.
(Even if we had a solution that could work, it would surely be obsolete by the time it could be meaningfully implemented. Cryptos of all kinds, at this point, can only provide their benefits to people with disposable wealth, who can afford to take the risk, and those are exactly the people who don't need you to fight for their interests. Or anyone -- but you're not anyone, you are you; your energy is finite, spend it where it can help the people who need it most.)
I appreciate your well-considered response.
I have a lot of things in involved with in life, and to varying degrees. Crypto is by no means my absolute focus.
However, crypto is immensely useful, and no amount of wishing it away or saying 'the time hasn't come' for it will be effective. It has a niche, and will occupy that niche successfully, without any big battles to fight.
It also is flexible, and new uses will come around, paralleling the existing ones.
My own uses for it are primarily in DAOs, which are really neat and useful, for me. There are plenty of other uses, but voting and traceable structure and organizational finance as exist in some DAOs really is a major one.
"Crypto" has become a common shorthand for "cryptocurrency". Unless I'm missing something, I saw nothing in their post that references cryptographic technology as a whole.
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?
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".
(sorry, not sorry)
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.
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.
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.
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?
No worries, it's expected that 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.
But they didn't, they said "X isn't solarpunk".
Ethereum is arguably coin #2 -- https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pow/
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.
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.
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.
Uh... ya.... money
We don't have a gold standard (in the U.S. or most western countries).
me too ya?
Did I fucking say you did? A gold standard. General case you myopic fuck.
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.
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.
Crypto can't be printed out of thin air which is what the billionaires hate.
Actually they can. Tether is basically running an endless printing press right now. They've produced billions of dollars "worth" of Tether backed by absolutely nothing, and most of it is used being used to bid up the notional value of Bitcoin.
Tether isn't what most people consider crypto.
Can't it? Is there any restriction on someone minting a brand new coin and trying to convince people it's worth money?
You can draw a $5 sign on a piece of paper as well. doesn't make it a real dollar.
Printing Bitcoin, Ethereum or Monero just isn't possible.
No, but printing things that trade for them is.
This is, in fact, shockingly common in the crypto space.
Step 1: Create a new ERC-20 token. Call it Dickcoin or whatever.
Step 2: Sell a hundred of them to yourself (using different wallets) a few times to establish a trade price.
Step 3: Trade your Dickcoins for ETH or BTC at the newly established rate (if need be, you might have to trade for some more well established alt-coins first, then trade those up to the big boy coins). Alternatively, just use the billions of dollars worth of coins you note own as collateral to take out loans in other cryptos, then default on the loan and let the worthless collateral get seized. Thanks to DAOs running as automated banks powered by smart contracts this is hilariously easy to do because the tiny piece of code will automatically approve the loan at instant speed without ever checking with a human.
None of this is hypothetical. It's been done an absolutely ridiculous number of times.
Doing wasteful math, shitting out an answer, and getting a fucking Bitcoin for it sure sounds like that.
If you can convince someone a piece of paper with a 5 dollar sign on it is worth value, then it is.
Oh wait, you invented checks.
All money is fiat. Nothing has inherent value.
Actually I'm going to disagree on that one. Fundamental value is actually an important concept when talking about money, and understanding why both backed and fiat currencies do actually have fundamental value is key to understanding why crypto doesn't, and why that matters.
See, the key here is that any currency can possess fundamental value if there is something that only that currency can buy. Fairground tickets can actually have a form of meaningful value, because they're the only thing the fairground will accept in return for that teddy bear you really want. Within the realms of the fairground, those tickets are a currency, just one with no exchange rate, and a very very limited definition of fundamental value. This is how Bitcoin briefly attained fundamental value; for a while it was the only good way to get drugs and hitmen.
More importantly, this is why every fiat currency (to my knowledge) still has some form of fundamental value; there is one particular service that you can only pay for with US dollars in the US, Canadian dollars in Canada, pound sterling in the UK, and so on... Taxes.
Every country wants you to pay their taxes in their issued currency. Which means there will always be some value to owning that currency, because even if you don't need it, it's basically guaranteed that someone else will. It doesn't matter how many people suddenly decide that the US dollar is just a meaningless number on a meaningless piece of paper, because once every year a few hundred million people still have to come up with a whole bunch of those pieces of paper.
So you mean, it has value because we believe it does. Got it. Inherent to the properties of the universe, nothing has value. Value is assigned by humans. Isn't that why countries have credit ratings? How much faith the world has in your currency, stability and otherwise? If a government collapses or suffers the country through hyperinflation, is the value of the currency not imaginary? It's not like you could collect on your Confederate Promissory Notes for any gold or anything of any value after the civil war. The existence of its value was contingent on winning a war. And instantaneously, that value evaporated. Now imagine this in crypto. Oh wait, that happens all the time. Just one little X class solar flair away from nuking the lot of it.
Idk. I agree with a lot of your points. But I think we are just arguing from different existential points of view. I'm not saying that the belief isn't valuable, that the backed or fiat currency is wrong or superior or whatever. I'm just of the mindset generally that nothing has meaning other than what we choose to give meaning. But that's just the optimistic nihilist in me.
Also there may have been a misunderstanding at some point about a distinction between value and usefulness. When I say value, I mean intrinsic worth. As opposed to how I would use usefulness which is to serve a purpose or fill a need.
hard forks your crypto
trades it back and forth with my friend to balloon it
dumps it on you
he he nothing personnel kid
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.
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.
There's no reason traditional banking methods can't also be processed on solar power.
That said, solarpunk might not use a currency system at all. Maybe. There are many threads of thought on this.
You missed the part of they just hating money.
A slow but decentralized and immutable database can have it's applications. You can have a semi-decentralized one if it's needed, doing stuff like PKI. I wish DNS were like that.
But the popular use is currencies. And scams. And people here seems to hate money, even more than actual scams.
The problem is that the method of securing that decentralized database relies on having a token to act as a payment system. Basically in order to have a public-ledger blockchain you have to have a cryptocurrency.
Not true.
The immutability of the thing is just Merkle trees. And integrity of the writings is any form of authorized blocks. From a certificate from an authority a la PKI to proof of work. And anything in between.
The thing is that there are not too many applications for slow distributed inmutable databases.
DNS is the only thing that I know that is globally distributed, with slow updates of domains being acceptable.
In order to have your system be distributed in a way that does not require a central authority, there has to be a way of determining which copy of the chain is the authoritative copy. In the context of public-ledger blockchain, that method relies on having a token as an incentive structure. If we're going to start discussing hypothetical new approaches to distributed blockchain that aren't a public-ledger blockchain system as laid out in Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper then we're really starting to veer out of the context of this discussion thread.