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.
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.
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.
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.
I’d like to just point out that systems that don’t use Proof of Work, such as Eth which uses Proof of Stake, use only a tiny fraction of the energy.
There are a ton of proof-of-stake cryptos out now. Cardano, Tezos, algorand, solana, for a few.
Pure proof-of-stake systems don't use more power than any other typical internet service.
Gnu Taler is doing this. No new currency, no mining, and no fraud. https://taler.net/en/index.html
Okay but who gets left to hold the bag? What kind of hyper-volatile get-rich-quick scheme is this anyway?? /s
@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
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".