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.
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
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.