Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.
Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.
People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.
Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.
Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.
Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions—things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis—while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrency is the online equivalent of the neo-Nazi bar.
You know how the story goes, with the bartender who tells the customer “you have to throw out neo-Nazis as soon as you see the uniforms or the tattoos, no matter how polite and well-behaved they are. Because if you let Nazis stay and get comfortable they’ll invite their friends, and word gets around that Nazis can drink comfortably at your bar, and customers who don’t want to drink with Nazis leave, and suddenly you have a Nazi bar”. You all remember that story?
Well, cryptocurrency in online spaces - especially futurist spaces and technological spaces - it’s a lot like that. Cryptocurrency supporters are constantly looking for opportunities to promote cryptocurrency. And they obviously see a movement like solarpunk, which talks a lot about decentralization, and mistrusts the global financial system, and so on, as fertile ground for shilling cryptocurrency.
And if you let cryptocurrency supporters hang out and talk about how awesome cryptocurrency is, they will inevitably start shilling their particular flavor of cryptocurrency. And that’s inevitably a capitalist scam and will inevitably harm anyone stupid enough to fall for it.
And the problem is not just that cryptocurrency is a capitalist scam. It’s that, if you don’t shut down cryptocurrency talk aggressively, you get more cryptocurrency supporters. Because the crypto bros see that cryptocurrency discussion is allowed, and they join in, and they invite their friends, and they start shilling their scams. And then you get crypto spammers and scam bots and the personal messages inviting you to elite investment opportunities and all the other scummy garbage that infests cryptocurrency websites. You either block cryptocurrency talk or you get a website full of crypto garbage.
In other words, cryptocurrency supporters need to be shut down as quickly and ruthlessly as any other bots and spammers. Because if you don’t you inevitably get a website full of bots and spammers.
Because the crypto bros see that cryptocurrency discussion is allowed, and they join in, and they invite their friends, and they start shilling their scams. And then you get crypto spammers and scam bots and the personal messages inviting you to elite investment opportunities and all the other scummy garbage that infests cryptocurrency websites
At this point any cryptocurrency discussion space by necessity has strict policies against promotion, people who like to talk about cryptocurrency have realized it’s generally rude and unwelcome to shill their bags outside of designated areas, and crypto scam bots don’t limit themselves to only those spaces. Not every group of people you don’t like is the equivalent of Nazis.
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.
Honorable mention: the GNU Taler project
https://taler.net/en/index.html
Could be a better alternative to crypto.
Thanks for highlighting it! Never saw it, and now looking into it.
For all I understood, it essentially resembles the banking system, except you have a digital cash option. But other than that, isn’t it just integrated into traditional finances, with national currencies and everything? Or is that the point?
Also, from all I understood, Taler is currently a demo and not an actual system for real-world transactions, right?
Or is that the point?
Kinda. You can think of GNU Taler as a standardized “Paypal” that your bank can self-host and that vendors can implement without having to do something special for each individual bank. In addition it offers cash like privacy protections for buyers.
The EU is currently funding a pilot with two cooperative banks (in Germany and Hungary) to scale this up a bit and NLnet is offering grants for projects like open-source online shop software to implement GNU Taler support.
But it could also be used for things like cash-less payments on music festivals, similar to how you often have to buy paper tokens on those. And of course it is not linked to a specific currency, so you can have many different currencies (even unofficial ones) in your Taler wallet, similar to how you could do that with cash.
Thank you!
I certainly don’t like the fact commercial banks are still part of the equation here. To me, the system should either be controlled through a central bank, or use a network of decentralized middlemen (like crypto does), though the latter may be inefficient. Commercial banks are cancer.
I’m also riddled with the technical details of it, in that transactions rely on blind signatures instead of blockchain.
How do blind signatures replace some sort of ledger? Or is it still kept somewhere somehow? Did Taler solve the issue of locally storing money in a way that they can’t be tampered with?
This presentation does a good job of explaining it. The gist of it is:
- People making payments are always anonymous, but people receiving money are not.
- Using already traditional currency infrastructure is relatively power efficient and cheap (especially compared to Crypto)
But I just learned of it from this thread as well, so that’s just what I’ve gleaned so far.
There is time and place for everything.
For starters, most modern cryptocurrencies (not Bitcoin, though) use Proof-of-Stake or a similar validation model, which pretty much solves the energy hogging problem. But the issue of laissez-faire capitalism persists, and crypto, in my opinion, is poorly equipped to deal with it - that is, assuming it wasn’t meant as a perfect money model to force unregulated capitalism over everyone’s throats.
And that is why it shouldn’t suddenly become the main means for payments. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean crypto doesn’t have legitimate use cases. There are cases where anonymity, immutability and quick settlements matter, be it financially supporting protesters, moving money across borders, or, say, my use case of evading sanctions when trying to send money to my brother over the Russian border (outside of Russia, mind you).
But the issue of laissez-faire capitalism persists, and crypto, in my opinion, is poorly equipped to deal with it
I mean, proof-of-stake protocols didn’t exist until 2012, and that was a hybrid protocol. Exclusively proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies weren’t available until long after that IIRC. There’s a lot we still don’t know about what blockchains are capable of, and it’s entirely possible that we figure out how to regulate them effectively.
But you point still stands;
And that is why it shouldn’t suddenly become the main means for payments.
I agree wholeheartedly.
‘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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Gnu Taler is doing this. No new currency, no mining, and no fraud. https://taler.net/en/index.html
I don’t see where this post did that, though? It criticises crypto for failing to solve the problems it claims to solve and for adding additional problems on top, not for trying to address things that aren’t problems
It’s just the vibes i get after seeing the 30th mini essay with the same exact content as this, in which nobody ever actually acknowledges any of those problems as being real nor ever proposes a better idea. I guess it literally doesn’t try to convince me they aren’t real problems, but you sure can’t conclude from anything the author has written that they think they are real problems.
I’m pretty sure that nobody describes something as “a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation” in a positive way
Sounds like you want a system that is distinct but similar to what we have. But that’s extremely un-solarpunk. Solar Punk is about imagining a better world that doesn’t rely on bad systems anymore. Crypto is still a tool of the capitalist system at the end of the day, and that makes it the enemy.
I’m honestly quite bewildered by your comment and I don’t even understand how you can make a single inference about my values based on what I wrote other than I think banks controlling the money supply is actually bad and that we should do something about it and if we don’t like crypto, we should think of a better idea
That is beside the point though. Crypto is very polluting, that’s really not compatible with solarpunk ideas.
