About 20 years ago I was on another forum with a crowd tangentially linked to Slashdot. Jimmy Wales popped in one day shilling his project and he got dogpiled hard. One guy noted that the Atlas Shrugged entry had like a 5,000 word essay from some fanboi while Sense and Sensibility just said, “Novel by Jane Austen.”
He promptly left and we all felt smug for driving off the dumb objectivist clown and his stupid encyclopedia that could be edited by anybody. We were all too smart to buy into his naive scheme.
Ironically, the only evidence that forum ever existed is the wayback machine and its wikipedia entry.
This probably describes my instinctive concerns about crypto. If crypto is just a bubble and it eventually bursts, then so what? Ultimately, that just leads to a bunch of capitalists getting fucked by capitalism. Who cares? Economic history has plenty of bubbles. If crypto is just another bubble, then that’s nothing new. But what if it isn’t a bubble? Will it be one step closer to a technocratic dystopia?
People who just want to proclaim that Bitcoin=tulips are short-sighted. Views on crypto seem to be Manichaean, that it must either be all good or all bad. I’m leaning towards the idea that, like many new technologies, it is both potentially useful and potentially dangerous in ways other than enabling scammers.
I don’t feel like my concerns get addressed by crypto skeptics or crypto evangelists.
I’ve posted several of the ways I think some of this stuff could both succeed and be terrible for society at the same time. I’m skeptical that true decentralization is possible, or that it’s something anybody even really wants. Miners and validators are the true owners of the blockchains and the barriers to entry are pretty significant if somebody wants to have any meaningful stake in them. It’s easy for me to see all this simply being a way to shift money, power, and control from one set of assholes to a different, slightly worse set of assholes.
they pumped the hell out of weed stonks awhile ago, they’re not talking about it now and it fell quite a bit since so those are probably actually worth a look now. I should take a look at them this week.
(if you go to any of their charts, the slope up to the peak, that was when all of their blogs or wherever else were pumping them)
I guess ultimately for me, the blockchain itself seems like the ultimate bottleneck that I’m skeptical ever gets solved. None of them can handle any significant volume and they’ve worked on that issue a long time already.
By the time it could, that same tech could also break it. Like a lot of you know I’m kinda bearish now but I was the same as the rest of you about 10 years ago. It’s just hard for me to see it now. We’ll see I guess. It’s not better than current gov’t money is the thing that’ll be tough to get most people in for anything other than token money I ultimately suppose.
I still think most likely it’ll just end up being a niche thing. How big that niche gets idk.
I want to apply critical race theory to crypto and examine whether rules that are presented as fair on the surface will have the effect of exacerbating racial inequalities.
I don’t think it is. I’m not sure how anybody can look at the current state of the world and see any viable paths to meaningful progress. From where I sit it seems like many of you are stuck in a loop of the first 4 stages of grief.
There are two different kinds of inflation. Monetary inflation is an increase in the supply of money. If monetary inflation is > economic growth, then it will likely lead to price inflation (which is what “inflation” typically refers to). The Fed being concerned about price inflation will lead them to reduce the amount of future monetary inflation.
Crypto is supposed to fare well in times of high monetary inflation, so the Fed tightening is bad for it.