I only swing by here occasionally so feel free to lock if this is a duplicate but what is your opinion on cryptocurrency? Specifically how it interacts with the economy, interacts with wealth gaps ect. obviously we also know how it impacts other resources as well such as GPUs and power for something that effectively just makes big numbers bigger. ect.
Feels like most resources are just in support of the big machine and I am eager to hear lefty analysis, thanks!
Personally just frustrated how many resources are dumped in this stupid thing when we could be using similar technology to automate all sorts of things, I wonder how we could scavenge the corpse of crypto when it finally dies and use that technology for other purposes.
Beyond being a digital tulip, the push crypto receives puts it forward as a potential way to block social democracy, let alone bona fide socialism.
David Hall
Blockchains and the general ease of verification and decryption of strong cryptography will one day be used to kill off piracy for good and that makes me sad tbh.
James Miller
It's just a stupid fad, tbh.
The only thing you can spend crypto on is drugs and cp, and good fucking luck getting it converted to actual money. I'm amazed it's lasted as long as it has considering that its foundations rest almost entirely on the idiots buying into it not realizing that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. I thought bitcoin was done for good, but it looks like there's a new wave of people buying into the tulip bulbs and the price is going up again. I think it comes down to the weird ideology that's developed around it.
Logan Wright
Well so far the crypto stuff mostly behaves like a speculative investment, economically. It also does function in a limited capacity for exchange of goods and services and contract management.
The initial driver of popularity was that it promised to function as a way to bypass wall-street. As a people's finance. But since the distribution of high inequality (1) was reproduced in the cryptosphere, and wallstreet-money could also buy into it, as result it lost steam. Basically there was an expectation that the distributed systems would negate power in of it self, where also the individual economic interaction would be between the individual personal wealth pile and a collective wealth pile of an ethereal commons. Private property was supposed to be replaced with digital property, that belonged to the commons and was controlled by an emergent swarm intelligence. Also too many young adults of middle income families lost money in crypto-currency gambling with all of the different cryptocoins. It was pump and dump mania.
However it's not likely going to crash and burn. To an extend it's a subsystem of the capitalist finance and legal system, but only half way.
The main problem with co-opting it for labour vouchers and planning (2) , is technical, it needs computers to run, and we don't have a secure computer infrastructure, in terms of end-user-devices, even though the crypto networking is decent in terms of security.
It's a great way to waste electricity and valuable resourcing making GPU's for autistic memelords.
James Cox
What kind of retarded ancap made this pic?
Jose Wood
A market is a price discovery mechanism. As the market attempts to find an appropriate price for BTC, BTC keeps going through cycles of boom and bust where each cycle/iteration is an order of magnitude larger than the previous one. If this continues long enough, then the next crash or the one after could be large enough to crash the entire global economy (e.g. housing bubble of 2007).
As a currency? Cool. But to 99% of people they are an investment scheme. So they're shit.
Charles Carter
Unstable and a waste of time as well as environmentally damaging.
As the blockchain gets longer, it takes more processing power to produce a Bitcoin. This makes the value of the Bitcoin go up, which creates an incentive for Bitcoin miners thinking they can get the next one, which in turn lengthens the blockchain. As a result of this cycle, you have enormous processing power, which requires real physical electrical production, chasing the blockchain.
Cryptocurrency has failed, and here's why. Without including bots and illegal transactions, how often do you see it used as actual, you know, currency? Almost never. Meanwhile, every ancap and their racist uncle has poured money into bitcoin because it's "such a good investment" it's just become another way to invest, except it got popular with 15 year olds. However, bitcoin is such an obvious pyramid scheme that one can only hope these people don't pull out until it's too late for them and their precious ancap money.
Jaxon Fisher
/thread
Austin Morris
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Anthony Reyes
Cryptocurrency becoming a global standard would be brilliant for accelerating the contradictions of capitalism. We'll be living under socialism in no time at all. It won't happen though. The bourgeoisie aren't that stupid.
David Hall
A cool piece of software for drawing won't produce cool pictures if it isn't used by anybody or people who are lazy and got no talent. Likewise, no amount of programmer brilliance can make trading software work if everybody is an absolute shithead. Trading is a social phenomenon linked with production, which is also a highly social process despite what the ruling ideology tells you. A lot of what makes society work is patterns of behavior by masses of people that "libertarians" just take for granted or aren't even aware of.
The concept of proof of work in Bitcoin should really be called proof of waste, since it serves 0 other purpose besides creating the proof. There's an alternative called Gridcoin that actually uses the calculations for something else than just doing random shit, but I haven't looked deeper into it. Proof of stake doesn't look that great either, it just rewards the haves and punishes the have-nots.
I don't want to have electronic coins for their own sake, I want to obtain products and services. And I want to avoid disagreements and disappointments, and if something like that happens anyway, I want to have some avenue for dealing with scammers. Bitcoin and similar concepts don't really do anything about that. It is foolish to focus so much on technical innovation here, since they can't really solve the basic issue, which is social. Impressive tech with a shit community gets beaten by mediocre tech with a nice community.
I find blockchain to be an incredibly wasteful way of record keeping. Even if it were usedin non crypo applications it would still be wasteful. Centralization is much more energy and storage efficient than the distributed approach of blockchain.
Jaxon Watson
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Brody Bailey
SHUT THE FUCK UP HOMOSEXUAL
Jackson Young
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Ryan Walker
Will never be anything more than a speculative commodity without a state involved. It's a state's ability to tax in the form of its currency that gives real currencies stability and meaning.
Crypto"currency" is not money. Due to the wild fluctuations that it undergoes by its nature, it cannot be used to fix prices. As such, the value of commodities in general must be expressed first in terms of fiat currency–actual money–before they can be given a price in cryptocurrency. It thus falls short of the very defining quality of the money commodity. Also, from a practical standpoint, cryptocurrency is perpetually deflationary which makes it more attractive as a speculative asset than as a means of payment. This makes it spectacularly inefficient in macroeconomic terms, since more of it is thus required (due to rampant and unpredictable hoarding) to facilitate all transactions that go on at any given time. Then, of course, you have the massive shortcoming that it is utterly useless as a marker for debt. Not only do fluctuations and deflation make a mockery of the concept of interest, but the very thing that makes it attractive–anonymity–undermines any guarantee of future payment.
Cryptocurrency has one and only one practical use: making anonymous purchases of contraband.
well you should capitalise on it and make a global-coin on some of those websites or apps that let you generate your own crypto-coin and then when Zuckbook launches theirs with big media circus, a bunch of people will buy yours because they clicked wrong.
Tyler Torres
Or you could do something useful like setting up a redirect to the Communist Manifesto
Blake Powell
Starbucks
Whole Foods
Nordstrom
Basken Robbins
Regal Cinemas
Gamestop
Create and Barrel
Petco
Lowe’s
Office Depot
Luke Russell
Blockchain is more reliable and censorship resistant though.
Jonathan Gray
The problem with open source software under capitalism is that there is no structural incentive for well-organised development aimed at a broad consumer base. It rarely gets beyond a bunch of nerds tinkering with code they think is interesting, thus only creating a product fit for nerds like themselves. Under communism open source development could be very different. We could put together an institutional framework pushing free developers to make their products consumer ready.
Adrian Baker
Plenty of open source software is used in development aimed at a broad consumer base, it's just that you don't see it because it all works under the hood.
Adrian Watson
Which doesn't disagree with the other poster. Open source software is only used where normies don't have to do anything. For whatever reason, nerds make open source software hard to interact with.
Jaxson Smith
Bitcoin is great for buying drugs. Other than that I don't care about it.
Luke Thomas
I don't think the meme that FOSS has shitty UI and doesn't have as much functionality as their proprietary counterparts is that true anymore. Although i'll concede that, indeed, for some 'normie' programs (mainly those involved in audiovisual production) there really isn't a proper FOSS counterpart, IMO this has to do less with STEM people having absolutely no sense of artistic design and not bothering to interact with graphic designers (which is true) and more with the fact that production of that kind of stuff is aimed at the section of the artisan class who have a repulsion to numbers and programming and won't mind if it's a black box so long as it looks or sounds 'professional', can do basic stuff easily and crashes only every hour, so they don't see the need to make their own programs (and even then, sometimes they do try). Not to mention that, not unlike the gaming industry, the selling of small pieces of software, plugins, etc. was 'democratized' and therefore people who would otherwise write programs for their own use would instead produce them to sell for a tiny profit. Anyways sage for off-topic.
oh well then pass on the advice to somebody in the Dprk they had a crypto conference half a year ago, so they should be able to apply it, and Zuck can't sue Dprk citizens. Maybe they can use it to get a new cargoship, you know since theirs got hijacked.
Henry Young
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Ethan Harris
Imagine being this naive.
Daniel Watson
It's a test run for the cash-less currency of the banking cartel. They are testing how the public responds to a total unstable economy…one that can be freely manipulated.
Lucas Mitchell
full of ancaps. go to any place that discusses cryptos and watch them gather.
Carter Cox
there is, but its mostly done for other devs/tech companies
Ian Thompson
And its the proprietors of "closed source" like google, ms, and amazon who get billions every year and control the digital infrastructure. What you like or not is irrelevant, by using their property you give them data and thus money.
