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Today I stumbled upon a very intersting (but also lengthy) blog post discussing currencies (crypto and fiat).

Thought provoking.
I definitely recommend reading it.
If anyone has any opinions on what is being said I'd be interested to hear them.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of the article, but points out a lot of interesting things which might be very relevant now that trump was elected.

dergigi.com/2022/11/19/dear-cr

dergigi.com Dear Crypto & Fiat Bros - An open letter to the confused and dismissive. | dergigi.com The coin is dead, long live the coin!

@serapath
> I'm not entirely sure what to make of the article

It's neither a technical nor a political-economic analysis. It's a religious one.

I skimmed a couple of pages, which were so full of motivated reasoning, and so smugly and unambiguously wrong on the basics, that I stopped reading.

@strypey interesting.

yes - i do notice that he is obviously very excited, but it also seems the arguments as such are valid.

could you point out a few things that were wrong? i might have missed them.

(1/2)

@serapath
> could you point out a few things that were wrong?

I'm not sure this is a good use of your time or mine at this point. Because I consider the whole thing obviously wrong, based on a huge memeplex of premises and assumptions that are also obviously wrong.

The fact that you consider it mostly right means we have a *huge* amount of ground to cover. Given how long we were able to debate Nostr vs. the fediverse alone, we'd need to strap in for months to get anywhere with it.

@strypey hahaha 🙂

i mean the gist imho is:

no young person can afford houses or anything apart from food and rent and even that is difficult.

the money printing worldwide is through the roof since 2008 and inflation too. stuff is insanely expensive and it apways gets worse.

if you dont have a job that pays you high salaries you are disadvantaged.

bitcoin does not solve all problems, but it ends the capitalist class. we (the ppl) never had momey printers, but bitcoin has no more than 21 mio

@strypey thus... no more money printers for capitalists either.

musk from multimillionaire to richest multibillionaire in the world in like ... ~10 years?

mental. ...same for the others.

most of his businesses arent even break even.
how do they do it?
also - how do they fund war?
...money printing.

private (investment) banks & VCs, but also government ...the latter in the US wil now be trump.

...the ppl nenver benefit from it

@strypey

no money for welfare or pensions or anything to raise living standard. homeless ppl on the street. ... but ppenty of money for the military and plenty of other corrupt projects.

just like the silicon valleys od this world print to enrich investors and the other privileged capitalist and never returns real value to the ppl that outbenefits the costs.

bitcoin ends money printing, thus ends apl of this.

if you have bitcoin and we all adopt it. it will grow forever in value

@strypey ...normal ppl anyway have to work to earn any money... but if they ever earn some, it will now grow in value over time instead of lose it.

that is the gist

@strypey

that is the plausible promise based on ince tives and what is enabped IF everyone switches to bitcoin

Brics and many others who might not trust the USD anymore have incentives too.

and for 15 years bitcoin grows.
soke BRICs countries mine bitcoin with government funds. soke minor countries declared it legal tender too.
blackrock and other big companies hold significant amounts including pension funds.

in switzerland you can pay taxes with it.

..soo yeah, what do you think?

(1/?)

@serapath
> soo yeah, what do you think?

I agree with Jason Hickel;

mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/113

It's well worth listening to the full podcast. But the rash of quotes I posted in that thread will give you a taste of just how differently we think about political economy.

I wasn't joking when I said a decent discussion would take months, I was being optimistic. It would probably require us to write blog length replies to each other and paste links here.

I'm up for this, after summer ; )

Mastodon - NZOSSStrypey (@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz)"People think, oh, you just want to slow down the entire economy and this is obviously going to leave us in poverty. But degrowth actually calls for, let's identity very energy intensive and materially intensive forms of production that are also socially unnecessary. Like mostly are organised around capital accumulation and elite consumption, etc, etc." #JasonHickel, 2024 https://techwontsave.us/episode/226_how_degrowth_will_reshape_technology_w_jason_hickel (1/2) #podcasts #TechWontSaveUs #DeGrowth

(2/?)

I think we're tacking towards the same destination. But one of us is going east to get there, and one to the west. So figuring out where we are in relation to each other right now, is going to take some careful descriptions, and poring over of maps.

This would be a complete waste of your time if I was a statist (whether marxist or liberal). But I'm not. Although as an environmentalist I do see a limited role for territorial governance, including making tactical use of existing ones.

(3/?)

Having given all that context, since you're asking what I think of BitCoin, I'll be blunt. I think the same thing I've thought about it since about a decade ago. It's not tulips, it's clearly more than a passing speculation fad, but It's not money either. It's value is a pure derivative of the value of fiat currencies, particularly the USD.

(4/?)

The main reason BTC holds value, more consistently than other crypto-tokens, is that the USAmerican elite are using it to stash stolen wealth and evade taxes. When the petrodollar scam finally ends, and the US financial system goes into freefall, BTC will tank along with the USD.

But by then those US elites will have turned their holdings back into land, and gold, and other things that hold their value in an economic crash. Most of it outside the US, which will probably deepen the crash.

(5/?)

Having said all that I'm less bearish on 2 strips of bandage on the "crypto" mummy.

Blockchains are a genuinely clever data structure. When the crypto wars are over and the dust settles, I'm confident they'll turn out to work really well for a particular set of use cases. Few if any of them to do with finance.

(6/6)

In the shorter term, I am interested in blockchain tokens as payment systems, for the same reason I'm interested in *every* kind of digital payment system.

Efficient digital payments are an unsolved problem. As I learned in some depth when I had a contract helping Permaculture in NZ improve their website, including a payment gateway for accepting membership dues and event registration fees.

InterLedger protocol interests me more than BitCoin though.

interledger.org/developers/get

InterledgerInterledger Protocol®Enable seamless exchange of value across payment networks.

@strypey
i follow interledger for some time now, longer than blockchains actually, but my impression was its mostly a system to allow payments on the internet ...including bitcoin.

I did not think interledger by itself works, but havent checked it for some time now.

maybe i'm missing some essentials about how it works. i found it difficult to wrap my head around it

@strypey

i dont think bitcion needs or is supposed to use a lot of energy - because your tech wont save us link was kinda about that too

Once block rewards go to zero and all figure it is pointless to attack and block rewards go to zero, it makes more sense to stop mining unless to again correct and protrct the chain, thus it should get less energy intensive. right now its crypto war time and block rewards exist so it continues, but apart from that, i feel its main proposal is 21mio limit

(1/?)

@serapath
> Once block rewards go to zero ... it makes more sense to stop mining unless to again correct and protrct the chain, thus it should get less energy intensive

I'll admit it's been a *long* time since I read the BitCoin white paper. However ...

My understanding is that mining blocks in a Proof of Work system isn't pointless make-work, designed merely to slow the release of new coins. But rather it's the computation work that confirms transactions, preventing double-spending.

(2/?)

Which is why new tokens get harder and harder to mine as time goes on. The algorithm is trying to make sure the number of new tokens to be issued approaches but *never reaches* zero. Because if mining ever stops, the whole shamozzle comes to a shuddering halt.

So not only is mining baked in, so is its exponentially increasing computational cost, and ergo, it's energy usage. All to create a form of purely artificial scarcity that we don't really need.

It's techno-solutionist insanity.

(3/?)

From what I understand, this is why Ethereum and a bunch of other blockchains have used or pivoted to Proof of Stake (Ethereum, Cardano et al).

I don't know how this affects energy use but it comes with new problems. It basically simulates capitalism (in the original Marxist sense of the term) on top of the blockchain. Whoever starts with the most tokens has a baked in advantage. Much more so than in PoW systems, where pools of holding power can be checked by pools of computation power.

(4/?)

The holy war between card-carrying BitCoiners, and the crypto protestants interested in wider use of blockchains, is IMHO explained by my conspiracy theory of BTC as a vector for elites hiding stolen wealth.

Their strategy doesn't work if people accept that BitCoin was a Proof of Concept, never intended to be used as day-to-day infrastructure. If usage bleeds off and spreads across a range of tokens, BTC loses its effective monopoly as a jurisdiction-agnostic store of value.

@strypey

bitcoin is extremely transparent, tokens can be tracked forever, thus especially if somebody is very rich - its not a good way of hiding transactions imho. its worse than the current monetary system with obviously allows for plenty of criminality already

(1/?)

@serapath
> bitcoin is extremely transparent, tokens can be tracked forever

True. Good to see people are moving on from the 'BitCoin is anonymous' nonsense ; )

> its not a good way of hiding transactions imho. its worse than the current monetary system

It's very much not. If you've ever tried to move money between countries without using crypto, you'll know that fiat currencies have a huge number of checks and balances (AML, KYC, etc), which make it hard to move large volumes offshore

@strypey i personally dont have large amounts to move around, but i am pretty sure criminals know how to do it.

buy something... shares? cash? or a car or diamonds or gold or whatever? or set up multiple businesses and sell a business from Mafia A to Mafia B for under the price in Country 1 and sell another business from Mafia B to Mafia A in country 2 for a bigher price... and yay... you transferred the diference.

I mean criminals will be criminals with or without crypto.

(1/2)

@serapath
> i personally dont have large amounts to move around, but i am pretty sure criminals know how to do it

They find ways, financial regulators find ways to mitigate them. It's an arms race.

> I mean criminals will be criminals with or without crypto

True. Blockchains are not, in themselves, better suited to financial shenanigans than fine art, or any other kind of unsecured asset, whose value is purely speculative.

(2/2)

What makes crypto-tokens different is;

a) being relatively new and mostly unregulated.

b) having a network of partisans who are highly allergic to any attempt to regulate them, to make them harder to use for financial shenanigans

This network of partisans forms part of the speculative value of crypto-tokens as an asset class. It's a built-in hedge against the risk of new regulation exposing and stopping tax evasion, wealth misappropriation, etc, using cross-border crypto trade.

@strypey

I do think it is a big issue that web3/altcoin are unregulated. They are essentially all securities (unlike bitcoin) and they are all scams - if nothing else you can see how all their price histories clearly reflect presale, pump and dump after which the price never really recovers.

You also notice it if you ever try to engage in those ecosystems. They are a big fat lie. All of web3 is just new unregulated money printers for capitalists.

@serapath
> They are essentially all securities (unlike bitcoin) and they are all scams

I agree with all of this, except "unlike BitCoin".

@strypey
a security means its controlled by single person or a small group who can significantly influence... or basically steal/rugpull ppl.

this is difficult with bitcoin.

nibody can print and nobody has such a significant control over it to change the value.

ethereum is controlled by the cabal of founders and early investors who control the code and established a culture of constant arbitrary changes.

@serapath
> a security means its controlled by single person or a small group who can significantly influence

Who told you that?

"A security is a tradable financial asset. The term commonly refers to any form of financial instrument, but its legal definition varies by jurisdiction."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security

A security is basically anything people buy that isn't;

* consumable

* real estate, or some other real world asset

* a unit of currency

BTC is none of these, ergo it's a security.

en.wikipedia.orgSecurity (finance) - Wikipedia
Forbearance

@strypey @serapath nah bro they have like a Howie test and shit, real estate can be "a security", the naming rights to my butt can be "not a security" and "uncalled for".