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I know "wild west" is a popular analogy, but I fear people may forget it was awful. Native peoples were slaughtered and forced off their land. Natural resource

I know "wild west" is a popular analogy, but I fear people may forget it was awful. Native peoples were slaughtered and forced off their land. Natural resources were mined and hunted with no regard for long-term sustainability. There was slave labor, sex trafficking, and endless profiteering based on speculation or downright lies. The rich got richer and maybe some poor people got a leg up? A whole lot of people ended up poorer, sicker, or dead. So yeah, maybe cryptocurrencies are a bit like the wild west. There are ways of taking risks, exploring, and pushing boundaries that don't put vulnerable people at greater risk. As far as I can tell the wild west and cryptocurrencies aren't it.

celticninja 7y ago
Same analogy was used for the internet and look what it gave us? It is also based on the Wild West of the USA and it turned out ok, not without its own problems but I'm not sure we would be saying let's just wipe the USA off the map because when it started things were not perfect.
- jfk13 7y ago
  > internet ... it turned out ok Did it? The internet I see is largely overrun by bandits and shysters looking to make a quick buck at the expense of every sucker they can find.
m-i-l 7y ago
"I know "wild west" is a popular analogy, but I fear people may forget it was awful." Fair points about the American Wild West and lawlessness, genocide, etc. But I think a better analogy would be the medieval era. The economic similarities between cryptocurrencies and feudalism have been fairly well discussed already, e.g. the privatisation of money creation, proliferation of decentralised currency fiefdoms, the crypto-VCs and crypto-oligarchs the new feudal lords and the "hodlers" the new vassals, etc. But the potential social impact hasn't really been discussed much. If the crypto-lords, supported by their crypto-serfs, do succeed in breaking down the social contract, we do risk returning to an era when life was "nasty, brutish and short". Life in the medieval era, before the Age of Enlightenment, when magic and superstition ruled everyday life, when there was the ever-present threat of plague, pestilence and famine, makes the Wild West sound not so bad after all, and is not something I would have thought many would consider aspirational.
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celticninja 7y ago

Same analogy was used for the internet and look what it gave us? It is also based on the Wild West of the USA and it turned out ok, not without its own problems but I'm not sure we would be saying let's just wipe the USA off the map because when it started things were not perfect.

jfk13 7y ago
> internet ... it turned out ok Did it? The internet I see is largely overrun by bandits and shysters looking to make a quick buck at the expense of every sucker they can find.

m-i-l 7y ago

"I know "wild west" is a popular analogy, but I fear people may forget it was awful." Fair points about the American Wild West and lawlessness, genocide, etc. But I think a better analogy would be the medieval era. The economic similarities between cryptocurrencies and feudalism have been fairly well discussed already, e.g. the privatisation of money creation, proliferation of decentralised currency fiefdoms, the crypto-VCs and crypto-oligarchs the new feudal lords and the "hodlers" the new vassals, etc. But the potential social impact hasn't really been discussed much. If the crypto-lords, supported by their crypto-serfs, do succeed in breaking down the social contract, we do risk returning to an era when life was "nasty, brutish and short". Life in the medieval era, before the Age of Enlightenment, when magic and superstition ruled everyday life, when there was the ever-present threat of plague, pestilence and famine, makes the Wild West sound not so bad after all, and is not something I would have thought many would consider aspirational.

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