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The difference is being able to solve crypto puzzles has actual uses whereas the beads are inherently worthless. A better comparison would be if the aliens off

The difference is being able to solve crypto puzzles has actual uses whereas the beads are inherently worthless. A better comparison would be if the aliens offered us some shiny space junk. Any deal involving something that one party doesn't know or understand is probably unethical. It's also questionable whether the aboriginal people understood the implications of trading their land.

_Microft 6y ago
> The difference is being able to solve crypto puzzles has actual uses I was hinting at crypto-currency mining which is an activity that would be meaningless if it did not produce results that are rare enough to suffice as store of value. I updated the earlier comment to make that clear.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
  The mining part doesn't belong in the analogy but I think the perspective is dead on. Here's what you're missing: What is rare about the results produced in mining is something that we humans would have control over, not the aliens. Aliens showing up with literal alien technology is one of the few things that might get a cryptocurrency to update their PoW someway or another.
cnity 6y ago
Genuine question: why is it unethical? It's a trade. If it were not deemed a worthwhile trade by either party, they're free to reject the offer. If an alien appeared before me and offered me some crazy never-before-seen four dimensional shapeshifting object in exchange for a bag of coffee, I'd accept it. Was I taken advantage of? I'd be the envy of my friends, for one. Clarifying edit: I believe the Manhattan example to be unethical, but probably not the alien example. The reason I think so is because I highly doubt (given colonial history in North America) that the trade terms were particularly clear or even that the decision was theirs to make. Rambling a bit, but here's another edit. The Manhattan trade sounds particularly fishy to me. Imagine that the alien was offering you a shiny 4D object in exchange _for your house_. That would be so ridiculously unwise that I can't really accept that the residents of Manhattan island thought it a good deal.
- rz2k 6y ago
  And, what if they had demonstrated their cool raygun to you before offering to trade the 4d trinket for your house? Maybe you can at least trade the trinket for a smaller house in a worse school district, and that would be preferable to the indirect possibility of being disintegrated. On the other hand the trinket might really be more valuable than your house as exposure to some technology that doesn't exist in the economy where you live. Or, trading coffee was equivalent to smuggling silkworms out of China. Or, you sold them the Brooklyn Bridge rather than coffee or your house.
  - cnity 6y ago
    This moves the goalposts though. Before the ethical question was whether or not it is ethical to trade items with unknown value to a less advanced group. Now it's whether it is ethical to do so under threat of violence (obviously unethical).
rz2k 6y ago
The Louisiana Purchase was paid with gold. The people who sold Manhattan may not have understood the selling of territory, or been good representatives of all of Manhattan's residents, but I don't think beads are entirely the problem. Napoleon sold inhabited territory he didn't control, and had no intention of wearing all of the gold. He was going to trade it away for useful goods and services necessary to take Britain by force. What were the plans for the beads? Let's say you have no prospect of sourcing the same beads (or therefore no need for a deep water port either) yet there is an entire continent west of you that has been depopulated by disease, and the remaining population has even less access to beads. My point is that vanity and status confer real value on beads and gold, because it makes them tradable goods. Likewise legalistic notions of owning land are different than de facto control. I think the discomfort comes from the dynamics of a deal made when one party has more power.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  > ...yet there is an entire continent west of you that has been depopulated by disease... This is a rather popular myth, but most academics reject the virgin soil thesis as some combination of incomplete and simplistic. Europeans were intimately involved with precipitous population declines where they occurred in North America.
  - rz2k 6y ago
    Though 1491 was published 15 years ago, it seemed both well-sourced and restrained in its claims. Whereas there may have been dense towns up and down the east coast in the 1400s, by the 1600s when the pilgrims arrived, and when Manhattan was sold, Europeans were encountering populations with their own politics and a societies suffering from collapses and multiple catastrophes.
    - AlotOfReading 6y ago
      1491 is generally a good book, but this was not the mainstream consensus when it was written and the information available has changed somewhat in the intervening decades. There are a lot of reasons to think that virgin soil thesis specifically is an insufficient explanation. I keep a link to Livi-Bacci's [1] essay to recommend on this topic. It remains approachable without having become severely outdated. Another good (though increasingly dated) critique is Jones' Virgin Soils Revisited [2], which unfortunately goes into quite a bit of detail about the biomedical issues with VST. [1] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.00116.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.00116.x [2] https://doi.org/10.2307/3491697 https://doi.org/10.2307/3491697

_Microft 6y ago

> The difference is being able to solve crypto puzzles has actual uses I was hinting at crypto-currency mining which is an activity that would be meaningless if it did not produce results that are rare enough to suffice as store of value. I updated the earlier comment to make that clear.

bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
The mining part doesn't belong in the analogy but I think the perspective is dead on. Here's what you're missing: What is rare about the results produced in mining is something that we humans would have control over, not the aliens. Aliens showing up with literal alien technology is one of the few things that might get a cryptocurrency to update their PoW someway or another.

cnity 6y ago

Genuine question: why is it unethical? It's a trade. If it were not deemed a worthwhile trade by either party, they're free to reject the offer. If an alien appeared before me and offered me some crazy never-before-seen four dimensional shapeshifting object in exchange for a bag of coffee, I'd accept it. Was I taken advantage of? I'd be the envy of my friends, for one. Clarifying edit: I believe the Manhattan example to be unethical, but probably not the alien example. The reason I think so is because I highly doubt (given colonial history in North America) that the trade terms were particularly clear or even that the decision was theirs to make. Rambling a bit, but here's another edit. The Manhattan trade sounds particularly fishy to me. Imagine that the alien was offering you a shiny 4D object in exchange _for your house_. That would be so ridiculously unwise that I can't really accept that the residents of Manhattan island thought it a good deal.

rz2k 6y ago
And, what if they had demonstrated their cool raygun to you before offering to trade the 4d trinket for your house? Maybe you can at least trade the trinket for a smaller house in a worse school district, and that would be preferable to the indirect possibility of being disintegrated. On the other hand the trinket might really be more valuable than your house as exposure to some technology that doesn't exist in the economy where you live. Or, trading coffee was equivalent to smuggling silkworms out of China. Or, you sold them the Brooklyn Bridge rather than coffee or your house.
- cnity 6y ago
  This moves the goalposts though. Before the ethical question was whether or not it is ethical to trade items with unknown value to a less advanced group. Now it's whether it is ethical to do so under threat of violence (obviously unethical).

rz2k 6y ago

The Louisiana Purchase was paid with gold. The people who sold Manhattan may not have understood the selling of territory, or been good representatives of all of Manhattan's residents, but I don't think beads are entirely the problem. Napoleon sold inhabited territory he didn't control, and had no intention of wearing all of the gold. He was going to trade it away for useful goods and services necessary to take Britain by force. What were the plans for the beads? Let's say you have no prospect of sourcing the same beads (or therefore no need for a deep water port either) yet there is an entire continent west of you that has been depopulated by disease, and the remaining population has even less access to beads. My point is that vanity and status confer real value on beads and gold, because it makes them tradable goods. Likewise legalistic notions of owning land are different than de facto control. I think the discomfort comes from the dynamics of a deal made when one party has more power.

AlotOfReading 6y ago
> ...yet there is an entire continent west of you that has been depopulated by disease... This is a rather popular myth, but most academics reject the virgin soil thesis as some combination of incomplete and simplistic. Europeans were intimately involved with precipitous population declines where they occurred in North America.
- rz2k 6y ago
  Though 1491 was published 15 years ago, it seemed both well-sourced and restrained in its claims. Whereas there may have been dense towns up and down the east coast in the 1400s, by the 1600s when the pilgrims arrived, and when Manhattan was sold, Europeans were encountering populations with their own politics and a societies suffering from collapses and multiple catastrophes.
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    1491 is generally a good book, but this was not the mainstream consensus when it was written and the information available has changed somewhat in the intervening decades. There are a lot of reasons to think that virgin soil thesis specifically is an insufficient explanation. I keep a link to Livi-Bacci's [1] essay to recommend on this topic. It remains approachable without having become severely outdated. Another good (though increasingly dated) critique is Jones' Virgin Soils Revisited [2], which unfortunately goes into quite a bit of detail about the biomedical issues with VST. [1] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.00116.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.00116.x [2] https://doi.org/10.2307/3491697 https://doi.org/10.2307/3491697