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I am often asked if I will “return to cryptocurrency”

514 points by null_object 5y ago

alessandroetc 5y ago
now tell us what you really think...
domatic1 5y ago
Jackson Palmer could have been a billionaire had he not sold his dogecoins.
- advisedwang 5y ago
  That's kind of his point. If he's able to become a billionaire on a joke coin, then that money has come out of the pockets of people buying into it.
Niglodonicus 5y ago
Extremely based and succinct rundown of why crypto is trash and should be avoided at all costs. Yes, the original vision was noble and worthwhile, but like nearly every nice theoretical idea, it was co-opted into the capitalist ecosystem to be just another vassal of greed and corruption, with some throwback wild west vibes.
johnwheeler 5y ago
Absolute anarchism is the base state of governance. All regulating and deregulating evolves out of anarchy. Why should crypto break that cycle?
okareaman 5y ago
My feelings of meh about crypto have nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the fact that I can't think of a problem it solves in my life or any way it makes my life easier, more enjoyable or more interesting.
- nwsm 5y ago
  It has made losing money more enjoyable for me
dandare 5y ago
So many attack on capitalism ITT. I wish we could have rational discussion about whatever word problem while at the same time not trash the idea of private ownership, competitive markets and investment for profit. Mind you, every successful country today runs on a MIXED economic system, and communism (or anarchy for that matter) failed every time it was tried.
traloid 5y ago
Wait, so how does he expect to fight capitalism, if all he'd be allowed to do was always logged and observed bank wire transfers? Thats rather shortsighted.
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  A lot of people thought that, at the dawn of the crypto era. I think an effective way to fight capitalism would be to rethink the banking system. We need public banks which will invest in the productive sector like manufacturing instead of speculating. That's how banks used to operate actually. Well yes crypto definitely won't get us there right now.
  - dgb23 5y ago
    > That's how banks used to operate actually. I assume this is not easily generalized but I'm curious to know more about this, what the context is, what the historical turning points are.
    - Synaesthesia 5y ago
      Economist Michael Hudson has written about it, his point of comparison is usually the german banks of the 19th century which financed rapid development of their industry to US banks post 1970 which mostly speculated and invested in Finance and Real Estate (FIRE sector)
      - dgb23 5y ago
        Thank you, he seems to have very distinct and interesting views!
- totalZero 5y ago
  I would appreciate some clarification here. First, capitalism doesn't necessarily require breaking the law, and capitalists use the banking system to a great extent. Second, many cryptocurrency transactions are logged and more discoverable ("observed") than bank transfers. How do you fight capitalism by avoiding wire transfers?
nikanj 5y ago
Cryptos make rich people richer, and are sold to poor people the same way lottery tickets are. ”Look at old Pete here, he used to be a loser like you, but he believed and now he’s got $millions in the bank”
- adventured 5y ago
  > and are sold to poor people the same way lottery tickets are. Crypto has never been heavily marketed to poor people. They don't have the capital to buy in at any meaningful scale. The lottery ticket appeal is that you might win $10k or $1m off of a $1 or $2 ticket. There is no mass scale marketing effort pushing $1/$2 of Bitcoin or Dogecoin to poor people with that con-pitch. To this day poor people have barely any stake in the crypto world. For crypto, the lottery players are the small contingent of middle class persons that bother with it (which still isn't very many). Actual lottery tickets on the other hand, are prominently marketed to poor people all over the place, front and center in many common stores. Walk into an average convenience store or liquor store, you're telling me they have a large display of dozens of cryptos with updating price quotes appealing to poor people about how big the prizes are and how they can win a million dollars with a $2 ticket? Nope.
  - alex504 5y ago
    They are marketed to people in my experience who are relatively poor. I know a guy who has a problem making rent who has all of his savings (about 1k) in dogecoin or other gambles like individual stocks. I have also met a ton of service people like bartenders and waiters who are involved in crypto. I have also met quite a few software engineers who are not poor but don' have nearly the level of wealth of the people manipulating these markets who have gotten involved with this stuff. These people aren't poor but relative to the scammers they are, and when they lose money in hurts. I know one engineer for example who lost his life savings on some alt coins in this mid thirties.
  - joshuahaglund 5y ago
    I know liquor stores with crypto ATMs with displays. If you log into paypal, you can buy crypto. They're absolutely marketing to people with not much money.
throwawayswede 5y ago
FFS can we stop politicizing everything? Crypto is right wing? Is this guy for real! What a weird and delusional thing to say. If anything, this just shows that propaganda can get smart people as well as dumb people. Probably smart people are even more subject to it because they think on some level that they're somehow immune.
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  Cryptocurrency is pretty damn close to the libertarian ideal and a lot of the community embraces that. I wouldn't call it "right wing" in the context of the USA left/right though.
  - throwawayswede 5y ago
    Agreed. I have no problem with that alignment as a political philosophy. But calling it "right wing" in US context implies the typical left/right divisive/alienating politicization. The entire thread is very delusional.
    - jsbdk 5y ago
      It's from someone who uses "right wing" as a slur... Of course it's very delusional.
- qeternity 5y ago
  Right wing is not politicized. It reflects an ideological scale. If he had characterized it as Republican, then sure. But calling crypto right wing is pretty fair.
  - throwawayswede 5y ago
    In the US, saying right one is synonymous with republican, which is wrong, but again, that's the mainstream view.
    - 5y ago
pearjuice 5y ago
I still don't get why people use Twitter as a blog or think it's a good content platform. It's uncomfortable to read and scroll through. It's not even clear if you reached the end as for some reason a different list of tweets started and I had to click "Show this thread" (which I already opened via this permalink?) to read the rest.
- pennaMan 5y ago
  It's where all the infinite feed dopamine fiends hang out, so the huge potential audience beats out any UX issues.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
This is about as silly as the Soviet Union banning the study of genetics as a "bourgeois pseudoscience", dismissing it as "anti-Marxist".
- pogorniy 5y ago
  Your comment is about as silly as the Soviet Union banning the study of genetics as a "bourgeois pseudoscience", dismissing it as "anti-Marxist". If that can't convince you, I can't imagine how you imagine your argument work.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    I think we're not understanding each other here. Let me rephrase this. Science and technology shouldn't have a political valence, and efforts to politicize science can end quite badly, like the Soviet Union banning the study of genetics on the grounds of it being "anti-Marxist". Technologies and their use can be debated on ethical grounds, but to assign valences is silly and potentially harmful.
    - benwad 5y ago
      I don't think anyone is taking issue with the Blockchain technology itself, it's about what cryptocurrency manifests in the real world. That's an argument about economics, not technology.
      - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
        But why? Not every cryptocurrency has rich-get-richer dynamics. Lots of chains have blessed authories or validators involved, and don't incentive holding money. Bitcoin and Ethereum are like this. But there's so much more out there.
    - pogorniy 5y ago
      > I think we're not understanding each other here. Let me rephrase this. That's much better. Because to understand what you meant by example one needed to know reasoning behind the example. > Science and technology shouldn't have a political valence It should not. I agree. Do you agree that atomic bomb is political? At which sate atomic bomb development stops being science and starts being political? At theory level? Experiments? First device? First use of device? At some stage we start observing that cryptocurrencies impact start having great consequences regardless of the science behind them. Great volume of electricity, centralization of power at hands of middlemen, promises of great future where benefits are reaped by early adopters already today. Some people feel like looking at cryptocurrencies and blockchain purely from technology perspective, advocating for them, brings more harm than good. And I can understand this position of the author well.
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piokoch 5y ago
What a strange set of opinions, not that I find cryptocurrencies as particularly valuable right now, besides cases like having something reasonable in a country with huge inflation or crappy banking system that makes online payments and bank transfers hard. Crypto misses basic services like ability to revert transaction in case of mistake, charge backs, etc. But: "I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents" Wow. Right. Wing. "Despite claims of “decentralization”, the cryptocurrency industry is controlled by a powerful cartel of wealthy figures who, with time, have evolved to incorporate many of the same institutions tied to the existing centralized financial system they supposedly set out to replace." Ok, sounds a bit like conspiracy theory (who are those wealthy figures? Elon Musk was playing with cryptos, yes, but this is Elon Musk, and he does all kind of funky stuff like electric cars or space travel), but yes, at some point cryptos might be somehow institutionalized and it will be done to avoid issues that crypto currencies have. Oddly enough the author lists them in the same twit: "Lose your savings account password? Your fault. Fall victim to a scam? Your fault. Billionaires manipulating markets? They’re geniuses." So, actually it would not hurt to "incorporate many of the same institutions tied to the existing centralized financial system". The bad thing that happened to cryptos was that they become an investment instrument, not the mean of payment. They were supposed to be "a better gold" of old times. But right now everything is an investment instrument. The other thing are technical issues that bitcoin has (other cryptos are small players right now), slow transactions, energy consumption and the risk that someone finally manages to gather 51% of digging power and will take over the network.
grahamplace 5y ago
It might be useful for the title of this post to clarify that this is the co-creator of Dogecoin, it’s not mentioned anywhere on the linked thread itself but is very relevant framing for the content. I didn’t realize who this was until I saw this thread linked elsewhere with that context https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/14/dogecoin-co-creator-jackson-palmer-criticizes-the-crypto-industry.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/14/dogecoin-co-creator-jackson-...
- throwawayswede 5y ago
  Funny how he started something, then change his mind about, then started advocating how everyone who still haven't changed their mind is wrong.
  - oefnak 5y ago
    What is wrong with changing your mind? If you never do that, how can you learn anything?
  - killingtime74 5y ago
    That’s entirely consistently no?
    - throwawayswede 5y ago
      No. It's hypocritical at best.
      - bendiksolheim 5y ago
        Are people not allowed to change their opinion? It seems to me that this is a person who once believed something, but later has gotten proof that what they believed was wrong and then changed their mind. This is a good thing, not at all hypocritical.
        yladiz 5y ago
ur-whale 5y ago
TL;DR: "It doesn't align with my politics or belief system" CTRL-W
neilsense 5y ago
> After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology We need a bingo for when and how people include 'right-wing' into things for likes.
- draw_down 5y ago
  Yeah. Flagged this story for politics.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I don't see you arguing that it's wrong or inaccurate though.
  - serf 5y ago
    rather than arguing which side things fall on i'd rather like to mention that painting every aspect of life as either 'left' or 'right' is at best a vast over-simplification of life and surrounding politics, and at worst a willful method by which to gain mind-share or allies to a cause. it's rarely useful for any level of civil discourse; it's general usage these past few years is to inflame a side or draw a border between Them and Us.
- Deukhoofd 5y ago
  Isn't the entire point of cryptocurrencies that it's right wing? It's built on the concept of market competition, and the complete lack of government restrictions. It's an incredibly neoliberal concept, which has been the economic policy of the right for decades.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Isn't the entire point of cryptocurrencies that it's right wing? No, its libertarian, not right-wing. They are basically on orthogonal axes (the US’s superficially unidimensional partisan divide and the fact that the right-wing party is the more prone to try to sell itself to libertarians may confuse Americans about this, though.)
RedComet 5y ago
He discredits himself almost immediately when he asserts that right wing views and capitalism are synonymous. But more importantly, he was only involved in publishing a meme-copy of bitcoin, so who cares at all what he thinks? Especially after he made fortune off of the thing he's denouncing.
casi 5y ago
I guess there creator of dogecoin always saw it as a joke, so this isn’t surprising. Cryptocurrency is about choice and voice. Coordination and communication tools. There are American right wingers with their tokens and systems they’ve designed. But there is also things like CirclesUBI which is much more socialist and gaining momentum in the Berlin indie art scene. Of course if you aren’t engaging with the space you just see speculation and hear about hacks and crime and people who became millionaires. what you will hear about is what Silicon Valley vcs pour millions of dollars into things they want you hearing about. But actually engaging with devs in the space and the different subcultures you can find people you get along with. You can find communities and daos doing things you are interested in and share your political alignment. Most people I know working in the space have European left wing leanings. Also a reminder. You don’t have to spend any money to be involved. Write code, join chat rooms, work on things you enjoy and want to make. That is going to obviously be much more rewarding than gambling on the back of VCs bags.
abiro 5y ago
I think he describes the current crypto landscape accurately, but I'm becoming more and more bullish on the long term decentralized finance vision. Imagine solving open source funding by OSS developers selling insurance for their projects on decentralized programmatic insurance markets.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  When does this “insurance” they sell pay out? What risk are they insuring against and how is it underwritten? I think this doesn’t make any sense but maybe I just don’t understand.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > selling insurance for their projects on decentralized programmatic insurance markets One of the problems with crypto is people treating it like fairy dust. There are remarkably few, perhaps vanishingly so, business models that do not work centralised that do decentralised. This is one. What is the pay-out? Who makes what guarantees? How are they enforced? If a business plan requires crypto—as opposed to being enhanced by it—it’s probably dead on arrival.
  - abiro 5y ago
    This is a super undeveloped idea, but I was thinking about something along these lines: 1. OSS users pay a monthly premium for insurance on the software (incl transient dependencies) that is critical to their business. 2. Part of the cash flow from premiums is pooled into an insurance fund that pays interest to OSS developers. The rest is payed out directly to OSS devs. 3. If there is a bug in an insured OSS project, policy holders have a claim on the pool. The magnitude of the claim depends on the severity of the bug and the time it remains open. Future payouts to the OSS project with the bug are directed to the fund until the payed out insurance benefit is covered. The hardest part is coming up with a decentralized consensus mechanism for establishing the existence, severity and resolution of bugs, but there is a lot of experimentation going on in DeFi to solve similar problems. As to why it should be decentralized, it's the same reason OSS is decentralized: you don't want a single actor to control OSS funding. edit: wording
golemiprague 5y ago
Why he thinks fraud and corruptions are the worst parts of the capitalist system? Aren't they just bad practices with no relation to the system in which the people who practice it operate?
vmception 5y ago
He helped make Dogecoin in 15 minutes, at a time when people thought “launching a blockchain” was complicated. Well 8 years later people still think that, but that’s not the point. A belief system wasn’t necessary back then, only cognition. People should stop exalting him just like he asks.
- rvz 5y ago
  > He helped make Dogecoin in 15 minutes It is literally a fork of Bitcoin with extra tweaks and a famous internet meme. Any Joe, Jane and, Jimbob can do just that in 15 minutes, hence the reason why the cryptocurrency market is still in its infantile stage and very unregulated. 8 years later its gotten easier for the retail investors signing up at major exchanges to buy it right now. The whales who accumulated however...
- Tenoke 5y ago
  >He helped make Dogecoin in 15 minutes, at a time when people thought “launching a blockchain” was complicated. It wasn't at that point though. Litecoin was already created by tweaking btc and I was seeing people on irc do the same for fun with ease. Launching a btc-copy with different params wasn't the big achievment he had, attaching it to the right meme and getting people into it was.
  - neilv 5y ago
    IIRC, Litecoin seemed like significant work, but after that, you could create a Scrypt altcoin by copying a source tree and doing not much more than changing the name (and pre-mining, because that's probably the point).
    - doomroot 5y ago
      If I recall a bitcoin core dev back in the day made a website where you could just change a few variables: name, block time, block size, block reward, etc. And it would spit out your customized fork of bitcoin core. This is basically how easy it is to make an erc20 token these days.
anonu 5y ago
DeFi does not exist without CeFi. So I agree wholeheartedly that there is an inherent problem with the cryptocurrency world today. But I'm still fascinated by decentralized concepts and the explosion of creativity around this. I think even if 1 percent of what's being created has long lasting implications for our world, then we've done well...
Synaesthesia 5y ago
When England went back onto the gold standard in 1925 it was a form of extreme austerity. That's because the govt can't easily create more money supply if needed. That's similar to the problem with BTC and cryptos with limited availablity. It just favours the early entrants.
- seibelj 5y ago
  "Creating more money" is simply diluting existing holders of money. Capital != money, value != money, productivity != money. Printing more money does not create wealth - it redistributes it to preferred recipients. The gold standard reinforces economic discipline. America and Britain were able to inflate more effectively than others because of having a monopoly on reserve currencies and owning the rails of international settlement, by requiring all countries to settle in their currencies. Essentially they exported their inflation to all other countries to benefit their own citizens.
  - chronolitus 5y ago
    This is true and I'm surprised at how little it is discussed and how long it took me to understand this simple fact. if you have a bunch of participants with money, and create new money,either you 1) give each participant an equal amount (this drives relative wealth towards equality) 2) give each participant an amount proportional to their wealth (result: nothing changes, relative wealth of all participants is the same) 3) you give to some and not others (all youve done is funnel relative wealth from some to others, while pretending you have created money) in real life, 'money creation' is almost exclusively 3)
    - spiralx 5y ago
      Money is created by banks when they loan money, so none of those apply.
      - chronolitus 5y ago
        I agree with the first part. But as long as money is created, it has to be either 1), 2), or 3). And in the case of banks, it's certainly not 1) or 2).
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noxer 5y ago
"I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing..." No need to further read. After such nonsense the opinion of this person has no credibility left. If you have to put politics into every f*** thing you express then I pass on anything you have to say.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  If he'd said "inherently Evil" it wouldn't have communicated the thought as effectively to his audience. I don't know (or care) what this person politics are, but there's something to be said for speaking the language your audience is listening in.
  - noxer 5y ago
    I can disagree with someone calling something "evil" but there is no disagreement possible if people feel the need to mix politics or other unrelated topics in their way to express an opinion. Ccryto can not be right-wing just as it can not be sexist or racist or whatever nonsense people come up with to "describe" it. It just as absurd as if someone would say HTTP is right-wing, browsers are inherently racist and HTML sexist. >I don't know (or care) what this person politics are, but there's something to be said for speaking the language your audience is listening in. Neither do I but its on twitter so hes probably catering to the general twitter audience.
argvargc 5y ago
Guy: 1) Holds tremendously narrow view of cryptocurrency & blockchain applications. 2) Holds some fair criticism of various elements of that narrow view. 3) Incorrectly expands that criticism to cover the entirety of the space that he therefore reveals himself to not understand. Conclusion: narrow-minded, arrogant guy comes to false conclusions based on ignorance.
cblconfederate 5y ago
hm, yet crypto allowed him to "exit" the industry while the traditional system doesnt; and for all the talk of "control" are people really coerced to use a cryptocoin? > Lose your savings account password? Your fault. > Fall victim to a scam? Your fault. > Billionaires manipulating markets? They’re geniuses. So the problem is that there's no 'daddy state' offering to save people from themselves. I guess nobody offers that, you 're on your own currently but nobody also pretends like it's safe either. In the end these rants are like an open admission that "people are stupid and they don't even know it and need to be protected at all times". This is well known but technology has a chance to change it by empowering and arming the individual
fidesomnes 5y ago
One of the biggest losers in the cryptocurrency space is back for just "one more tweet."
Zababa 5y ago
Interesting read. One thing I don't understand is that he still presents decentralization as something to strive for (as lots of people in the crypto space do), but then he criticizes the consequences of decentralization: > Despite claims of “decentralization”, the cryptocurrency industry is controlled by a powerful cartel of wealthy figures who, with time, have evolved to incorporate many of the same institutions tied to the existing centralized financial system they supposedly set out to replace. > Cryptocurrency is like taking the worst parts of today's capitalist system (eg. corruption, fraud, inequality) and using software to technically limit the use of interventions (eg. audits, regulation, taxation) which serve as protections or safety nets for the average person. From what I understand, people in that space seem to think that because something is decentralized, people will automatically distribute equally between themselves power and authority. That seems really naive. As with any "free for all" type of space, the law of the strongest applies. The "cartel" that he speaks of taking control of crypto is a natural consequence of decentralization. An important part of central authorities in the modern world is to guarantee some freedom from exploitive forces. Democracy, unions, laws are a way to achieve that goal. I wonder if it's a consequence of people thinking about the state as fundamentally bad? I often see criticism from some people, both left and right-wing, that the state is good for nothing, but it seems clear (in the view of the author) who wins when the state can't exercise its authority. Maybe it's time for some people to review their views about decentralization and its consequences.
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  The leftists critique of states stretches back to the origins of leftist philosophy; it’s not a newfangled thing.
- gverrilla 5y ago
  I don't think there's a powerful cartel controlling the industry. If you'd imagine that, they would be controlling the market, not the industry per se, it's production.. Anyhow, most industries are controlled by few players outside of crypto. Perhaps the right question would be if the existence of crypto as a new component of the system can somehow decrease injustice in the system as a whole. I don't know the answer, but I would gamble it's No - for now. The way I see it in the near future (maximum 10y) we'll get obvious reasons to answer Yes, though.
rvz 5y ago
> After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology ? > It doesn't align with my politics or belief system, and I don't have the energy to try and discuss that with those unwilling to engage in a grounded conversation. Like himself. Given what he just said about cryptocurrency being 'inherently right-wing' which that is completely baseless. Obviously it is heavily manipulated and it is not exclusive to cryptocurrencies, just like forex and the stock market but the main difference is that it is highly unregulated. I expect more exchanges to use more than just KYC, AML checks and the rise of implementing CBDCs to drive cryptocurrencies past the wild west stage that it is today. Good luck trying to ignore it because it is here to stay. (Even if you are the creator of a meme coin)
- mypastself 5y ago
  Yeah, I suppose you could associate the tech with the libertarian/anarchist crowd (which are nonetheless a minority in that space nowadays, compared to those simply interested in making money), but right-wing? If he was truly willing to engage in the discussion, you’d at least expect him to look up some definitions.
  - 71a54xd 5y ago
    I guess the question here is if he conflates being a statist crony with "right-wing". Clearly he misses the fact that the fed is controlled by people who don't even delineate their political affiliation and only seek to control and manipulate. It's really quite funny that this guy wrote this whole self-abating sob story on twitter...
SyzygistSix 5y ago
I am unclear how audits, regulation, taxation serve as protections or safety nets for the average person. Seems like the kind of thing large corporations can manipulate and avoid whereas individuals cannot. I'm not a crypto person but it seems like crypto at least has the potential to offer some of those protections to individuals that were once the province of the powerful.
- helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  You can put fiet money ($€£) in a western bank and earn a fixed interest and be sure you can get it out when you want, if you forget your account number or password you’ll be ok and if the bank goes bust, you’ll get (upto ~$250K in US and similar around the world). You can spend those dollars instantly anywhere around the world - as cash or online. Buy Bitcoin purchasing items is a pain, the value may be higher or lower than last week or yesterday, seemingly manipulated by unknown whales totally legally. If the money is in an unregulated exchange it can be lost with little recompense. Buy one of the more exotic coins you may make a fortune or loose everything overnight because of a coding error or just because.
- Hokusai 5y ago
  > I am unclear how audits, regulation, taxation serve as protections or safety nets for the average person. There is much literature about the topic that explain why regulation and audits are needed to protect not only the average person but the whole economy. You can find some information here https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/28-2-bank-regulation/ https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/28-2-ban... The "taxation" part is mention as cryptocurrencies are used for tax-avoidance and fraud. - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/31/cryptocurrency-poses-a-significant-risk-of-tax-evasion.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/31/cryptocurrency-poses-a-signi... - https://www.ft.com/content/aa9834a1-8e3a-46c9-a2d8-13b10882c1c9 https://www.ft.com/content/aa9834a1-8e3a-46c9-a2d8-13b10882c... ... Banking, at high level, is not complicated and it is very interesting to see how regulation keeps a safe and sound economic system and how failures to regulate make markets collapse. For a historical perspective you can study The Great Depression, as many regulations were created to avoid similar systematic failures.
ballenf 5y ago
He calls "corruption" "one of the worst parts of capitalism". Maybe I should have paid more attention in class and less to Civilization, but I did think that corruption was not generally seen as much of a problem with capitalism as more centralized economic systems. Corruption is always a problem everywhere, but it would seem to get worse with greater centralization of control.
- DasIch 5y ago
  Capitalism and centralization of control are not incompatible. The entire point of platforms is to centralize control up to the point of having full control over proprietary markets like Apple with it's App Store.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  I haven't ever seen a more glaring example of corruption as the Soviet black markets for food in the 1980s. By the late 1980s, Soviet price controls and centralized distribution rules, incentivized black market growth by providing opportunity for tremendous profit. Ultimately, it overtook the regular gov't markets - resulting in the famous empty shelves we iconically associate with the collapse of the USSR. Most gov't officials participated in these black markets. This also led to massive organized crime groups, which became so profitable, that they became the oligarchs who ultimately took over the country when the gov't collapsed from bankruptcy. The notion that capitalism creates corruption is laughable with these massive recent examples.
  - adventured 5y ago
    > The notion that capitalism creates corruption is laughable with these massive recent examples. The most corrupt nations throughout modern history have always been on the Socialist spectrum, without exception. Including National Socialist Germany, Communist Cuba, Communist China, Communist Vietnam, Socialist Iraq, Communist North Korea, Theocratic-Socialist Iran, Socialist Syria, Socialist Zimbabwe, Socialist Venezuela as well as Soviet Russia, all of which were/are Socialist derivatives.
    - 5y ago
poorjohnmacafee 5y ago
Well it's easy to argue that most crypto projects are get rich quick schemes by their creators. A lot of people haven't even heard of OneCoin [1], but I think it's what most of the crypto community actually looks like when you remove the whole "progressive" or "building future" branding. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64xcgvEJ3Ys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64xcgvEJ3Ys
eingaeKaiy8ujie 5y ago
Cryptocurrencies are an open-source alternative to the traditional financial system. There are problems of course, but remember that this industry is still very young. Unless crypto gets totally banned or over-regulated, it's going to have a bright future.
Passthepeas 5y ago
People should read "The Internet of Money" by Andreas Antonopolous, in it he describes how much of the criticisms levied against crypto are similar to criticism levied against the internet in the early days. Many of the internets early adopters were actual criminals, and its detractors talked about how it "couldn't scale", was bad for the environment, etc. What sort erroneous conclusion might you have drawn during the tech bubble at the turn of the century? Similar criticism were pushed on the automobile, the airplane, and even electricity. It might not seem like now, but we are still in the early days of crpytocurrency, being this overly hung up on the current state of things is missing the forest for the trees.
- zzzeek 5y ago
  > Many of the internets early adopters were actual criminals the early adopters were college students and professors since that's where it was available. as far as "criminals" it would have only been those pesky "hackers" who were mostly acting from curiosity. there wasnt any big opportunity for financial fraud on the "internet" because there was no commerce on the internet. the commercialization had to happen first and that required massive buy-in long before criminals could have any fertile ground to operate upon. > and its detractors talked about how it "couldn't scale", ive never seen such a thing, in the early 90s most of us didnt even have terms like that queued up > was bad for the environment, never heard of this
- esja 5y ago
  I was an early adopter and I don’t recall anyone saying the internet was bad for the environment, or that it couldn’t scale. Quite the opposite actually! And there was very little fraud or criminality - most new applications and ideas were genuinely innovative and immediately and obviously beneficial. Yea the financial hype took over in the late nineties but the fundamentals were always sound and the potential was obvious. And over time that potential grew, it didn’t shrink like it has for cryptocurrency.
  - doomroot 5y ago
    Is a sovereign nation adopting bitcoin as a payment method an example of Bitcoin’s shrinking potential?
jl2718 5y ago
He has a lot of good points, but, he leads with a political trope. This is a sure-fire way to lose most of your audience from the start. His primary argument is “A is bad”. But then he adds “B is bad, and A is associated with B”. But B is tautologically half the audience, so you lose them, and this becomes support for A. Then there are those that think A is good, but B is bad. Presumably this is the intended audience. You just told them that they are associated with B, so you start out with ideological antagonism instead of making a direct point. You are left with only those that hate both A and B, and of course they will re-tweet, but in this case, it’s still just a bunch of opinions, no personal account or facts that could be used to direct change. In the bigger picture, cryptocurrency is a confluence of technologies that are not going away. It can be used for almost any ideology, and some of those will be popular and some of those will be violently opposed and some will be made illegal. But, in the long run, the one that will survive, for any specific group, is the one that facilitates the strongest social organization. So ultimately, opinions of ideological taste, one way or another, are irrelevant. Let me reiterate: I think he has some reasonable points within his opinions, and we should consider them even if we disagree.
- vendiddy 5y ago
  What points do you feel are reasonable? I'm having trouble digesting his rationale. He makes many claims without further explanation. Was looking for a perspective on how crypto could be bad for society, but was a disappointed in reading it.
  - jl2718 5y ago
    I find tweets 3 (centralization) and 4 (predation) to be particularly incisive. This may not be obvious to everybody, because these things are meant to be well-hidden. Although, I will say, those points massively contradict with the second tweet in ways that are even less obvious, but significantly more enraging if they are well-understood. If you look into all of his complaints, the main offenders are the institutions that have been given some form of legal monopoly to do so.
maverick-iceman 5y ago
Crypto is exciting. There is the price argument which I think will remain , given how historically inflation scares people. But it's just exciting as a social enviornment. All the young kids who are into crypto today...they might move on tomorrow, but the connections you can make while you are in this amazing melting pot will last forever. And it's not like they are dumb connections either.. Crypto is a college experience 2.0 ,or... for those who are not American the chance to experience US College environment for the first time This is why Musk jumped in it head first before doing a 180 after realizing the fact that this thing was in fact not built by him and thus had to be destroyed. The various flavors of crypto can be compared with the different colleges. Bitcoin...I imagine it as a weird mix of University of Miami, Stanford, MIT and George Mason
- IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
  You do know that other countries have colleges and universities as well, right? And the experience is quite similar for most of them: first time living away from parents, first serious relationships, first time taking LSD, and finally starting to appreciate the intricacies of French or the Citric Acid Cycle. None of which strikes as particularly close to what I gather is the daily life of cryptobros.
  - maverick-iceman 5y ago
    You miss the Us v Them rivalries with other schools which explodes in things like the Ohio State v. Michigan 'Civil War'. It's not the same thing without top notch sports. Other countries don't have that. If you are a 'cryptobro' with a decent following that's not that different than being the QB of Michigan or Ohio State given the median age of people which are into BTC. Okay there are very few girls and no cheerleading...that's a bummer, but it's still early , maybe they'll arrive now that Bitcoin Central has moved to Miami
rmtech 5y ago
I'd also be mad if I sold all my dogecoin for a used car in 2013.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
Jackson Palmer is a self-absorbed grifter. He did next to nothing in cryptocurrency. He forked Bitcoin, changed a parameter, and added a Doge meme picture to the wallet/website. That amounts to zero technical achievement, and one good utilization of a single meme at the right place and time in history. Now he acts as an intellectual authority on the crypto space, and uses whatever legitimacy that gives him to smear any one involved in it with his typical left-wing takes on the world, that include cheerleading for the state and its totalitarian mandates while trying to stigmatize any one who objects to them. Hey moral elitism is a fun activity for under-achievers like Palmer, who recently tweeted: "Elon Musk is and always will be, a self-absorbed grifter" [1] To the naive, this kind of cynical anti-rich ad hominem makes Palmer sound profound, while those he smears, like Musk, actually drive the world forward. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-creater-elon-musk-self-absorbed-grifter-jackson-palmer-2021-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-creater-elon-musk-s...
- intuitionist 5y ago
  Elon Musk certainly drives the world forward, and occasionally into and under a parked trailer
Geee 5y ago
I think he never really understood Bitcoin, which led him to create Dogecoin and now this. He is right about the whole "crypto industry", but that has nothing to do with Bitcoin. There's an ideology called Bitcoin maximalism or toxic Bitcoin maximalism, which defends the truth and the ideals of cryptocurrency against this greedy and manipulative "crypto industry" he is talking about. Bitcoin maximalism is basically the free market / "hyper-capitalist" answer to all the scamming that's going on in the industry. It's like the early Internet. There were a lot of scams on the Internet, and also early Internet companies which were pump&dump-scams. It gets better when people get more educated and learn not to trust anyone. I'm not sure what are his suggestions, but authoritarianism certainly doesn't solve this issue.
question000 5y ago
Cryptocurrency like all right-wing idealism is based on a belief in the supernatural. They preform these ritual calculations and anoint each other with imaginary tokens, claim value has been created and write that off on their taxes, the big difference with crypto over the regular voodoo is that you can actually make money doing it even if you don't believe the fundamentals are sound. You attract the worse of both worlds, the crazy idealists and the complete scam artists and when you get to the core of what crypto is really about those groups are basically the same.
ernopp 5y ago
"You can believe that 99% of crypto is bullshit while also believing that the 1% that isn't will change the world" - Preston Byrne
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Bitcoin has been around longer than the iPhone. When it started I think we were all still in Windows XP. If Bitcoin hasn’t yet discovered a killer app, when will it? But yeah yeah, it took tens of thousands of years between humans seeing lightning start fires and the charcoal grill… if it took that long, I'm sure it will be tens of thousands of years before Bitcoin finds a use. Better keep buying and holding!
  - carlosdp 5y ago
    That’s kind of like saying “the Nokia brick phone has been around forever, if it hasn’t discovered a killer app, when will it?” Bitcoin was just the first blockchain to really find adoption, it’s nowhere near where 99% of the innovation in crypto is happening today. Far more interesting projects that are providing actual value today.
  - cercatrova 5y ago
    > Bitcoin has been around longer than the iPhone Bitcoin was released in 2009. The iPhone was released in 2007.
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
      Well, it was pretty early days: Bitcoin was released a few months after the iPhone got an app store, and a few months before the iPhone got copy & paste functionality.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Nobody mentioned bitcoin except you So its an unproductive assumption
  - pcthrowaway 5y ago

514 points by null_object 5y ago

alessandroetc 5y ago

now tell us what you really think...

domatic1 5y ago

Jackson Palmer could have been a billionaire had he not sold his dogecoins.

advisedwang 5y ago
That's kind of his point. If he's able to become a billionaire on a joke coin, then that money has come out of the pockets of people buying into it.

Niglodonicus 5y ago

Extremely based and succinct rundown of why crypto is trash and should be avoided at all costs. Yes, the original vision was noble and worthwhile, but like nearly every nice theoretical idea, it was co-opted into the capitalist ecosystem to be just another vassal of greed and corruption, with some throwback wild west vibes.

johnwheeler 5y ago

Absolute anarchism is the base state of governance. All regulating and deregulating evolves out of anarchy. Why should crypto break that cycle?

okareaman 5y ago

My feelings of meh about crypto have nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the fact that I can't think of a problem it solves in my life or any way it makes my life easier, more enjoyable or more interesting.

nwsm 5y ago
It has made losing money more enjoyable for me

dandare 5y ago

So many attack on capitalism ITT. I wish we could have rational discussion about whatever word problem while at the same time not trash the idea of private ownership, competitive markets and investment for profit. Mind you, every successful country today runs on a MIXED economic system, and communism (or anarchy for that matter) failed every time it was tried.

traloid 5y ago

Wait, so how does he expect to fight capitalism, if all he'd be allowed to do was always logged and observed bank wire transfers? Thats rather shortsighted.

Synaesthesia 5y ago
A lot of people thought that, at the dawn of the crypto era. I think an effective way to fight capitalism would be to rethink the banking system. We need public banks which will invest in the productive sector like manufacturing instead of speculating. That's how banks used to operate actually. Well yes crypto definitely won't get us there right now.
- dgb23 5y ago
  > That's how banks used to operate actually. I assume this is not easily generalized but I'm curious to know more about this, what the context is, what the historical turning points are.
  - Synaesthesia 5y ago
    Economist Michael Hudson has written about it, his point of comparison is usually the german banks of the 19th century which financed rapid development of their industry to US banks post 1970 which mostly speculated and invested in Finance and Real Estate (FIRE sector)
    - dgb23 5y ago
      Thank you, he seems to have very distinct and interesting views!
totalZero 5y ago
I would appreciate some clarification here. First, capitalism doesn't necessarily require breaking the law, and capitalists use the banking system to a great extent. Second, many cryptocurrency transactions are logged and more discoverable ("observed") than bank transfers. How do you fight capitalism by avoiding wire transfers?

nikanj 5y ago

Cryptos make rich people richer, and are sold to poor people the same way lottery tickets are. ”Look at old Pete here, he used to be a loser like you, but he believed and now he’s got $millions in the bank”

adventured 5y ago
> and are sold to poor people the same way lottery tickets are. Crypto has never been heavily marketed to poor people. They don't have the capital to buy in at any meaningful scale. The lottery ticket appeal is that you might win $10k or $1m off of a $1 or $2 ticket. There is no mass scale marketing effort pushing $1/$2 of Bitcoin or Dogecoin to poor people with that con-pitch. To this day poor people have barely any stake in the crypto world. For crypto, the lottery players are the small contingent of middle class persons that bother with it (which still isn't very many). Actual lottery tickets on the other hand, are prominently marketed to poor people all over the place, front and center in many common stores. Walk into an average convenience store or liquor store, you're telling me they have a large display of dozens of cryptos with updating price quotes appealing to poor people about how big the prizes are and how they can win a million dollars with a $2 ticket? Nope.
- alex504 5y ago
  They are marketed to people in my experience who are relatively poor. I know a guy who has a problem making rent who has all of his savings (about 1k) in dogecoin or other gambles like individual stocks. I have also met a ton of service people like bartenders and waiters who are involved in crypto. I have also met quite a few software engineers who are not poor but don' have nearly the level of wealth of the people manipulating these markets who have gotten involved with this stuff. These people aren't poor but relative to the scammers they are, and when they lose money in hurts. I know one engineer for example who lost his life savings on some alt coins in this mid thirties.
- joshuahaglund 5y ago
  I know liquor stores with crypto ATMs with displays. If you log into paypal, you can buy crypto. They're absolutely marketing to people with not much money.

throwawayswede 5y ago

FFS can we stop politicizing everything? Crypto is right wing? Is this guy for real! What a weird and delusional thing to say. If anything, this just shows that propaganda can get smart people as well as dumb people. Probably smart people are even more subject to it because they think on some level that they're somehow immune.

tick_tock_tick 5y ago
Cryptocurrency is pretty damn close to the libertarian ideal and a lot of the community embraces that. I wouldn't call it "right wing" in the context of the USA left/right though.
- throwawayswede 5y ago
  Agreed. I have no problem with that alignment as a political philosophy. But calling it "right wing" in US context implies the typical left/right divisive/alienating politicization. The entire thread is very delusional.
  - jsbdk 5y ago
    It's from someone who uses "right wing" as a slur... Of course it's very delusional.
qeternity 5y ago
Right wing is not politicized. It reflects an ideological scale. If he had characterized it as Republican, then sure. But calling crypto right wing is pretty fair.
- throwawayswede 5y ago
  In the US, saying right one is synonymous with republican, which is wrong, but again, that's the mainstream view.
  - 5y ago

pearjuice 5y ago

I still don't get why people use Twitter as a blog or think it's a good content platform. It's uncomfortable to read and scroll through. It's not even clear if you reached the end as for some reason a different list of tweets started and I had to click "Show this thread" (which I already opened via this permalink?) to read the rest.

pennaMan 5y ago
It's where all the infinite feed dopamine fiends hang out, so the huge potential audience beats out any UX issues.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

This is about as silly as the Soviet Union banning the study of genetics as a "bourgeois pseudoscience", dismissing it as "anti-Marxist".

pogorniy 5y ago
Your comment is about as silly as the Soviet Union banning the study of genetics as a "bourgeois pseudoscience", dismissing it as "anti-Marxist". If that can't convince you, I can't imagine how you imagine your argument work.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  I think we're not understanding each other here. Let me rephrase this. Science and technology shouldn't have a political valence, and efforts to politicize science can end quite badly, like the Soviet Union banning the study of genetics on the grounds of it being "anti-Marxist". Technologies and their use can be debated on ethical grounds, but to assign valences is silly and potentially harmful.
  - benwad 5y ago
    I don't think anyone is taking issue with the Blockchain technology itself, it's about what cryptocurrency manifests in the real world. That's an argument about economics, not technology.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      But why? Not every cryptocurrency has rich-get-richer dynamics. Lots of chains have blessed authories or validators involved, and don't incentive holding money. Bitcoin and Ethereum are like this. But there's so much more out there.
  - pogorniy 5y ago
    > I think we're not understanding each other here. Let me rephrase this. That's much better. Because to understand what you meant by example one needed to know reasoning behind the example. > Science and technology shouldn't have a political valence It should not. I agree. Do you agree that atomic bomb is political? At which sate atomic bomb development stops being science and starts being political? At theory level? Experiments? First device? First use of device? At some stage we start observing that cryptocurrencies impact start having great consequences regardless of the science behind them. Great volume of electricity, centralization of power at hands of middlemen, promises of great future where benefits are reaped by early adopters already today. Some people feel like looking at cryptocurrencies and blockchain purely from technology perspective, advocating for them, brings more harm than good. And I can understand this position of the author well.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

piokoch 5y ago

What a strange set of opinions, not that I find cryptocurrencies as particularly valuable right now, besides cases like having something reasonable in a country with huge inflation or crappy banking system that makes online payments and bank transfers hard. Crypto misses basic services like ability to revert transaction in case of mistake, charge backs, etc. But: "I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents" Wow. Right. Wing. "Despite claims of “decentralization”, the cryptocurrency industry is controlled by a powerful cartel of wealthy figures who, with time, have evolved to incorporate many of the same institutions tied to the existing centralized financial system they supposedly set out to replace." Ok, sounds a bit like conspiracy theory (who are those wealthy figures? Elon Musk was playing with cryptos, yes, but this is Elon Musk, and he does all kind of funky stuff like electric cars or space travel), but yes, at some point cryptos might be somehow institutionalized and it will be done to avoid issues that crypto currencies have. Oddly enough the author lists them in the same twit: "Lose your savings account password? Your fault. Fall victim to a scam? Your fault. Billionaires manipulating markets? They’re geniuses." So, actually it would not hurt to "incorporate many of the same institutions tied to the existing centralized financial system". The bad thing that happened to cryptos was that they become an investment instrument, not the mean of payment. They were supposed to be "a better gold" of old times. But right now everything is an investment instrument. The other thing are technical issues that bitcoin has (other cryptos are small players right now), slow transactions, energy consumption and the risk that someone finally manages to gather 51% of digging power and will take over the network.

grahamplace 5y ago

It might be useful for the title of this post to clarify that this is the co-creator of Dogecoin, it’s not mentioned anywhere on the linked thread itself but is very relevant framing for the content. I didn’t realize who this was until I saw this thread linked elsewhere with that context https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/14/dogecoin-co-creator-jackson-palmer-criticizes-the-crypto-industry.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/14/dogecoin-co-creator-jackson-...

throwawayswede 5y ago
Funny how he started something, then change his mind about, then started advocating how everyone who still haven't changed their mind is wrong.
- oefnak 5y ago
  What is wrong with changing your mind? If you never do that, how can you learn anything?
- killingtime74 5y ago
  That’s entirely consistently no?
  - throwawayswede 5y ago
    No. It's hypocritical at best.
    - bendiksolheim 5y ago
      Are people not allowed to change their opinion? It seems to me that this is a person who once believed something, but later has gotten proof that what they believed was wrong and then changed their mind. This is a good thing, not at all hypocritical.
      - yladiz 5y ago

ur-whale 5y ago

TL;DR: "It doesn't align with my politics or belief system" CTRL-W

neilsense 5y ago

> After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology We need a bingo for when and how people include 'right-wing' into things for likes.

draw_down 5y ago
Yeah. Flagged this story for politics.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I don't see you arguing that it's wrong or inaccurate though.
- serf 5y ago
  rather than arguing which side things fall on i'd rather like to mention that painting every aspect of life as either 'left' or 'right' is at best a vast over-simplification of life and surrounding politics, and at worst a willful method by which to gain mind-share or allies to a cause. it's rarely useful for any level of civil discourse; it's general usage these past few years is to inflame a side or draw a border between Them and Us.
Deukhoofd 5y ago
Isn't the entire point of cryptocurrencies that it's right wing? It's built on the concept of market competition, and the complete lack of government restrictions. It's an incredibly neoliberal concept, which has been the economic policy of the right for decades.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Isn't the entire point of cryptocurrencies that it's right wing? No, its libertarian, not right-wing. They are basically on orthogonal axes (the US’s superficially unidimensional partisan divide and the fact that the right-wing party is the more prone to try to sell itself to libertarians may confuse Americans about this, though.)

RedComet 5y ago

He discredits himself almost immediately when he asserts that right wing views and capitalism are synonymous. But more importantly, he was only involved in publishing a meme-copy of bitcoin, so who cares at all what he thinks? Especially after he made fortune off of the thing he's denouncing.

casi 5y ago

I guess there creator of dogecoin always saw it as a joke, so this isn’t surprising. Cryptocurrency is about choice and voice. Coordination and communication tools. There are American right wingers with their tokens and systems they’ve designed. But there is also things like CirclesUBI which is much more socialist and gaining momentum in the Berlin indie art scene. Of course if you aren’t engaging with the space you just see speculation and hear about hacks and crime and people who became millionaires. what you will hear about is what Silicon Valley vcs pour millions of dollars into things they want you hearing about. But actually engaging with devs in the space and the different subcultures you can find people you get along with. You can find communities and daos doing things you are interested in and share your political alignment. Most people I know working in the space have European left wing leanings. Also a reminder. You don’t have to spend any money to be involved. Write code, join chat rooms, work on things you enjoy and want to make. That is going to obviously be much more rewarding than gambling on the back of VCs bags.

abiro 5y ago

I think he describes the current crypto landscape accurately, but I'm becoming more and more bullish on the long term decentralized finance vision. Imagine solving open source funding by OSS developers selling insurance for their projects on decentralized programmatic insurance markets.

dan-robertson 5y ago
When does this “insurance” they sell pay out? What risk are they insuring against and how is it underwritten? I think this doesn’t make any sense but maybe I just don’t understand.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> selling insurance for their projects on decentralized programmatic insurance markets One of the problems with crypto is people treating it like fairy dust. There are remarkably few, perhaps vanishingly so, business models that do not work centralised that do decentralised. This is one. What is the pay-out? Who makes what guarantees? How are they enforced? If a business plan requires crypto—as opposed to being enhanced by it—it’s probably dead on arrival.
- abiro 5y ago
  This is a super undeveloped idea, but I was thinking about something along these lines: 1. OSS users pay a monthly premium for insurance on the software (incl transient dependencies) that is critical to their business. 2. Part of the cash flow from premiums is pooled into an insurance fund that pays interest to OSS developers. The rest is payed out directly to OSS devs. 3. If there is a bug in an insured OSS project, policy holders have a claim on the pool. The magnitude of the claim depends on the severity of the bug and the time it remains open. Future payouts to the OSS project with the bug are directed to the fund until the payed out insurance benefit is covered. The hardest part is coming up with a decentralized consensus mechanism for establishing the existence, severity and resolution of bugs, but there is a lot of experimentation going on in DeFi to solve similar problems. As to why it should be decentralized, it's the same reason OSS is decentralized: you don't want a single actor to control OSS funding. edit: wording

golemiprague 5y ago

Why he thinks fraud and corruptions are the worst parts of the capitalist system? Aren't they just bad practices with no relation to the system in which the people who practice it operate?

vmception 5y ago

He helped make Dogecoin in 15 minutes, at a time when people thought “launching a blockchain” was complicated. Well 8 years later people still think that, but that’s not the point. A belief system wasn’t necessary back then, only cognition. People should stop exalting him just like he asks.

rvz 5y ago
> He helped make Dogecoin in 15 minutes It is literally a fork of Bitcoin with extra tweaks and a famous internet meme. Any Joe, Jane and, Jimbob can do just that in 15 minutes, hence the reason why the cryptocurrency market is still in its infantile stage and very unregulated. 8 years later its gotten easier for the retail investors signing up at major exchanges to buy it right now. The whales who accumulated however...
Tenoke 5y ago
>He helped make Dogecoin in 15 minutes, at a time when people thought “launching a blockchain” was complicated. It wasn't at that point though. Litecoin was already created by tweaking btc and I was seeing people on irc do the same for fun with ease. Launching a btc-copy with different params wasn't the big achievment he had, attaching it to the right meme and getting people into it was.
- neilv 5y ago
  IIRC, Litecoin seemed like significant work, but after that, you could create a Scrypt altcoin by copying a source tree and doing not much more than changing the name (and pre-mining, because that's probably the point).
  - doomroot 5y ago
    If I recall a bitcoin core dev back in the day made a website where you could just change a few variables: name, block time, block size, block reward, etc. And it would spit out your customized fork of bitcoin core. This is basically how easy it is to make an erc20 token these days.

anonu 5y ago

DeFi does not exist without CeFi. So I agree wholeheartedly that there is an inherent problem with the cryptocurrency world today. But I'm still fascinated by decentralized concepts and the explosion of creativity around this. I think even if 1 percent of what's being created has long lasting implications for our world, then we've done well...

Synaesthesia 5y ago

When England went back onto the gold standard in 1925 it was a form of extreme austerity. That's because the govt can't easily create more money supply if needed. That's similar to the problem with BTC and cryptos with limited availablity. It just favours the early entrants.

seibelj 5y ago
"Creating more money" is simply diluting existing holders of money. Capital != money, value != money, productivity != money. Printing more money does not create wealth - it redistributes it to preferred recipients. The gold standard reinforces economic discipline. America and Britain were able to inflate more effectively than others because of having a monopoly on reserve currencies and owning the rails of international settlement, by requiring all countries to settle in their currencies. Essentially they exported their inflation to all other countries to benefit their own citizens.
- chronolitus 5y ago
  This is true and I'm surprised at how little it is discussed and how long it took me to understand this simple fact. if you have a bunch of participants with money, and create new money,either you 1) give each participant an equal amount (this drives relative wealth towards equality) 2) give each participant an amount proportional to their wealth (result: nothing changes, relative wealth of all participants is the same) 3) you give to some and not others (all youve done is funnel relative wealth from some to others, while pretending you have created money) in real life, 'money creation' is almost exclusively 3)
  - spiralx 5y ago
    Money is created by banks when they loan money, so none of those apply.
    - chronolitus 5y ago
      I agree with the first part. But as long as money is created, it has to be either 1), 2), or 3). And in the case of banks, it's certainly not 1) or 2).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

noxer 5y ago

"I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing..." No need to further read. After such nonsense the opinion of this person has no credibility left. If you have to put politics into every f*** thing you express then I pass on anything you have to say.

h2odragon 5y ago
If he'd said "inherently Evil" it wouldn't have communicated the thought as effectively to his audience. I don't know (or care) what this person politics are, but there's something to be said for speaking the language your audience is listening in.
- noxer 5y ago
  I can disagree with someone calling something "evil" but there is no disagreement possible if people feel the need to mix politics or other unrelated topics in their way to express an opinion. Ccryto can not be right-wing just as it can not be sexist or racist or whatever nonsense people come up with to "describe" it. It just as absurd as if someone would say HTTP is right-wing, browsers are inherently racist and HTML sexist. >I don't know (or care) what this person politics are, but there's something to be said for speaking the language your audience is listening in. Neither do I but its on twitter so hes probably catering to the general twitter audience.

argvargc 5y ago

Guy: 1) Holds tremendously narrow view of cryptocurrency & blockchain applications. 2) Holds some fair criticism of various elements of that narrow view. 3) Incorrectly expands that criticism to cover the entirety of the space that he therefore reveals himself to not understand. Conclusion: narrow-minded, arrogant guy comes to false conclusions based on ignorance.

cblconfederate 5y ago

hm, yet crypto allowed him to "exit" the industry while the traditional system doesnt; and for all the talk of "control" are people really coerced to use a cryptocoin? > Lose your savings account password? Your fault. > Fall victim to a scam? Your fault. > Billionaires manipulating markets? They’re geniuses. So the problem is that there's no 'daddy state' offering to save people from themselves. I guess nobody offers that, you 're on your own currently but nobody also pretends like it's safe either. In the end these rants are like an open admission that "people are stupid and they don't even know it and need to be protected at all times". This is well known but technology has a chance to change it by empowering and arming the individual

fidesomnes 5y ago

One of the biggest losers in the cryptocurrency space is back for just "one more tweet."

Zababa 5y ago

Interesting read. One thing I don't understand is that he still presents decentralization as something to strive for (as lots of people in the crypto space do), but then he criticizes the consequences of decentralization: > Despite claims of “decentralization”, the cryptocurrency industry is controlled by a powerful cartel of wealthy figures who, with time, have evolved to incorporate many of the same institutions tied to the existing centralized financial system they supposedly set out to replace. > Cryptocurrency is like taking the worst parts of today's capitalist system (eg. corruption, fraud, inequality) and using software to technically limit the use of interventions (eg. audits, regulation, taxation) which serve as protections or safety nets for the average person. From what I understand, people in that space seem to think that because something is decentralized, people will automatically distribute equally between themselves power and authority. That seems really naive. As with any "free for all" type of space, the law of the strongest applies. The "cartel" that he speaks of taking control of crypto is a natural consequence of decentralization. An important part of central authorities in the modern world is to guarantee some freedom from exploitive forces. Democracy, unions, laws are a way to achieve that goal. I wonder if it's a consequence of people thinking about the state as fundamentally bad? I often see criticism from some people, both left and right-wing, that the state is good for nothing, but it seems clear (in the view of the author) who wins when the state can't exercise its authority. Maybe it's time for some people to review their views about decentralization and its consequences.

Ar-Curunir 5y ago
The leftists critique of states stretches back to the origins of leftist philosophy; it’s not a newfangled thing.
gverrilla 5y ago
I don't think there's a powerful cartel controlling the industry. If you'd imagine that, they would be controlling the market, not the industry per se, it's production.. Anyhow, most industries are controlled by few players outside of crypto. Perhaps the right question would be if the existence of crypto as a new component of the system can somehow decrease injustice in the system as a whole. I don't know the answer, but I would gamble it's No - for now. The way I see it in the near future (maximum 10y) we'll get obvious reasons to answer Yes, though.

rvz 5y ago

> After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology ? > It doesn't align with my politics or belief system, and I don't have the energy to try and discuss that with those unwilling to engage in a grounded conversation. Like himself. Given what he just said about cryptocurrency being 'inherently right-wing' which that is completely baseless. Obviously it is heavily manipulated and it is not exclusive to cryptocurrencies, just like forex and the stock market but the main difference is that it is highly unregulated. I expect more exchanges to use more than just KYC, AML checks and the rise of implementing CBDCs to drive cryptocurrencies past the wild west stage that it is today. Good luck trying to ignore it because it is here to stay. (Even if you are the creator of a meme coin)

mypastself 5y ago
Yeah, I suppose you could associate the tech with the libertarian/anarchist crowd (which are nonetheless a minority in that space nowadays, compared to those simply interested in making money), but right-wing? If he was truly willing to engage in the discussion, you’d at least expect him to look up some definitions.
- 71a54xd 5y ago
  I guess the question here is if he conflates being a statist crony with "right-wing". Clearly he misses the fact that the fed is controlled by people who don't even delineate their political affiliation and only seek to control and manipulate. It's really quite funny that this guy wrote this whole self-abating sob story on twitter...

SyzygistSix 5y ago

I am unclear how audits, regulation, taxation serve as protections or safety nets for the average person. Seems like the kind of thing large corporations can manipulate and avoid whereas individuals cannot. I'm not a crypto person but it seems like crypto at least has the potential to offer some of those protections to individuals that were once the province of the powerful.

helsinkiandrew 5y ago
You can put fiet money ($€£) in a western bank and earn a fixed interest and be sure you can get it out when you want, if you forget your account number or password you’ll be ok and if the bank goes bust, you’ll get (upto ~$250K in US and similar around the world). You can spend those dollars instantly anywhere around the world - as cash or online. Buy Bitcoin purchasing items is a pain, the value may be higher or lower than last week or yesterday, seemingly manipulated by unknown whales totally legally. If the money is in an unregulated exchange it can be lost with little recompense. Buy one of the more exotic coins you may make a fortune or loose everything overnight because of a coding error or just because.
Hokusai 5y ago
> I am unclear how audits, regulation, taxation serve as protections or safety nets for the average person. There is much literature about the topic that explain why regulation and audits are needed to protect not only the average person but the whole economy. You can find some information here https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/28-2-bank-regulation/ https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/28-2-ban... The "taxation" part is mention as cryptocurrencies are used for tax-avoidance and fraud. - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/31/cryptocurrency-poses-a-significant-risk-of-tax-evasion.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/31/cryptocurrency-poses-a-signi... - https://www.ft.com/content/aa9834a1-8e3a-46c9-a2d8-13b10882c1c9 https://www.ft.com/content/aa9834a1-8e3a-46c9-a2d8-13b10882c... ... Banking, at high level, is not complicated and it is very interesting to see how regulation keeps a safe and sound economic system and how failures to regulate make markets collapse. For a historical perspective you can study The Great Depression, as many regulations were created to avoid similar systematic failures.

ballenf 5y ago

He calls "corruption" "one of the worst parts of capitalism". Maybe I should have paid more attention in class and less to Civilization, but I did think that corruption was not generally seen as much of a problem with capitalism as more centralized economic systems. Corruption is always a problem everywhere, but it would seem to get worse with greater centralization of control.

DasIch 5y ago
Capitalism and centralization of control are not incompatible. The entire point of platforms is to centralize control up to the point of having full control over proprietary markets like Apple with it's App Store.
koheripbal 5y ago
I haven't ever seen a more glaring example of corruption as the Soviet black markets for food in the 1980s. By the late 1980s, Soviet price controls and centralized distribution rules, incentivized black market growth by providing opportunity for tremendous profit. Ultimately, it overtook the regular gov't markets - resulting in the famous empty shelves we iconically associate with the collapse of the USSR. Most gov't officials participated in these black markets. This also led to massive organized crime groups, which became so profitable, that they became the oligarchs who ultimately took over the country when the gov't collapsed from bankruptcy. The notion that capitalism creates corruption is laughable with these massive recent examples.
- adventured 5y ago
  > The notion that capitalism creates corruption is laughable with these massive recent examples. The most corrupt nations throughout modern history have always been on the Socialist spectrum, without exception. Including National Socialist Germany, Communist Cuba, Communist China, Communist Vietnam, Socialist Iraq, Communist North Korea, Theocratic-Socialist Iran, Socialist Syria, Socialist Zimbabwe, Socialist Venezuela as well as Soviet Russia, all of which were/are Socialist derivatives.
  - 5y ago

poorjohnmacafee 5y ago

Well it's easy to argue that most crypto projects are get rich quick schemes by their creators. A lot of people haven't even heard of OneCoin [1], but I think it's what most of the crypto community actually looks like when you remove the whole "progressive" or "building future" branding. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64xcgvEJ3Ys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64xcgvEJ3Ys

eingaeKaiy8ujie 5y ago

Cryptocurrencies are an open-source alternative to the traditional financial system. There are problems of course, but remember that this industry is still very young. Unless crypto gets totally banned or over-regulated, it's going to have a bright future.

Passthepeas 5y ago

People should read "The Internet of Money" by Andreas Antonopolous, in it he describes how much of the criticisms levied against crypto are similar to criticism levied against the internet in the early days. Many of the internets early adopters were actual criminals, and its detractors talked about how it "couldn't scale", was bad for the environment, etc. What sort erroneous conclusion might you have drawn during the tech bubble at the turn of the century? Similar criticism were pushed on the automobile, the airplane, and even electricity. It might not seem like now, but we are still in the early days of crpytocurrency, being this overly hung up on the current state of things is missing the forest for the trees.

zzzeek 5y ago
> Many of the internets early adopters were actual criminals the early adopters were college students and professors since that's where it was available. as far as "criminals" it would have only been those pesky "hackers" who were mostly acting from curiosity. there wasnt any big opportunity for financial fraud on the "internet" because there was no commerce on the internet. the commercialization had to happen first and that required massive buy-in long before criminals could have any fertile ground to operate upon. > and its detractors talked about how it "couldn't scale", ive never seen such a thing, in the early 90s most of us didnt even have terms like that queued up > was bad for the environment, never heard of this
esja 5y ago
I was an early adopter and I don’t recall anyone saying the internet was bad for the environment, or that it couldn’t scale. Quite the opposite actually! And there was very little fraud or criminality - most new applications and ideas were genuinely innovative and immediately and obviously beneficial. Yea the financial hype took over in the late nineties but the fundamentals were always sound and the potential was obvious. And over time that potential grew, it didn’t shrink like it has for cryptocurrency.
- doomroot 5y ago
  Is a sovereign nation adopting bitcoin as a payment method an example of Bitcoin’s shrinking potential?

jl2718 5y ago

He has a lot of good points, but, he leads with a political trope. This is a sure-fire way to lose most of your audience from the start. His primary argument is “A is bad”. But then he adds “B is bad, and A is associated with B”. But B is tautologically half the audience, so you lose them, and this becomes support for A. Then there are those that think A is good, but B is bad. Presumably this is the intended audience. You just told them that they are associated with B, so you start out with ideological antagonism instead of making a direct point. You are left with only those that hate both A and B, and of course they will re-tweet, but in this case, it’s still just a bunch of opinions, no personal account or facts that could be used to direct change. In the bigger picture, cryptocurrency is a confluence of technologies that are not going away. It can be used for almost any ideology, and some of those will be popular and some of those will be violently opposed and some will be made illegal. But, in the long run, the one that will survive, for any specific group, is the one that facilitates the strongest social organization. So ultimately, opinions of ideological taste, one way or another, are irrelevant. Let me reiterate: I think he has some reasonable points within his opinions, and we should consider them even if we disagree.

vendiddy 5y ago
What points do you feel are reasonable? I'm having trouble digesting his rationale. He makes many claims without further explanation. Was looking for a perspective on how crypto could be bad for society, but was a disappointed in reading it.
- jl2718 5y ago
  I find tweets 3 (centralization) and 4 (predation) to be particularly incisive. This may not be obvious to everybody, because these things are meant to be well-hidden. Although, I will say, those points massively contradict with the second tweet in ways that are even less obvious, but significantly more enraging if they are well-understood. If you look into all of his complaints, the main offenders are the institutions that have been given some form of legal monopoly to do so.

maverick-iceman 5y ago

Crypto is exciting. There is the price argument which I think will remain , given how historically inflation scares people. But it's just exciting as a social enviornment. All the young kids who are into crypto today...they might move on tomorrow, but the connections you can make while you are in this amazing melting pot will last forever. And it's not like they are dumb connections either.. Crypto is a college experience 2.0 ,or... for those who are not American the chance to experience US College environment for the first time This is why Musk jumped in it head first before doing a 180 after realizing the fact that this thing was in fact not built by him and thus had to be destroyed. The various flavors of crypto can be compared with the different colleges. Bitcoin...I imagine it as a weird mix of University of Miami, Stanford, MIT and George Mason

IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
You do know that other countries have colleges and universities as well, right? And the experience is quite similar for most of them: first time living away from parents, first serious relationships, first time taking LSD, and finally starting to appreciate the intricacies of French or the Citric Acid Cycle. None of which strikes as particularly close to what I gather is the daily life of cryptobros.
- maverick-iceman 5y ago
  You miss the Us v Them rivalries with other schools which explodes in things like the Ohio State v. Michigan 'Civil War'. It's not the same thing without top notch sports. Other countries don't have that. If you are a 'cryptobro' with a decent following that's not that different than being the QB of Michigan or Ohio State given the median age of people which are into BTC. Okay there are very few girls and no cheerleading...that's a bummer, but it's still early , maybe they'll arrive now that Bitcoin Central has moved to Miami

rmtech 5y ago

I'd also be mad if I sold all my dogecoin for a used car in 2013.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

Jackson Palmer is a self-absorbed grifter. He did next to nothing in cryptocurrency. He forked Bitcoin, changed a parameter, and added a Doge meme picture to the wallet/website. That amounts to zero technical achievement, and one good utilization of a single meme at the right place and time in history. Now he acts as an intellectual authority on the crypto space, and uses whatever legitimacy that gives him to smear any one involved in it with his typical left-wing takes on the world, that include cheerleading for the state and its totalitarian mandates while trying to stigmatize any one who objects to them. Hey moral elitism is a fun activity for under-achievers like Palmer, who recently tweeted: "Elon Musk is and always will be, a self-absorbed grifter" [1] To the naive, this kind of cynical anti-rich ad hominem makes Palmer sound profound, while those he smears, like Musk, actually drive the world forward. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-creater-elon-musk-self-absorbed-grifter-jackson-palmer-2021-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-creater-elon-musk-s...

intuitionist 5y ago
Elon Musk certainly drives the world forward, and occasionally into and under a parked trailer

Geee 5y ago

I think he never really understood Bitcoin, which led him to create Dogecoin and now this. He is right about the whole "crypto industry", but that has nothing to do with Bitcoin. There's an ideology called Bitcoin maximalism or toxic Bitcoin maximalism, which defends the truth and the ideals of cryptocurrency against this greedy and manipulative "crypto industry" he is talking about. Bitcoin maximalism is basically the free market / "hyper-capitalist" answer to all the scamming that's going on in the industry. It's like the early Internet. There were a lot of scams on the Internet, and also early Internet companies which were pump&dump-scams. It gets better when people get more educated and learn not to trust anyone. I'm not sure what are his suggestions, but authoritarianism certainly doesn't solve this issue.

question000 5y ago

Cryptocurrency like all right-wing idealism is based on a belief in the supernatural. They preform these ritual calculations and anoint each other with imaginary tokens, claim value has been created and write that off on their taxes, the big difference with crypto over the regular voodoo is that you can actually make money doing it even if you don't believe the fundamentals are sound. You attract the worse of both worlds, the crazy idealists and the complete scam artists and when you get to the core of what crypto is really about those groups are basically the same.

ernopp 5y ago

"You can believe that 99% of crypto is bullshit while also believing that the 1% that isn't will change the world" - Preston Byrne

spookthesunset 5y ago
Bitcoin has been around longer than the iPhone. When it started I think we were all still in Windows XP. If Bitcoin hasn’t yet discovered a killer app, when will it? But yeah yeah, it took tens of thousands of years between humans seeing lightning start fires and the charcoal grill… if it took that long, I'm sure it will be tens of thousands of years before Bitcoin finds a use. Better keep buying and holding!
- carlosdp 5y ago
  That’s kind of like saying “the Nokia brick phone has been around forever, if it hasn’t discovered a killer app, when will it?” Bitcoin was just the first blockchain to really find adoption, it’s nowhere near where 99% of the innovation in crypto is happening today. Far more interesting projects that are providing actual value today.
- cercatrova 5y ago
  > Bitcoin has been around longer than the iPhone Bitcoin was released in 2009. The iPhone was released in 2007.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
    Well, it was pretty early days: Bitcoin was released a few months after the iPhone got an app store, and a few months before the iPhone got copy & paste functionality.
- vmception 5y ago
  Nobody mentioned bitcoin except you So its an unproductive assumption
- pcthrowaway 5y ago