3 ms·

Visiting Copenhagen I pondered on those points too. Denmark seems to be a society that firmly embraced “centralized digital currency” - even the beggers have PO

by seer 4y ago

Visiting Copenhagen I pondered on those points too. Denmark seems to be a society that firmly embraced “centralized digital currency” - even the beggers have POS terminals and if you _request_ a cash payment at a restaurant people look at you funny. But they have this “Freetown” of sorts right smack in the center of their capital, where you can buy illegal stuff with cash. There’s no guards, no police posted at the entrance. People are just kinda OK with all that. You live a highly structured civilized life, but then a metro stop away you enter this place where people are selling weed on the streets and you can probably get other funky stuff. And seems to be quite stable thing - they’ve had it for like 50 years or so. Maybe thats what we need - unregulated places where societies can try out different things that are not accepted at large? Maybe digital currencies in the future would incorporate that? A friend is working for a VMWare project where the etherium based crypto has an “escape hatch” built in with some allowance for “cash like” transactions … maybe something like that would work?

motohagiography 4y ago
What I actually suspect is that the move toward drugs legalization in places like Canada and experiments with decriminalization of cocaine and heroin are a way to normalize using electronic payments (e.g. interac) for those black market goods, which brings them into the fold of centralized economic control and removes a key use case for cash. However the liberalization is a trap intended to set the stage for CBDCs, as once cash is fully marginalized, what will you pay in when the people in the govt change their mind about legalization? Forget drugs for a moment, what about meat, gas, ammunition, and other normal things that are being reclassified as decadent luxuries you apparently don't "need," or "deserve," according to whoever "they" are. It's not enough for them to live virtuously according to their values, they need to police you first, and fly around in private jets while they do it. Seeing the institutions behind identity, government, and payments from the inside has persuaded me that the conspiracy theorists are just people in denial of what they have discovered, because they can't face the consequences of how serious it really all is. The architects of this don't care what anyone believes, they just need for members of any potential resistance to keep doing nothing to stop it. For good men to do nothing, as they say. Cryptocurrencies were and remain necessary beacuse they represent a limit on state power in an era of previously unimaginable total surveillance tech, and this limit makes leviathanists and technocrats apopleptic. That's also why the arguments against crypto always seem to have a shrill whinge of cant about them - as they're based on accusations of blasphemy against the pillars of offical technocratic narrative, and the arguments themselves aren't powerful or persuasive. Not only do we need cryptocurrencies, we need to establish boundaries on the dominion of people in governments, as without those boundaries, we're in for a totalitarian hell not even fiction could prepare us for, imo.

by seer 4y ago

motohagiography 4y ago

What I actually suspect is that the move toward drugs legalization in places like Canada and experiments with decriminalization of cocaine and heroin are a way to normalize using electronic payments (e.g. interac) for those black market goods, which brings them into the fold of centralized economic control and removes a key use case for cash. However the liberalization is a trap intended to set the stage for CBDCs, as once cash is fully marginalized, what will you pay in when the people in the govt change their mind about legalization? Forget drugs for a moment, what about meat, gas, ammunition, and other normal things that are being reclassified as decadent luxuries you apparently don't "need," or "deserve," according to whoever "they" are. It's not enough for them to live virtuously according to their values, they need to police you first, and fly around in private jets while they do it. Seeing the institutions behind identity, government, and payments from the inside has persuaded me that the conspiracy theorists are just people in denial of what they have discovered, because they can't face the consequences of how serious it really all is. The architects of this don't care what anyone believes, they just need for members of any potential resistance to keep doing nothing to stop it. For good men to do nothing, as they say. Cryptocurrencies were and remain necessary beacuse they represent a limit on state power in an era of previously unimaginable total surveillance tech, and this limit makes leviathanists and technocrats apopleptic. That's also why the arguments against crypto always seem to have a shrill whinge of cant about them - as they're based on accusations of blasphemy against the pillars of offical technocratic narrative, and the arguments themselves aren't powerful or persuasive. Not only do we need cryptocurrencies, we need to establish boundaries on the dominion of people in governments, as without those boundaries, we're in for a totalitarian hell not even fiction could prepare us for, imo.