8 ms·

I'm glad a big government supporter such as SBF is out of crypto leadership. Crypto is an anarchist experiment and it should remain that way

by majani 4y ago

andirk 4y ago
Why not both? Centralized where people trust, decentralized where people don't trust. In my interpretation, the Bitcoin white paper states that BTC is an answer to _the lack of regulation_ that allowed the fat cats to abuse the money supplies. It's kind of ironic, but to see crypto as purely anarchistic is to ignore that it is essentially _democratized_ money. Both: I use exchanges as well as cold storage.
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  I never understood. Where's the democracy here, exactly? A regular user cannot afford to participate in the decision making of the system in any meaningful way. In fact, today, most users don't even directly use it, instead relying on processors such as Coinbase. The "not your keys, not your coins" meme exists due to this. The original paper described a democratic system where people voted with their processors, but failed to take into account that people with more processors get more votes. I find it hard to argue that the system as it currently exists is more democratic than the currency emitted by the central bank of your country.
  - ballofrubber 4y ago
    Arguably a lot of discussion is open to anyone (Bitcoin mailing list, Core github repo), where anyone is free to post their opinion on topics themselves. It is not democratic as in "you have a vote to force others to comply to the majority", but more a democratic in "you can try to convince enough people that the major chain becomes how you like it, while the others run a minority fork". People think "where the money goes, is where the miners go", but the blocksize wars showed that "where the users go, is where the miners go". Miners themselves don't decide on bitcoin rules, users do. So I personally think that bitcoin is not necessarily democratic, but still highly people/community vs money driven.
    - jrumbut 4y ago
      This is a terrifying definition of democracy, "you don't get a vote but there is an informal and non-binding channel to lodge complaints." That's not democratic at all!
      - webXL 4y ago
        > "you have a vote to force others to comply to the majority" is less terrifying to you?
        cmeacham98 4y ago
        What you're arguing for is "you have a vote (well you don't, but people much richer than you do) to force others to comply to a very small minority", how is that better than majority rule?
        ballofrubber 4y ago
        Well there are no votes, so you can't force anyone to run anything. You run what you like and hope others do as well. As I said miners follow users, not companies.
      - andirk 4y ago
        Democracy can be defined as a popularity contest; democracy does not = good. When I and others say "democratized money", it's not to say it is identical to the definition of democracy as it pertains to a populous voting 1 person 1 vote. More like "money that is not controlled by a single source but rather as large a group as cares to participate who also have access to and knowledge of the tech".
        ballofrubber 4y ago
        Additionaly it's also different as in "the majority does not change my rules", they can be wrong in the long run and my rules become majority again.
        4y ago
  - m00dy 4y ago
    well, honestly speaking, Bitcoin community looks to be committed to preserve 21million as max supply. That's a big promise and I love it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nursie 4y ago
    > I find it hard to argue that the system as it currently exists is more democratic than the currency emitted by the central bank of your country. Significantly less, as the central bank is usually at least accountable to the democratically elected government of the country.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
> Crypto is an anarchist experiment And, like every anarchist experiment before it, it failed. It continues to draw in new suckers every day, and that is a problem for society. It doesn't matter if you didn't cause the problem. Because you live in that society, you still have to pay the cost to fix it or continue to take the losses from the problem existing. It's the same with slavery, not educating blacks, and then not employing blacks in America. I had nothing to do with it. My family had nothing to do with it. But because I live in America, I have to either pay the cost to fix the problem or pay the ongoing cost of crime that the problem produces. Taking on the cost of problems others created is the cost of living in society, just as benefiting from the value that others create is the benefit of living in society. The time to regulate crypto and cut our future losses was yesterday.
- jrm4 4y ago
  Every anarchist experiment failed? The Internet's still around, buddy.
  - svachalek 4y ago
    The Internet was created by DARPA and while it got a little wild in the 90s, neither its origins or current form in any way resemble anarchy.
    - Eduard 4y ago
      Just because "The Internet"'s _mainstream_ may not resemble anarchy, this doesn't prohibit other parts to resemble anarchy. In fact there are a lot of examples active and thriving "on the Internet" fulfilling various definitions of anarchy.
      - namaria 4y ago
        Or it's infrastructure, or design, or all the corporate committees involved in managing it. Care to give counter examples?
mrtksn 4y ago
Rest assured that the regulations are coming because the crypto simply did a speed-run of unregulated securities market and repeated every fraud or scam that the traditional markets went through over the history. In the process, huge fortunes were created and libertarians were empowered(but not enough to be the main political power). Congrats to them but there's nothing anarchist left in crypto, they even end up consolidated and centralised. No interesting business models or financing came out of it except for ransomware. The silver linings might be that the crypto regulations can be made with the current technology and globalisation in mind, hopefully.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  Exactly, it's bizarre to read about the wildcat banking era in the US and why the Fed was created while simultaneously looking around at the rate of mainstream crypto scams and institutional failures nowadays. The Fed sure isn't without its issues, but it was created to solve the exact problems that we're now seeing proliferate via the crypto space.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
    I don't think this is correct. The FED was created in 1913 for a very specific reason - to counter the Panic of 1907 by creating a banker of last resort. It did nothing to curb the banker speculation that led to the panic of 1907 Witness LTCM, Web bubble, Subprime crisis, all fueled by banks willing to lend and overextend themselves beyond margin. The 1913 ACT did not change that one bit except make the speculators never "lose" The FED did nothing to resolve speculation, if anything, bubbles are worse and now they are worldwide thanks to them and their low rates.
    - MrMan 4y ago
      in my town in the 19th and early 20th centuries there were numerous bak runs where local people were wiped out. we collectively decided to take steps to make that much much less likely to happen
    - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
matheusmoreira 4y ago
That experiment already failed to be honest. Cryptocurrencies were prophesized to get rid of banks. Instead exchanges reinvented banks with all the drawbacks and none of the benefits. Cryptocurrencies were supposed to be in wide circulation just like USD, eliminating the need for fiat on/off ramps. Instead we got these centralized corporations and endless KYC/AML surveillance with none of the regulation and government backing. Real cryptocurrency is what you have in your wallet. How many of us hold our own coins? Pretty much everyone keeps "their" coins at the exchange...
- Geee 4y ago
  Only about 10% (2M) of bitcoin are on exchanges: https://www.coinglass.com/Balance https://www.coinglass.com/Balance
  - aeyes 4y ago
    You also have to take the ~4M estimated coins with lost keys into account. If these stats are correct we closer to 15%. Which is a lot. I would have expected 0.1%.
    - Geee 4y ago
      It could be less, but it's not that much. People say often that "most" coins are held on exchanges, which is far from true.
      - Melting_Harps 4y ago
        > If these stats are correct we closer to 15%. Which is a lot. I would have expected 0.1%. That was never going to happen, too much institutional money and index funds have been super focused on trading rather than the tech, and their are ETFs that have paper BTC that can move the price at will, just as much as if a whale decides to do so--it wouldn't even take MicroStrategy's stash, it could just be Laszlo wanting to get some stuff out of cold storage and clear a couple days because the tx fee is low. Also most of those HFT bots need to have liquidity on hand so this is part of the system, what is noteable is how little it takes to move the market these days: less than a 500 coin sell off on an exchange like Bitfinex gave us >$1000 swings. Which if you trade is what you want as volatility is where the money is made. MTGOX taught us very early to never trust exchanges and this was after the capital controls in Cypus that made us all on edge at the time, and yet it took multiple GOXXINGS to learn (the last one still hasn't been resolved and the Japanese govt has been dragging it's feet for nearly a decade now). People who buy and keep them on exchanges are going to have to learn why self-ownership is a critical part of this ecosystem. People may have lost untold millions/billions having sloppy OPSEC when handling BTC, but so did Turing [0] and he did it for the same reasons we have just so it's clear and goes to show how it's not a fringe idea to have self-sovereignty over one's finances, especially in uncertain times like war (and in his case peace time as they castrated for being gay despite his efforts in breaking the U-boat cryptography) and I doubt you will question his genius in cryptography and just think of him as a crypto bro: proving it's just as common for a super genius as it is from the layman to get it wrong. We just need to make it better, and in that regard I think we have com efar but it's still too difficult and a trusted 3rd party is required: Dorsey is working on something along those lines. This is why we have always encouraged doing small sums until you can replicate the process and then transfer the whole amount with several contingencies in place should anything happen. It's not easy or perfect, but neither is physics and we can still have re-usable first stage rockets when it was thought to be impossible. 0: https://www.iflscience.com/alan-turing-buried-his-life-savings-behind-a-cipher-so-hard-he-never-found-it-66034 https://www.iflscience.com/alan-turing-buried-his-life-savin...
woodruffw 4y ago
> Crypto is an anarchist experiment and it should remain that way What exactly makes it remain that way? I don't say this as a cheap "gotcha": what's the governance structure that makes it an anarchist experiment, specifically, and not just a free-for-all?
- logicx24 4y ago
  Nothing. And that is the problem with anarchism. For some, the lack of a centralized power structure is the goal. For others, it's an opportunity.
secretsatan 4y ago
Ha! One massive feudal lord just crushed another and all the serfs lost their money. This isn’t anarchy, it’s a monopoly
- World177 4y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure. The monopolist had a $100,000,000 theft last month, [1] after a $1 billion dollar loss from LUNA in the summer. [2] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/business/binance-hack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/business/binance-hack.htm... [2] https://decrypt.co/100530/binance-ceo-says-exchange-never-sold-15-4m-luna https://decrypt.co/100530/binance-ceo-says-exchange-never-so...
  - secretsatan 4y ago
    But still, they’ve consolidated themselves in the monopoly money system, so the monopoly money they lost doesn’t matter if they control the board
nullc 4y ago
> a big government supporter such as SBF A supporter or another crook LARPing as pro-regulation because it makes some people ignore red-flags? Constantly braying about the "the law" is part of the the main act of the highest profile scammer claiming to have created Bitcoin. Fact is that saying a lot of vague "pro regulation" things doesn't likely subject you to any additional regulatory scrutiny, it's a free move even when you are waste deep in the cookie jar. But some people are going to notice it and consider it evidence that you're all above board.
- Eduard 4y ago
  > Constantly braying about the "the law" is part of the the main act of the highest profile scammer claiming to have created Bitcoin. Whom are you alluding to?
  - nullc 4y ago
    Craig Wright. It's refreshing to encounter someone who hasn't seen that scammers circus. In the latest season we find Wright trying to steal literally billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin while constantly yelling that everyone who doesn't support him is a criminal. If he weren't financially ruining people with vexatious litigation it would all be pretty funny.
UncleMeat 4y ago
An anarchist experiment that plays into capitalism's worst instincts and rapidly encountered "please give the money back to the rich people" when the first big ETH theft was pulled off. Anarchism should be about dismantling hierarchies. Crypto has further entrenched owners against the rest.

I'm glad a big government supporter such as SBF is out of crypto leadership. Crypto is an anarchist experiment and it should remain that way

by majani 4y ago

I'm glad a big government supporter such as SBF is out of crypto leadership. Crypto is an anarchist experiment and it should remain that way

andirk 4y ago

Why not both? Centralized where people trust, decentralized where people don't trust. In my interpretation, the Bitcoin white paper states that BTC is an answer to _the lack of regulation_ that allowed the fat cats to abuse the money supplies. It's kind of ironic, but to see crypto as purely anarchistic is to ignore that it is essentially _democratized_ money. Both: I use exchanges as well as cold storage.

TremendousJudge 4y ago
I never understood. Where's the democracy here, exactly? A regular user cannot afford to participate in the decision making of the system in any meaningful way. In fact, today, most users don't even directly use it, instead relying on processors such as Coinbase. The "not your keys, not your coins" meme exists due to this. The original paper described a democratic system where people voted with their processors, but failed to take into account that people with more processors get more votes. I find it hard to argue that the system as it currently exists is more democratic than the currency emitted by the central bank of your country.
- ballofrubber 4y ago
  Arguably a lot of discussion is open to anyone (Bitcoin mailing list, Core github repo), where anyone is free to post their opinion on topics themselves. It is not democratic as in "you have a vote to force others to comply to the majority", but more a democratic in "you can try to convince enough people that the major chain becomes how you like it, while the others run a minority fork". People think "where the money goes, is where the miners go", but the blocksize wars showed that "where the users go, is where the miners go". Miners themselves don't decide on bitcoin rules, users do. So I personally think that bitcoin is not necessarily democratic, but still highly people/community vs money driven.
  - jrumbut 4y ago
    This is a terrifying definition of democracy, "you don't get a vote but there is an informal and non-binding channel to lodge complaints." That's not democratic at all!
    - webXL 4y ago
      > "you have a vote to force others to comply to the majority" is less terrifying to you?
      - cmeacham98 4y ago
        What you're arguing for is "you have a vote (well you don't, but people much richer than you do) to force others to comply to a very small minority", how is that better than majority rule?
        ballofrubber 4y ago
        Well there are no votes, so you can't force anyone to run anything. You run what you like and hope others do as well. As I said miners follow users, not companies.
    - andirk 4y ago
      Democracy can be defined as a popularity contest; democracy does not = good. When I and others say "democratized money", it's not to say it is identical to the definition of democracy as it pertains to a populous voting 1 person 1 vote. More like "money that is not controlled by a single source but rather as large a group as cares to participate who also have access to and knowledge of the tech".
      - ballofrubber 4y ago
        Additionaly it's also different as in "the majority does not change my rules", they can be wrong in the long run and my rules become majority again.
      - 4y ago
- m00dy 4y ago
  well, honestly speaking, Bitcoin community looks to be committed to preserve 21million as max supply. That's a big promise and I love it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Nursie 4y ago
  > I find it hard to argue that the system as it currently exists is more democratic than the currency emitted by the central bank of your country. Significantly less, as the central bank is usually at least accountable to the democratically elected government of the country.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

> Crypto is an anarchist experiment And, like every anarchist experiment before it, it failed. It continues to draw in new suckers every day, and that is a problem for society. It doesn't matter if you didn't cause the problem. Because you live in that society, you still have to pay the cost to fix it or continue to take the losses from the problem existing. It's the same with slavery, not educating blacks, and then not employing blacks in America. I had nothing to do with it. My family had nothing to do with it. But because I live in America, I have to either pay the cost to fix the problem or pay the ongoing cost of crime that the problem produces. Taking on the cost of problems others created is the cost of living in society, just as benefiting from the value that others create is the benefit of living in society. The time to regulate crypto and cut our future losses was yesterday.

jrm4 4y ago
Every anarchist experiment failed? The Internet's still around, buddy.
- svachalek 4y ago
  The Internet was created by DARPA and while it got a little wild in the 90s, neither its origins or current form in any way resemble anarchy.
  - Eduard 4y ago
    Just because "The Internet"'s _mainstream_ may not resemble anarchy, this doesn't prohibit other parts to resemble anarchy. In fact there are a lot of examples active and thriving "on the Internet" fulfilling various definitions of anarchy.
    - namaria 4y ago
      Or it's infrastructure, or design, or all the corporate committees involved in managing it. Care to give counter examples?

mrtksn 4y ago

Rest assured that the regulations are coming because the crypto simply did a speed-run of unregulated securities market and repeated every fraud or scam that the traditional markets went through over the history. In the process, huge fortunes were created and libertarians were empowered(but not enough to be the main political power). Congrats to them but there's nothing anarchist left in crypto, they even end up consolidated and centralised. No interesting business models or financing came out of it except for ransomware. The silver linings might be that the crypto regulations can be made with the current technology and globalisation in mind, hopefully.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
Exactly, it's bizarre to read about the wildcat banking era in the US and why the Fed was created while simultaneously looking around at the rate of mainstream crypto scams and institutional failures nowadays. The Fed sure isn't without its issues, but it was created to solve the exact problems that we're now seeing proliferate via the crypto space.
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  I don't think this is correct. The FED was created in 1913 for a very specific reason - to counter the Panic of 1907 by creating a banker of last resort. It did nothing to curb the banker speculation that led to the panic of 1907 Witness LTCM, Web bubble, Subprime crisis, all fueled by banks willing to lend and overextend themselves beyond margin. The 1913 ACT did not change that one bit except make the speculators never "lose" The FED did nothing to resolve speculation, if anything, bubbles are worse and now they are worldwide thanks to them and their low rates.
  - MrMan 4y ago
    in my town in the 19th and early 20th centuries there were numerous bak runs where local people were wiped out. we collectively decided to take steps to make that much much less likely to happen
  - thr0wawayf00 4y ago

matheusmoreira 4y ago

That experiment already failed to be honest. Cryptocurrencies were prophesized to get rid of banks. Instead exchanges reinvented banks with all the drawbacks and none of the benefits. Cryptocurrencies were supposed to be in wide circulation just like USD, eliminating the need for fiat on/off ramps. Instead we got these centralized corporations and endless KYC/AML surveillance with none of the regulation and government backing. Real cryptocurrency is what you have in your wallet. How many of us hold our own coins? Pretty much everyone keeps "their" coins at the exchange...

Geee 4y ago
Only about 10% (2M) of bitcoin are on exchanges: https://www.coinglass.com/Balance https://www.coinglass.com/Balance
- aeyes 4y ago
  You also have to take the ~4M estimated coins with lost keys into account. If these stats are correct we closer to 15%. Which is a lot. I would have expected 0.1%.
  - Geee 4y ago
    It could be less, but it's not that much. People say often that "most" coins are held on exchanges, which is far from true.
    - Melting_Harps 4y ago
      > If these stats are correct we closer to 15%. Which is a lot. I would have expected 0.1%. That was never going to happen, too much institutional money and index funds have been super focused on trading rather than the tech, and their are ETFs that have paper BTC that can move the price at will, just as much as if a whale decides to do so--it wouldn't even take MicroStrategy's stash, it could just be Laszlo wanting to get some stuff out of cold storage and clear a couple days because the tx fee is low. Also most of those HFT bots need to have liquidity on hand so this is part of the system, what is noteable is how little it takes to move the market these days: less than a 500 coin sell off on an exchange like Bitfinex gave us >$1000 swings. Which if you trade is what you want as volatility is where the money is made. MTGOX taught us very early to never trust exchanges and this was after the capital controls in Cypus that made us all on edge at the time, and yet it took multiple GOXXINGS to learn (the last one still hasn't been resolved and the Japanese govt has been dragging it's feet for nearly a decade now). People who buy and keep them on exchanges are going to have to learn why self-ownership is a critical part of this ecosystem. People may have lost untold millions/billions having sloppy OPSEC when handling BTC, but so did Turing [0] and he did it for the same reasons we have just so it's clear and goes to show how it's not a fringe idea to have self-sovereignty over one's finances, especially in uncertain times like war (and in his case peace time as they castrated for being gay despite his efforts in breaking the U-boat cryptography) and I doubt you will question his genius in cryptography and just think of him as a crypto bro: proving it's just as common for a super genius as it is from the layman to get it wrong. We just need to make it better, and in that regard I think we have com efar but it's still too difficult and a trusted 3rd party is required: Dorsey is working on something along those lines. This is why we have always encouraged doing small sums until you can replicate the process and then transfer the whole amount with several contingencies in place should anything happen. It's not easy or perfect, but neither is physics and we can still have re-usable first stage rockets when it was thought to be impossible. 0: https://www.iflscience.com/alan-turing-buried-his-life-savings-behind-a-cipher-so-hard-he-never-found-it-66034 https://www.iflscience.com/alan-turing-buried-his-life-savin...

woodruffw 4y ago

> Crypto is an anarchist experiment and it should remain that way What exactly makes it remain that way? I don't say this as a cheap "gotcha": what's the governance structure that makes it an anarchist experiment, specifically, and not just a free-for-all?

logicx24 4y ago
Nothing. And that is the problem with anarchism. For some, the lack of a centralized power structure is the goal. For others, it's an opportunity.

secretsatan 4y ago

Ha! One massive feudal lord just crushed another and all the serfs lost their money. This isn’t anarchy, it’s a monopoly

World177 4y ago
I wouldn't be so sure. The monopolist had a $100,000,000 theft last month, [1] after a $1 billion dollar loss from LUNA in the summer. [2] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/business/binance-hack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/business/binance-hack.htm... [2] https://decrypt.co/100530/binance-ceo-says-exchange-never-sold-15-4m-luna https://decrypt.co/100530/binance-ceo-says-exchange-never-so...
- secretsatan 4y ago
  But still, they’ve consolidated themselves in the monopoly money system, so the monopoly money they lost doesn’t matter if they control the board

nullc 4y ago

> a big government supporter such as SBF A supporter or another crook LARPing as pro-regulation because it makes some people ignore red-flags? Constantly braying about the "the law" is part of the the main act of the highest profile scammer claiming to have created Bitcoin. Fact is that saying a lot of vague "pro regulation" things doesn't likely subject you to any additional regulatory scrutiny, it's a free move even when you are waste deep in the cookie jar. But some people are going to notice it and consider it evidence that you're all above board.

Eduard 4y ago
> Constantly braying about the "the law" is part of the the main act of the highest profile scammer claiming to have created Bitcoin. Whom are you alluding to?
- nullc 4y ago
  Craig Wright. It's refreshing to encounter someone who hasn't seen that scammers circus. In the latest season we find Wright trying to steal literally billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin while constantly yelling that everyone who doesn't support him is a criminal. If he weren't financially ruining people with vexatious litigation it would all be pretty funny.

UncleMeat 4y ago

An anarchist experiment that plays into capitalism's worst instincts and rapidly encountered "please give the money back to the rich people" when the first big ETH theft was pulled off. Anarchism should be about dismantling hierarchies. Crypto has further entrenched owners against the rest.