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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32061 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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But that's not true, not in the least. If you are scammed in real life, you have several avenues of recourse, through the financial and legal systems. The very virtues crypto advocates praise (untrackability, anonymity, trustless systems) are exactly the qualities that make it possible for scams to be pulled off with incredible ease.

There are certainly those Don Quixotes who tilt at the windmill of the USD being a hegemonic currency, but that doesn't make alternatives to it better. If you create abusable tools, advocate for them, and don't tell naive newcomers of the dangers and only the benefits - you're more awful than you think. You don't get to walk away from the moral implications of your actions. You can't hide in the theoretical wonderlands and ignore how the implications of the technology come about in real life.

The devil isn't the inchoate maw that devours sinners at the bottom: he's the man who pushes a wavering soul at the edge.

But that's not true, not in the least. If you are scammed in real life, you have several avenues of recourse, through the financial and legal systems.

Also, to belatedly address this point: the things you mention which provide you recourse are not somehow part and parcel of the US dollar. If you do all your financial transactions through the financial system then great, you have lots of protections which are legally required to be provided to you. But that is because of the financial system and the records they keep. If you hold all your fiat currency in cold hard cash, and you spend it on something stupid (or get scammed) then you're probably SOL. Or if it all goes up in a fire, you're definitely SOL.

So your argument here against crypto really has precious little to do with crypto versus traditional currencies. It's more to do with the realities of dealing in cash versus opting into a financial system where everything is tracked and you have resources to help you if something goes wrong. It's perfectly legitimate to want to opt into that security! But it's not really true that the risks of not doing so are a crypto problem in particular.

You can't hide in the theoretical wonderlands and ignore how the implications of the technology come about in real life.

Yeah, actually you can. If you don't do it, you aren't responsible for it. I don't even care for crypto myself (not enough practical uses and I'm not into naked speculating), but I refuse to give people moral culpability for things they didn't actually do. That's not how moral culpability works, you aren't responsible for second order effects of your actions.

I disagree: and I think it's a fundamental difference in values that can't be overcome by argument. I think that the world would be a better place if people thought through the consequences of their actions. If you pour chemical waste into the water table, you recruit people into a cult, or you don't push a shopping cart back to the corral, it's not guiltlessness - it's malicious indifference. There's no legal liability, but morally it is abhorrent all the same.

All the things you're listing here are quite different in that the bad effects aren't second order effects. Putting poison into the water table is bad in itself. Same for having a cult, or not putting shopping carts back. But being enthusiastic about crypto for positive reasons is not bad in and of itself.

But my viewpoint is that cryptocurrency is a first order terrible thing, it is a banal evil like slash and burn agriculture, payday loans, etc. All the good it could possible do is corrupted by its incredible inefficiency and callous indifference to its own toxicity.

It is technology that is completely worthless, obsolete as it was theorized and definitely as it was implemented. Its only use I see is to extort the tears and sweat of the gullible and enrich the intelligent and evil. That some South Americans occasionally use it to buy USD is, in my mind, completely inconsequential.

Technology is not agnostic. It can be built to be vile. No amount of clever evasions and definitional wordplay can hide smug, self-satisfied, all-consuming avarice behind it all.

Ok, well I think that's a very incorrect view and don't think you should judge people based upon it. But you are, of course, entitled to your opinion.

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