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I know this is a tangent to what you're really talking about, but I have to say something about crypto. In short, there is a very short list of people less trustworthy than the Argentine government: the people who advocate for cryptocurrency are amongst them. The sort of people who hold a morbid fascination with the misery and suffering of others to further the adoption of their internet funcoins in the off chance they can offload their bags onto desperate people is profoundly evil.
Crypto is not a good store of value, or a currency. And anyone who says that it is you should be very wary of.
How someone can look at the abuses possible with a central authority and immediately dump on the decentralized alternatives is incredible. No argumentation, just blind ignorant assertions.
Just because the Argentinian state is a known bad actor does not make any proposed alternative inherently better. I can point to any amount of rugpulls, from the original MT.Gox to the very recent Polaris to demonstrate that crypto is not safe.
I would ask you to assume good faith, that I am informed and I have good reason to believe in what I do. Then make an argument, if you believe I am wrong. For the same reason, I assume you have no position in cryptocurrency and are arguing purely on its technical and utilitarian merits.
To do otherwise would be a great conflict of interest.
Sure, easy. Although you've already insinuated in the outset that I must be a shill and you must be warry of me so I question your own ability to do this.
This is very much a look from the outside. Mt.Gox says absolutely nothing about crypto's fundamental safety, and cannot be called a "rugpull" by anyone with any understanding of the term and event. I don't even know what you mean by the polaris incident, it's not a project I have had a particular focus on. I'm well aware that there are scams in the crypto space, it kind of comes with the territory of places where lots of money is moved around with minimal regulation. None of that really relates to the fundamental promise of decentralization in general. I'm not sure what angle to take defending it because you don't really even seem to have attacked it directly at all, instead opting to mention low effort sneers against negative related events. Like me citing the 2008 housing crisis to discredit centralized currencies because it's a bad thing that happened in which a centralized currency was involved.
Is your critique really just that scams are possible if you're careless in crypto? Because I can point to the traces of cocaine on most US currency or any other scam using greenbacks. If it's more sophisticated then please make that critique instead.
I am of the opinion that stupid people, trusting people, and old people should be allowed to keep their money. It is not reasonable to transfer the burden of 'educating oneself' onto the general public when it comes to investments and finance. When a state turns the deposits in their national banks into worthless nothing, it is of course a wrong thing. It is also a wrong thing when sleazy cryptoscammers run off with all the investor's money.
It's not a young man's game anymore. A careless idiot degenerate gambler who loses his inheritance by blowing it on a shitcoin is highly unsympathetic. But you read the bankruptcy documents of these shams of companies, and you see the pure despair of the investors. They are men and women in their fifties and sixties, who were sold hopes and dreams of financial independence. They are ruined now, and it is unlikely they will find good employment: they will be working now until the day they die. You read about marriages falling apart, people losing their houses. These desperate, foolish letters begging the judge to be pushed to the front of the creditor line, when the truth is that there is no money at all. All they have are the worthless tokens on a server they can't even withdraw from. So much for the promise of a decentralized currency!
There is no protection against this, in the technology, in the services that have sprung up around it. It is as safe as a screaming buzz saw for the unwary. It is not their fault: they were deceived, by advocates who were full of themselves, who gladly pumped them up - but dumped them, and called them witless fools and rubes when they lost it all.
So I find it hard to argue on the 'merits' and 'technicalities' of cryptocurrency when it has created so much human suffering. You may be able to ignore it, but I can't.
The problem with your argument (besides that you assume bad faith in anyone who doesn't share your skepticism for crypto) is that you are conflating all the bad things you mention with crypto in and of itself. I certainly agree people being defrauded is bad, and I even understand why you say we should endeavor to protect people from making stupid financial decisions (though I don't particularly agree). But it's simply not accurate to say "[crypto] has created so much human suffering". Crypto hasn't caused that suffering, people have.
By your logic, the US dollar should be regarded with extreme skepticism simply because people have defrauded others of their money (and will in the future). People do bad things, and people make foolish mistakes with their money. This is well known and not the fault of crypto in and of itself.
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.
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.
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