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Not sure if folks here keep up with crypto much, but over the weekend FTX had a liquidity crisis and agreed to sell to Binance. This is pretty huge news - FTX was one of the bigger crypto exchanges known for buying out other flailing firms that had crises. This may lead to a larger spiral within the crypto economy. @aqouta curious for your take here.
Also as some folks here may know Sam Bankman-fried of FTX wealth is one of the three major funders of the Effective Altruism movement. Given the circumstances of this bailout, it's likely that FTX was sold for an incredibly small amount - if Binance didn't help them with the liquidity crisis they almost certainly would've fallen to $0 value. Unfortunately this means that the money EA has been pledged/receiving from SBF is going to dry up. I'm curious to see if the EA movement can weather this storm, as they have been rather aggressively growing and it looks like they've been betting on this funding being in place for a long time.
Time to add some wild speculation - Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, is Chinese. Now that Binance owns FTX, they are clearly the dominate player in the crypto space, or at least positioned well to become the dominant exchange. I wonder if this shift will cause China to reconsider their decision to make crypto illegal? Or is it too much of a risk to state power?
Update: This definitely seems like a coordinated attack. Apparently Coinbase released an article slamming FTX’s native token, then Binance pulled out their entire stake. Without those two events not sure if this would’ve happened.
EAs ought to have acquired enough momentum via their PR in major outlets (rather, this PR seems to indicate the momentum) to not care that much about Sam now, I believe. They're getting their AI safety and longtermism discussions, they've got their China chip ban, and they'll keep getting more stuff. Aren't they already plugged into networks much more valuable than anything crypto bros had to offer? Like, national security council tier?
Off topic, but China making crypto illegal and thus giving up their stake in the digital economy the US cannot control by decree has been the first of many ruinous, small-minded mistakes of Xi era (I mean, outside the obvious geopolitical ones like their handling of Hong Kong and Xinjiang) and they haven't shown the ability to reverse any of those.
Crypto is being pretty thoroughly neutered, no wonder its value is dropping. Ruskies who enabled much of the privacy side are suiciding or getting arrested, and Ethereum is ensuring that blocks are kosher now.
It's darkly amusing to be proven right. People thought that technology will disrupt traditional governance, and instead we're seeing bureaucratic sanctions effectively enforced against abstract cryptographic protocols. Social technology and human networking keep trampling over nerdy bullshit. How about a nice central bank digital currency? It's very high-tech, like in China, but without the scary Social Credit! Just a little oversight from your friendly democratically elected government, to make sure you don't use any of that nasty anonymous fake money like XMR or financing something evil... like Kiwifarms (more evil things are best left unmentioned and dealt with professionally).
I suppose we'll see Tor and i2p and other such bastions of net freedom dismantled completely in a few years, maybe blocked on the level of hardware, with forced upgrades under the guise of onshoring the supply chain and ensuring safety from RussiaChina threat and AGI risk. What a time to be alive.
Glad to hear EA should be safe. My intuitions were broadly in the same place but outside confirmation is nice.
Some people have been arguing that access to the high quality networks is a function of receiving billionaire money, and that once the money dries up the access will as well. I tend to believe that it’s the other way around, and EA ideas are what has directly led to that level of access.
What do you mean by social technology here? If anything crypto used memes extremely well to become so big in the first place.
Also assuming you are on the decentralized side, what has to happen for mass adoption of decentralized currencies?
I mean practices which are to «memes» as ASML engineering is to redneck engineering. Mature practices not to produce random flashy effects on the social tissue or have a few crude immediate-term uses, but to steadily and reliably expand your domain and degrees of freedom, and suffocate your competitors. Such as exacerbation of fear of unapproved non-state actors and normalization of anarcho-tyranny. Things behind campaigns like this one.
Widespread fear of incumbent Western state-affiliated actors, which is strong enough to negate all of their propaganda about monster-of-the-week threats like islamchinarussianazis, but simultaneously not so strong as to be mind-numbing.
Their goal is to move us past that sweet spot as quickly as possible.
I find this fascinating! Any blogs/books you'd recommend to learn more about how these types of practices operate? I've read Manufacturing Consent and a bunch of anti-PR work, but anything more in depth and modern?
What does moving past this sweet spot look like in practice? Are you saying the goal is to make us terrified of the incumbent Western state actors, so much so we lose the will to resist?
I have not read "credible" literature on this subject but there's plenty of literature on it. Pinging @eetan. I spoke more of the above-ground long-term social engineering, even detailed by Scott, like the success of the Fabian Society.
Perhaps not «us» in the broadest possible sense, but yes, the goal is to make e.g. unsurveilled communications on badthink topics, and crypto business that's not entirely fetishistic (like "waow I'm paying for Mossad VPN in Bitcoin from my Coinbase to discuss Elon Musk's racism on Mastodon! this is the future of freedom!") as mentally taxing as building FGC9's in your garage in Europe.
Thanks for ping ;-)
It depends what you count as "credible".
Open source publication in the realms of marketing, advertising, PR?
Lots of material showing how to do "memetic engineering" for profit.
Everyone heard about Bernay and his torches of freedom (lung cancer so liberating, light up!), fewer know , for example, how diamond rings became necessary part of every traditional marriage.
https://edwardjayepstein.com/diamond/prologue.htm
Official declassified documents?
Lots of material here too, starting with CIA efforts in arts and literature (while various neanderthals were braying that abstract art is bolshevik conspiracy, CIA was busy supporting it as the perfect capitalist art form).
https://www.theawl.com/2015/08/literary-magazines-for-socialists-funded-by-the-cia-ranked/
https://twitter.com/marina0swald/status/1579138604911439872
Moving to more clandestine things, we have COINTELPRO.
Many of their methods look rather childish to modern eye, but they worked at the time.
https://twitter.com/RobertSkvarla/status/1448816158807838720
https://twitter.com/RobertSkvarla/status/1567226620687122435
https://twitter.com/TrueAnonPod/status/1588173962768285697
What happened since the sixties, since three letter agencies promised to be good guys and do not do bad things any more?
Few "credible" sources, but we saw hard to explain rise of causes that could appeal only to extreme minority to worldwide acceptance
https://archive.ph/XH5v5
and even clearly mentally unstable individuals with no achievements and no distinction at all thrust to worldwide "stardom" overnight
https://www.theartofannihilation.com/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/
When we burrow into these rabbit holes we find nothing spontaneous. Do they end at big business both profit and "nonprofit", or do they lead further?
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