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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30883 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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Circling back on the crypto FTX fiasco, Noah Smith has a new piece out theorizing, what happens if crypto just dies? Unfortunately it's paywalled so I couldn't read the whole thing, but I have been wondering this myself. More and more crypto exchanges have been dying off, especially over the last couple of years. FTX seemed to resemble one of the last exchanges embodying the spirit of crypto, and now it's gone.

By spirit of crypto, I mean the original cypherpunk, decentralized idea of a currency that operates outside the bounds of the State. As @aqouta and others have mentioned, big exchanges like Binance are actually more centralized, and if they continue to grow they can easily be incorporated as organs of the existing State apparatus.

As someone who has always been wary of censorship and centralized power, especially in light of the recent escalation in terms of woke social norms being shoved down everyone's throat, this is troubling to me. Both the right and left seem to care less and less about the overreach of the powers that be - in fact folks like Tyler Cowen think that the main difference in the 'New Right' is that they are more trusting of elites.

I'm curious for takes on either side of this issue. If you don't think we have anything to worry about with regards to State power, why is that so? Do you just think that with the rise of the internet/technology States are impotent, or is centralized power a good thing?

If you disagree with the premise above, then how can we work to push back on centralization? Especially with the rise of powerful tools like LLM and the rise of AI, is there any hope for the individual classical liberal ethos to survive the next century?

Maybe 1/3 of the crypto space is actually meaningfully tackling the problem of censorship and institutional control/blacklisting, and the remaining 2/3rds is just ponzi schemes and speculative bubbles driven by fed money.

so much of the space is just hoping that central bankers will pick their unsecure totalitarian surveillance system to be the social credit system of the future, and provide not even convivence value. A shocking amount of the space is openly hostile to the original libertarian vision of the first crypto projects and actively trying to co-opt it into the surveillance state...

The problem is: the Fed isn't interested in it. Powell and every fed official is dreaming of the day they'll leave the fed, go to work on wall street and make their billions. They have zero loyalty to central banking total state, and absolute loyalty to the jank and intermediation that keeps the current financial titan profitable and in position.

There will be no great reset, there will be social credit system... there's even shockingly little inflation and the fed seems shockingly commited to protectng the dollar... because Wall Street is the only one that can make Powell richer, and Wall street isn't giving up the intermediation that generates its fees.

.

So ya expect every crypto project that doesn't actively enable drug dealing or dissent to get torpedoed by rising interest rates and the drying up of fed money

Circling back on the crypto FTX fiasco, Noah Smith has a new piece out theorizing, what happens if crypto just dies? Unfortunately it's paywalled so I couldn't read the whole thing, but I have been wondering this myself. More and more crypto exchanges have been dying off, especially over the last couple of years. FTX seemed to resemble one of the last exchanges embodying the spirit of crypto, and now it's gone.

Nothing will happen .A bunch of VCs and gamblers will lose money, as if they haven't lost enough already. Some developers and exchange operators will be unemployed. Unlike the financial sector in 2008, there will be no systemic risks, because there is no adoption or penetration into the economy. It's just a huge bubble/fad that for some reason captivated the world but is otherwise useless. These huge federal seizures of bitcoin, sometimes many years after the crime was committed, proves that crypto is worse than cash at preserving anonymity.

Both the right and left seem to care less and less about the overreach of the powers that be - in fact folks like

Always been that way. I think the left is still worse though in this regard. Wilson, LBJ and FDR overseeing some of the biggest overreaches of power ever.

If you disagree with the premise above, then how can we work to push back on centralization? Especially with the rise of powerful tools like LLM and the rise of AI, is there any hope for the individual classical liberal ethos to survive the next century?

That's what Elon is trying to do with his buyout of twitter.

People in Latin America are getting use out of cryptocurrencies. Does that not count?

Which people in Latin America are those?

AIUI it’s largely getting used as a store of value by workers in high-inflation LatAm countries as a way to store their earnings that won’t halve in value every [time interval] due to the government constantly devaluing the currency.

I believe you are talking about Argentina. When I was there a short while ago green dollars were the king and I haven’t seen any signs of crypto. I honestly doubt it gets much use other than perhaps a simple way to buy something that roughly tracks American dollars in value and might even make you rich if you get lucky.

[crypto] no systemic risks... captivated the world

Quite the combination!

Yeah, but not unreasonable. There's a big difference between "everyone temporarily pays attention to the shiny thing" and "the thing is integrated into the economy".

Always thought it was never realistic to pursue libertarianism outside of real power. Russia invading Ukraine proves this. At the end of the day money needs backed by something real. Like the meme nukes. People are putting their energy in the wrong thing if they want a better society. You can’t just break away from power. You have to win hearts and minds of America.

And I’ve known about bitcoin since 2008 and always thought it was cool. Hansens co-blogger on overcoming bias is the likely creator.

You’ve got to fight the culture war because culture is what matters. Teach the Constitution and what it means. Theirs no breaking away from power you must control the ethos of that power.

Or go work for SpaceX and conquor Mars and create a stronger force outside of present power structures.

Woah wait a second now I want to hear your theory on who Satoshi is?

Hal Finney. I think he’s got the strongest case and fairly obvious.

  1. He was involved in the first crypto transaction. It’s quite possible he did those transactions on both sides.

  2. Requisite training and was the cyber punks. Cal-Tech grad.

  3. Lived in the same town for 10 years as Dorian Satoshi Nakamato (explains where the name came from stole a neighbors)

  4. He died in 2014. So explains where founder went. He denied being founder but a true cypher punk could have seen how it’s better to have no owner.

Hansens co-blogger on overcoming bias is the likely creator.

He had 4. which one?

Hal Finney. Did the first bitcoin transactions. May have been on both sides of transaction. And conveniently dead.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/author/hal-finney

Missed my chance to become a billionaire by mining back then and taking basically a free punt.

Hal Finney I presume.

I've mostly just been looking for an appropriate nook in which to observe the striking nominative determinism here: Bankman-Fried is the founder's name, and "bankman fried" is not a half bad summary.

Add in that a SAM is a weapon designed to bring something that is flying high up in the air (maybe 'going to the moon') abruptly crashing to the ground in flames and, yeah.

Hah I’ve been thinking similar thoughts. Seen a couple of ‘Sam Bankloan-Fraud’s thrown around which I also find funny.

Sam? I think you mean Scam Bankloan-Fraud.

TINACBNIEAC.

I've made my position clear in other posts quite recently, but the problem is that centralization is orders of magnitude more efficient than decentralized solutions, and technology increasingly pushes in favor of it. I've written some speculative science fiction on the matter. The larger the system, the more data it pushes, the more it can feed its machine learning algorithms. Giving up on the holy grail of machine learning just means that someone else will make a leaner and meaner finance transaction-bot, that will reduce fees to infinitesimal slivers and process a year's worth of financial transactions in an afternoon.

Given crypto's abysmally slow transaction speed (and the dubiousness of the solutions proposed to fix that) it's not competitive now, much less with whatever fintech comes from the next generation of money robots.

So long as crypto interacts with the conventional finance system, it will always be at a disadvantage. It is playing a game that it will always lose because the US dollar is backed by the world's hegemonic superpower and crypto is not. The fact that the majority of its current user base sees their hopes and fears rise and fall on its USD value will always make it less than it could potentially be.

It is playing a game that it will always lose because the US dollar is backed by the world's hegemonic superpower a

The hegemonic superpower cannot even maintain its military, relies on battleships (not "the battleships" but the premier weapon systems of the last war - look up what happened to those in WW2).

Sure, America may feel like it's going Turbo, but it's like the speeding coked up executive riding high on a recent business success - on a collision course with reality.

So long as crypto interacts with the conventional finance system, it will always be at a disadvantage. It is playing a game that it will always lose because the US dollar is backed by the world's hegemonic superpower and crypto is not. The fact that the majority of its current user base sees their hopes and fears rise and fall on its USD value will always make it less than it could potentially be.

Crypto has already lost because it does not solve any practical problems, and the anonymity and fungibility that were major selling points before 2013 have proved easily undone by determined governments. Paypal is convenient and fast, crypto is neither of those. Crypto is like the world's costliest hobby or overvalued open source project. It has no hope of ever being a contender in the US or global financial system.

Paypal is compromisable and has in fact been compromised. The financial aspect is not even really an interesting direction of discussion, centralization risk on transact should be obvious to anyone paying attention. Take a look at what the merchant bank empire is able to do to the porn empire if you question power of transact centralization. as the heel crushes and the bones break the wisdom in investment in anti-stomping insurance becomes clear.

doesn't onlyfans work with credit cards? same for almost all porn sites. the fees are high at times, but it seems to work

It only works because those websites censor everything that offends American puritan sensibilities. This is sort of why fansly exists, it has much laxer content policies than OnlyFans.

Know what Fansly also doesn't support? My credit card provider. (German national bank, via MasterCard)

Have you seen the wild shit at OF ? I struggle to think of what OF policies do not allow, violent simulations of rape or what ?

Puritans are not what they used to be I guess.

Even "softcore" urination is banned there, for example. Also public nudity is a very gray area and, from my understanding, de-facto prohibited.

Odd, when far more fucked up fetishes (e.g. feedism) aren't. I also think they're banning public nudity not because of puritans but because allowing it'd mean being seen as promoting criminal activity as it's typically illegal.

Information may be out of date at this point but I was acquainted with someone who ran the backend for several porn sites about a decade ago. Not large ones, medium sized independent contractor stuff. Porn credit card software infrastructure as he told it was a beautiful mess of chaining together every credit card processing API and library from every provider you could find that hadn't banned you and running the credit card details through each of them of them until you got a transaction that didn't bounce. And given the rate of banning from various providers usually from disputes (honey I didn't sign up for BackdoorSluts9.com, someone must have stolen my credit card details, let's dispute this obviously false charge) but sometimes legitimately violating TOS, it was a constant cycle of updating. He was looking at licensing out his meta billing library/service to other contacts in the industry given how much time-effort was being sunk into solving the problem that sounded like it affected a lot of the smaller players in the market.

did you actually not hear about the recent time Visa and mastercard made pornhub, the king of the porn space, bend the knee? More truthfully it was the NYT that put out a report that single handedly knocked the largest porn company on the internet out of existence until it purged more than half of its content off the site. The only thing stopping this weapon from being turned directly against dissidents is precedent, and barely at that. Can you say it would surprise you if DeSantis donations were cut off mid campaign if he looked dominant?

there are 1000s of porn sites and all seem to be doing fine except for that one and a few others maybe. That is the risk of allowing anyone to upload anything without moderation or screening, which they have fixed, and is a problem that was unique to pornhub. Most porn sites screen the performers for age. This risk is not just limited to porn sites, any site that allows user generated content is at risk of being cut off. if porn is so badly threatened by this, why are so many sites .

The only thing stopping this weapon from being turned directly against dissidents is precedent, and barely at that

It's also possible to oppose government overreach but still think crypto is an impractical solution

If you can appease this latest demand by the censors then there is not problem

Is this even convincing to you? I genuinely don't know if it's worse faith to assume you're making this objection in good faith or not. You don't see why someone might be concerned that two, demonstrably cowardly, corporations being able to basically wipe any business on the internet out of existence if pressed hard enough should be concerning?

Yes, I saw the blasphemers crushed under the boot of the master but look at all the prosperous people whom have not yet had their insides turned into a fine slush by the master! Surely this is an optimal system!

corporations being able to basically wipe any business on the internet out of existence if pressed hard enough should be concerning?

I am just talking about bitcoin not being viable as a payment alternative. This does not imply supporting tyranny . The collapse of SilkRoad showed how hard this is, at least in the US, and this was with 2013 technology. Feds are much better at tracking crypto.

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Have you read John Stokes on the Web 2.0 centralization history? He makes some good points that it wasn’t a purely technical, efficiency driven move that matches my memory of the aughts.

Interesting argument. I wonder if it's compatible with the smartphone revolution though. A large amount of internet activity has moved onto much more locked down devices, like smartphones and tablets. Even the desktop OSes seem to be gradually making it harder to do things the authorities don't approve of (authorities here being the OS vendors, which mostly bend to the will of governments and activist groups).

This sounds like a more reasonable read, along with crushedoranges' take below. A lot of things have happened that lawmakers could not have comprehended back in the Bush Jr. admin. Just look at the laws (or lack thereof) around gaming, right-to-repair, and "games as a service"/live-service games. A lot of these things just haven't been tested in court, compared to home recording or internet piracy.

Huh, interesting.

I think it makes sense, the theory, but I would caution against imagining that the establishment always had plans to centralize the internet. Lawmakers have chronically been incompetent at creating legislation concerning computers. What I suspect is that lobbyists for giants like Microsoft were allowed to write their competition out of business because no one else understood the subject at all - and those who knew better were, frankly, toe-jam eating weirdos.

Nowadays the government is all for it, but my 'politicians are stupid and easily manipulated' principle as well as 'boomers know nothing about technology' axiom are sufficient to explain how centralization took hold before the technological gains from singularity were realized.

Sorry, I have to say it. This is good for crypto.

People are far too trusting with these centralized exchanges that are basically unregulated and provide very little transparency as to how they manage user funds. The more events like this happen, the more people will learn that the whole point of crypto is to not blindly trust an organization because they have their name on a stadium or advertise everywhere on social media.

Hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger has reported "massive outflows" from exchanges to the self-custody wallets they make. It appears people are learning.

The crypto space is still a wild west rife with scams, opaque systems, and deceptive marketing. This is just yet another expensive lesson for the newbies that joined in the 2021 bull market cycle.

The collapse of FTX came not a moment too soon. SBF, noted for playing League of Legends while on a fundraising call with investing giant Sequoia capital (and apparently squeezing in a round last night while dealing with the collapse of his empire) had been lobbying Washington for legislation that targets decentralized protocols and would grant favorable status to his exchange platforms. He was just behind George Soros as the #2 donor to the Democrats.

This event targets centralized exchanges as the source of systemic risk and highlights how decentralized open-source infrastructure is the safer, anti-fragile path forward. The progress being made here is remarkable and could soon make exchanges like FTX largely obsolete. Just over 2 years ago, the first decentralized exchange (DEX), Uniswap, launched and was slow and extremely expensive to use. Now we have an ecosystem of DEXes running on many blockchain networks, offering low-fee, fast, leveraged trading, limit orders, and supposedly soon, decentralized order books. The billions of dollars of capital poured into this ecosystem have not all been siphoned away by fraudsters, the world of decentralized finance is expanding and innovating rapidly. Web3/blockchain is now one of the most common career paths for CS grads. The opportunity and dream of a new financial system still lies ahead, and its future is brighter than ever.

To make a difference in the wider world where our freedoms and independence are being aggressively stripped from us day by day, more real economic activity needs to take place on decentralized, open networks. I'm still waiting for substack to open BTC lightning payments. Macro-economic content network Real Vision has pivoted heavily toward crypto and yet they won't let you pay for a subscription with cryptocurrency. It's very rare to see any online business accept crypto apart from donations to the odd independent creator, never mind seeing crypto acceptance at your local market or corner store. So we have a ways to go yet. But to be fair, we are just now getting to the point where transaction speed and convenience are at a point where they could be easily used in point-of-sale applications in the real world.

If you care about censorship and individual liberty, you'd be wise to get up to speed on crypto self-custody and see what you can do to use it more as "money" in your daily life.

The progress being made here is remarkable and could soon make exchanges like FTX largely obsolete.

All a DEX does is convert one Ethereum token to another token, sorta like like a WOW marketplace. It's not at all like a replacement for the existing financial system. A DEX does not solve the problem of converting fiat to crypto or crypto back to usable fiat.

To make a difference in the wider world where our freedoms and independence are being aggressively stripped from us day by day, more real economic activity needs to take place on decentralized, open networks.

This may be true, but crypto is not the answer

I'm still waiting for substack to open BTC lightning payments.

It has been 5 years and lightning network has close to no adoption. Substack or any website accepting bitcoin does not solve the problem of converting fiat to bitcoin, which is cumbersome. The vast majority of people would rather just pay with fiat.

If you care about censorship and individual liberty, you'd be wise to get up to speed on crypto self-custody and see what you can do to use it more as "money" in your daily life.

Sticking your money in something that will likely to go zero or close to it is not a good way to protect one's liberty and freedom.

One 'rule' is that a product that is successful tends to be successful quickly. It's not something that is forced. Cellphones, social networks, the WWW, PayPal, iPhone, Walmart, Amazon, credit cards, TV, AOL, eBay, Google, Uber, mp3 players, etc all saw rapid adoption. Bitcoin after 12 years has not. So it may be a niche, but not something that will rise above that. That's not a total failure. But worth hundreds of billions of dollars? Likely not. One can argue that Bitcoin is a protocol like TLS and TCP and the the adoption will lay on it, but even then I am skeptical because it do not see what problem this solves.

The point is that more real economic activity needs done with crypto for it to truly make a difference. It's incredible it's gotten as far as it has without interacting with the real world much, but that is changing. the future will depend on people's willingness to use it and if they keep getting scared away or dismissing it, it will be a slow process. But it's looking inevitable barring some major catastrophe.

Lightning network may be a dead end (although it is still growing), as it is crippled by the ignorance and stubbornness of the bitcoin maxi's, but there are hundreds of other payment solutions being built on other crypto platforms. It's a race at this point and either the bitcoiners will compete or they won't.

Not to mention there are actual use cases of crypto today in countries with unstable financial systems.

Most of the companies and technologies you mention are exploring applications for crypto in their organizations. You may not see what problems it can solve, but millions of other people do.

FYI: DEXes exist on many networks, not just ETH, and cross-chain DEXes are becoming a thing.

One can argue that Bitcoin is a protocol like TLS and TCP and the the adoption will lay on it, but even then I am skeptical because it do not see what problem this solves

Well since you think that platforms with censorship officially built into them and regulated by telephone rule, like PayPal, are better because you can just pay for non-censored things instead, there's no hope of showing you the problem Bitcoin solves.

There still exists the possibility of censorship aided by chain analysis. Exchanges and merchants can reject tainted bitcoin, similar to how credit card companies can decline orders or refuse to do business with certain merchants. Crypto fiills a niche, but I don't see crypto ever gaining mainstream adoption or disrupting the global financial system. I myself have used crypto for small orders and would prefer it over PayPal , but few merchants want to accept bitcoin, in part because because so few people want to use it and it comes with the issue of having to convert the btc back into usable fiat.

Censorship is bad, I think everyone understands that. What's not so clear is if it is a problem that bitcoin can solve. It doesn't matter if you accept payment in BTC if your hosting service doesn't, if your payment processor doesn't, if any of the points of failure on the modern web refuse to take your payments. Could Bitcoin have saved Kiwi Farms?

At some point crypto has to onramp onto the fiat economy, and whatever benefits its proponents says it has collapses.

Yes, you basically need a full stack of society to make an alternative economy viable, and so long as incumbent players can entrap you and handcuff you at exchange point, this is not a problem crypto can solve. No, this is not a cogent argument to make against crypto as compared to inherently backdoored transaction platforms, which he does. The stack must be made of trustworthy blocks.

If Crypto was going to die due to exchanges failing, it probably would have happened back when Mt. Gox imploded. That was a situation where people could have thrown in the towel completely and maybe Bitcoin dies an awkward early death as people stop mining it and delete their keys and eventually forget about the whole thing, and there is no early hype to drive the market into mainstream awareness at all.

Or when The DAO (the original one) suffered that legendary hack which might have soured people on the Ethereum blockchain.

Real OGs remember, and hopefully learned their lesson all that way back about 'trusting' centralized exchanges. AND about trusting decentralized ones.

Ultimately there are major hurdles to maintaining the decentralized aspect of crypto that makes it worth considering as a censorship resistant method of transferring value.

I'm not a bitcoin maxi but I am a crypt-optimist (and I mean ALL of cryptography) but it is certainly hugely frustrating to me that the projects that get the most attention seem to be the ones that fail the most spectacularly.

And the projects that actually leverage the decentralized public ledger in a way that, to me, makes actual sense tend to be ignored since they're not flashy and glamorous nor do they promise to 100x your money.

So I'm a little bitter that we're not getting actual useful products out of this mess so far, but I do think crypto will survive and useful projects will, eventually, be the only reason they can continue to exist and operate. Centralized exchanges may eventually become obsolete in this magical future world.

Mt Gox and the Dao hack were bad, but there where so few people involved compared to now, and those that got burned where more ideologically committed. Now with the implosion of Celsius, Luna and FTX a huge number of normies are getting burnt, and they (and their families, friends etc) will never look at crypto again and always think of it as a scam.

Is that what happened to the traditional financial system after the 2008 meltdown?

That involves a huge chunk of the population of the entire world losing money.

It certainly did after the great depression, lots of old people (who lived through the depression never trusted banks again).

I've yet to see in it argued that we're experiencing the crypto equivalent of the great depression, but there may be a case for it.

I think it's more like the panic of 1907, but that may just be me.

I'd believe it. Crypto has reinvented, among other things, wildcat banking and Tulip Mania.

Any retrospective of Crypto's history (whether it lives or dies) is going to be able to draw ample historical comparisons.

So I'm a little bitter that we're not getting actual useful products out of this mess so far, but I do think crypto will survive and useful projects will, eventually, be the only reason they can continue to exist and operate. Centralized exchanges may eventually become obsolete in this magical world.

It will survive in the sense that Beanie Babies and 80s-90s comics still exist. It's just that no one wants them. MTG cards are the exception to this, probably because they have actual use as enjoyment and a huge and active community, despite not generating revenues or profits. Old MTG cards have outperformed any asset class over the past 2 decades (except ahem crypto but much less volatility though, and most those crypto gains were compressed before 2018) .

You're kind of making my point, though, even if I disagree with the analogy.

99% of collectibles will fade out, but MTG holds on because it has an actual use case, gains a following, and is competently managed.

It's just not decentralized. Which is the magic bullet I am hoping for. An actually successful decentralized project that makes sense as a blockchain product.

I think crypto isn't dying, it's being killed, and its killers have names like «Sam Bankman-Fried». You don't get more centralized than this goofy fuck pontificating on regulation while misappropriating your funds to help out his buddies. It's dressed-up anarcho-tyranny. FTX was scarcely any more legitimate an institution than 2014 style exit scam exchanges ran by Eastern European anons, but the impact is vastly greater precisely due to those pretensions of being the responsible backbone to the system. It doesn't matter that he has the markings of a trustworthy radical bro and signals the «spirit of crypto». What matters is what he does.

SBF was either grossly unethical, beyond incompetent or conspiring with the incumbent powers; seeing his EA affiliations and apparent nonchalance in the wake of the disaster, I believe the latter is very probable and hope not just crypto but EAs get the spillover reputation damage they deserve.

We do not need more Bankmans. We have TradFi already, @2rafa and@BurdensomeCount are doing their jobs there just fine, it has more than enough reach in the society. The whole point of crypto was to establish from first principles an alternative, trustless transaction ecosystem they are not involved with. Roon is another sellout to EAs, but he puts it well:

i've been too anti-crypto so i'll say that i've always liked the piratical create new legal/financial system ethos of it all. towards 2021 end, what we actually saw was the 11th noncollateralized algorithmic stablecoin (ponzi) or people remaking normal apps with worse technology

the problem was always that the good use cases for crypto require random people in poor countries without extradition to build insane free market cypherunk neal stephenson network states and instead we got harvard graduate institutionally backed money grabbing nonsense

Crypto, as conceived of by Satoshi, is intrinsically incompatible with the USG hegemony, and with people like SBF as its champions; it was one of the few non-hopeless attempts to challenge the singleton and increase the richness of potential outcomes. Villain League leaders (Russia, China, Iran etc.) reveal their lack of vision, or complicity, in not throwing their weight behind it.

More generally.

You've asked me the other day:

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?

Adding to those posts: I think that this, in part, will be implemented as the infantilization of the populace framed for midwits as interdependence in modern economy, and the disappearance of people with «fuck you money».

Ironically, it may look like the spread of practices typical for the super-rich down the social strata, but with one significant nuance: as your dependence on connections increases, your own agency and ability to decide whether someone else is connected does not, and indeed it degrades. Thus, a two-class system emerges: people who are connected and people who connect. Even the extremely rich plebeians, like Kanye, are but leafs of the graph; every link between them and the world with which they can affect it can be trivially snapped with or without a formal cause by even the lowest member of the patrician class, who is, in turn, able to fall back on an antifragile support system working on informal «understandings». Plebeian wealth is tied in contracts that can be canceled unilaterally if they misbehave, their social capital – on platforms with censors and politruks, hosted on vulnerable servers owned by people either terrified of another set of politruks or agreeing with them; their money in banks, ran by Bankmans, or in cargo-cultish meme assets like Bitcoin in a Coinbase wallet. We are being made into perpetual children, evaluated, tested and judged by the nebulous Adult Society, granted good boy points, credentials and access tokens which can be revoked at will.

If the realization of having been made into such a child is not terrifying, I don't know what is. My belief is that people gloating at the troubles in crypto, such as the Hacker News audience, are domesticated to the extent they cannot feel this terror and instead skip to obedience instantly, eagerly swallowing the bluepill cope about interdependence, regulations, «consequences of speech» and such. Maybe that's the historically normal mentality for a plebeian.

In any case, Crypto was our shot at resisting this atomization and subjugation trend. But it got infiltrated, discredited, devalued and now is being brought to heel, because, as I always say, social technology >>> technology.

True I think I misread the tea leaves in terms of FTX being non centralized.

I also tend to agree that the nanny state is growing more and more powerful. Our classic formal networks of family helping with raising kids, getting jobs, providing emotional support, etc seems to have been almost fully dismantled at this point. It also doesn’t seem to be enjoying a resurgence.

If you ask me now is the perfect time for a modern day messiah to bring a new religion focused on solving some of these major issues.

With regards to social tech, I think you also make a good point. EA is sadly a great example there, they’ve got so many smart people but fail to grasp how to work the social side of things. Without that too many of their projects are doomed before they start.

I think crypto isn't dying, it's being killed, and its killers have names like «Sam Bankman-Fried». You don't get more centralized than this goofy fuck pontificating on regulation while misappropriating your funds to help out his buddies. It's dressed-up anarcho-tyranny.

BTC was down 70% before FTX failed. Bitcoin was already dying. This was just some salt on the wound. It collapsed under its weight of its unsustainable and unjustifiable valuation.

Of course a huge chunk of that 70% was hot air, nobody's denying that. The current price and market cap seems far more reasonable to me than the heady highs of normie hype.

Villain League leaders (Russia, China, Iran etc.) reveal their lack of vision, or complicity, in not throwing their weight behind it.

It's worth noting that Bitcoin isn't compatible with any temporarily disgraced hegemonies, either; China (in particular) needs to crack down on it because the first thing people do with it is use it to make their assets immune from seizure by the ruling party, and that means their so-far successful attempts at devaluing their currency stop being so successful. The only country that can make it work is one more freedom-minded than the US... and no such countries exist (or are allowed to exist).

If the realization of having been made into such a child is not terrifying, I don't know what is.

The bans on raising children to be functional adults that were totally implemented by the end of the 1980s was always going to have terrible consequences.

The only country that can make it work is one more freedom-minded than the US... and no such countries exist (or are allowed to exist).

Well, El Salvador tried.

bans on raising children to be functional adults

Can you expand here please? I’m curious.

Sure, here you go.

I'm really not sure how else to describe this other than "it's illegal to raise a kid properly".

If your kid isn't at home in front of a screen or within eyeshot at all times, you're a criminal. And that is the exact opposite of fostering adult characteristics like, y'know, independence.

This isn't an isolated incident, either; Utah fixed their law properly but Texas clearly did not.

Not OP, but the current state of parenting is essentially the worship of infantilization.

Teachers are quitting en masse because nobody is willing to standup to parents demanding special treatment and refusing consequences. (Teacher's aren't saints either, but both things can be true). Letting your children trick or treat, as a practice, has disappeared in a handful of years. Letting your kid fall into the iPad vortex isn't frowned upon at all anymore, at least by 7 they'll be able to string together nuke-level kill streaks in COD.

Was this driven by legislative changes or cultural changes though? When he wrote banned that made me assume the former.

Mostly cultural practices. I recommend listening to some George Carlin, it seems like 1 out of every 3 of his routines has him talking about the coddling of children.

It's worth noting that Bitcoin isn't compatible with any temporarily disgraced hegemonies, either; China (in particular) needs to crack down on it because the first thing people do with it is use it to make their assets immune from seizure by the ruling party, and that means their so-far successful attempts at devaluing their currency stop being so successful. The only country that can make it work is one more freedom-minded than the US... and no such countries exist (or are allowed to exist).

I suppose that is the paradox of crypto at present: the countries that would benefit from it on the world stage are also the countries that probably would be the most undermined by it domestically.

I'd argue FTX didn't really have much of a reason to come into existence at all. The role of centralized exchanges in the Cypherpunk ethos is pretty much just fiat on ramps. The most crypto way to exchange crypto are decentralized exchanges(DEX).

As for the doomsaying we've been through this cycle before, it's probably healthy. The last two crashes have generally improved the quality of projects and a lot of the stuff we're seeing die was rotten to begin with. The next cycle with start with millions more people having native wallets built into their browsers, mature side chain/L2 options for scaling, healthier skepticism of tokens (especially NFTs) that don't have a purpose, answers to the environmental waste criticism(Pow=>PoS), and many other infrastructure projects.

The next cycle with start with millions more people having native wallets built into their browsers,

This reminds me of the hype over browser toolbars that were popular in the early 2000s.

I remember one of those toolbars, I think it was for this new company gewgal, or something.

which makes hundreds billions in profits for shareholders, unlike crpyto

What were they returning to their shareholders in the early 2000s? Apologies if I can't find your point, I was temporarily disoriented by the sudden shifting of the goalposts.

bitcoin will never return anything

Your link just goes to the Brave browser - do they have native wallets for crypto? That's pretty awesome if so.

mature side chain/L2 options for scaling

How is this different from forking a blockchain?

I agree that PoS is gonna be huge. What other infrastructure projects have you seen?

Your link just goes to the Brave browser - do they have native wallets for crypto? That's pretty awesome if so.

Brave is the same organization behind the basic attention token. The browser has a built in wallet and some neat features.

How is this different from forking a blockchain?

Most critically interoperability, you can't take advantage of ethereum classic's low transaction fees to do stuff on the ethereum main net. You can move money onto the matic chain directly and perform operations with other people on that network that ultimately roll up to the ethereum main net.

What other infrastructure projects have you seen?

I recommend just checking out vitalik's blog if you haven't already, especially on the zero knowledge(ZK) posts. I don't really want to shill specific projects.

I think it depends a lot on what your goals are.

You can always self custody your crypto. You can create things of value, and have people send crypto to you self custodied wallet.

There is the concern that you more or less have to purchase crypto at an exchange with strict Know Your Customer policies, that reports all your transactions to the state. And everything after that isn't difficult to track. And even if the government can't exactly track it, they know you had it at one point, so they can harass you to explain what you did with it. Probably trump up some charges related to not cooperating if you don't. And yeah, that might not be exactly constitutional, but good luck getting through the many year long process to fight it in courts.

But I'm not sure the KYC regulations around crypto exchanges really meaningfully impact that propensity of the government to apply maximum boot pressure on dissenting faces. It's just ruining crypto as the magic bullet offramp from dystopia people hoped it would be.

It still has utility, operating outside of the default authority of the state when you self custody. Which is to say, you make the state work harder to harass you. I know it's not what people hoped, but it's not nothing.

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