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