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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.
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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