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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I'm a big blockchain/decentralization fan for reasons like this. Of course there are still system wide attack vectors. What happens when ethereum becomes the chain of dissidents and progchain gets buy in by all the respectable power centers?

We're already seeing some lines being drawn over the Tornado Cash incident. But I have much belief in the ability of markets to build coalitions of limited interests out of disorganized people.

Besides, the whole point of cypherpunk is that you don't need permission or assent from power. It doesn't matter how much they disapprove if they can't stop you.

But they can stop us is the issue. In both a pos and pow system if freedom chain is small enough it's vulnerable to sybil attacks.

I know the theoretical weaknesses. But in these matters I defer to practicality. I don't believe there's been a successful attack against large chains, even ones like Monero where it would be a direct interest of state actors to pull off.

Ultimately they can just send men with guns to kill anyone they don't like, it's not like principles have reliably stopped people with power from doing that in the past. But if it's impractical, they often focus their attention elsewhere and leave us alone, for a time.

Freedom is always to be found in those cracks that the all powerful castle has decided aren't worth crushing yet. Arguably there's not even any other form of freedom.