it’s really challenging being a pro crypto liberal
Welcome to the Leftist Club. We’re here for you, comrade!
I just believe in good tech. And I invest in emerging technologies. All the politics and bullshit narratives in crypto are exhausting.
I like good tech
I know crypto, like all unregulated currencies, is just a tool for scammers and criminals to make money.
I don’t beleive crypto is good tech becauase it has proven to not be.
Understanding the effects of tech should be seperate of your beleif in it, and should dictate your beleifs if you want to live in reality.
Completely agreed. Everything is framed from the perspective of who it helps or who it hurts rather than seeing the incredible and liberating potential of new innovations.
When the “innovations” are made by people who claim to see themselves as liberators, but structure and use the technology only as a vehicle for scams, grifts, and other unregulated financial shenanigans, it’s kinda hard to see it in any other frame than who it helps and who it hurts. Overwhelmingly, crypto has shoveled money into the hands of those already wealthy.
Also being complicated & convoluted doesn’t make it good. It drains massive amounts of electricity for a heavily redundant proof of work system that has simple flaws like not handshaking wallet transactions. (You can just drop something into a wallet without the owner’s consent or approval, on ether.)
Also of course there is a political narrative. It’s a technology that’s trying to embed itself into society, it’s inherently political as a core goal. Lmao.
I respectfully disagree. Crypto is a tool. It can be used by oppressed people to protect their money, and it can be used by people like Trump to grift them out of it too. It’s the same energy as a knife—it can perform life saving surgery and it can kill depending on the hands using it. The tool isn’t to blame, the people using it are.
Another interesting phenomenon with crypto is the safety it has brought to the drug trade through online markets. Instead of a dealer being able to sell bunk product to hundreds of unaware customers, now we have anonymous online reviews to assist people in sourcing safer products from an industry that governments have refused to regulate and provide access to.
It’s a double edged sword, but it isn’t crypto’s fault how it gets used, just like it isn’t a dollar bills fault when it buys a child bride. Accountability is for humans, not objects.
Lol. Lmao.
Accountability is for the people that design, build, maintain, use, and moderate the program just like every other program. That’s just bullshit for the devs and their backers to weasel out of responsibility. Clearly they’re able to fork out transactions they don’t want to happen, if it benefits them.
Saying the system has no accountability for the way it allows anonymous actors to commit virtual financial crimes without fear of consequences is again, laughable. It’s a program, it should be judged on how it’s used. If a website allows people to post child porn, it’s just “a tool that’s being used and could be used to post art as well” oh well.
It’s purpose is what it does. I’ve never seen an “oppressed person” protect their money with crypto. By what mechanism would that happen? Wishful thinking?
The drug trade issue is soaked in capitalist libertarianism and any more socially libertarian / anarchist effects are purely derivative. Bypassing the capitalists government by going directly into the unregulated market.
You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.
Your lol’s and lmao’s aren’t necessary, I’m trying to engage in a good faith discussion with you here. Laughing me off isn’t the same as making a valid point.
Saying that they can fork out transactions they don’t like is clearly a misunderstanding of how most crypto works. There may be some shitcoin out there that has nefarious design qualities that I don’t know about, but the largest coin out there is undoubtedly bitcoin, and speaking to that system, the entire purpose of it is that it is trustless at its core. It is defined by a set of rules that were set out in the white paper, and it does not deviate from that. Transactions are verifiable by each ledger. Satoshi Nakamoto isn’t sitting there with his finger on a switch to screw you. There may be whales who are able to move the needle with huge transactions, but that is literally the same for any currency.
Maybe we will have different definitions of oppression, so I will just say people in general can protect their assets from seizure with crypto. If you have too much cash in your car and get pulled over at a traffic stop, the cops can just take it on the assumption that having a large amount of money on you is suspicious. This has happened multiple times in America when people have been traveling with large amounts of cash to purchase properties, cars, antiques, or a whole variety of other things. No beat cop is going to be smart enough to start hassling you over your USB keychain when you get stopped for going 5 over the limit.
I agree with the first sentence of your second paragraph—if the creators of a coin have included hidden design elements to screw people, they should be held accountable for that, but that is not going to be the case with every crypto coin out there, and they should be judged individually. Going back to my knife example, a knife that is a murder weapon should be seized, a knife that is a cooking utensil should not.
And lastly, to speak to your point about CP, while I’m not an expert on the subject, nearly every system I’ve heard of that is used for that is something that is also used for totally legal purposes including Lemmy! Should Lemmy be illegal because there are some illegal instances out there? Of course not—those individual instance operators should be held accountable, and the other instance operators have nothing to do with it. When you paint with such a broad brush, you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
