Why must we use the loaded term 'toxicity'?
It starts your argument with: "Those who disagree with me are poison".
On anti-crypto toxicity
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Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#12I don’t think there’s a bifurcation between “good” and “bad” people in crypto, the real world is a lot more grey, and how people behave doesn’t depend so much on their character, but on culture and incentives.
These days, we painfully observe the culture of crypto in every single online medium that isn’t very carefully moderated, for example Twitter.
And about incentives, I think it’s very hard not to become some kind of “evangelist” or “shill” when a significant fraction of your net worth is invested in a digital item whose sole value depends on enough other people also believing in the project. You need to spread the hype.
In my opinion, all of this would be fun and games if it weren’t for the massive negative externalities all of this cause in terms of environmental damage and accelerating the climate catastrophe. This is completely evident, which doesn’t stop some crypto holders from denying it with all kinds of illogical arguments. That’s understandable — see previous paragraph.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#13The problem is that while these topics are interesting (and even crucial these days) they're often used in bad faith by people who are just in it because of the get-rich-quick scheme. You'll often see people push some cryptotoken using a thin veneer of political activism, saying that it's about taking control back or redistributing wealth etc... but it's rarely more than that.
In my experience if you attempt to push back and ask how exactly they propose to fix these problems they'll just resort to enumerating the failings of our current system (the 2008 crisis, wealth inequality, tax evasion by the wealthiest etc...) which is all fair, but how does cryptocurrency fix this? I'd argue that so far it's mostly demonstrated that it shares all these issues, only even more pronounced.
The pyramid scheme at the core of cryptocurrency poisons the well, that's the original issue with this entire thing. You can't have a good faith discussion when one side expects that they're going to be billionaires if things go their way. I acknowledge that there's definitely toxicity coming from us cryptoskeptics, but you have to acknowledge that these days easily 90% of any discussion involving cryptocurrencies is going to use shallow catchphrases pushed by people who don't understand the technology, don't understand basic economic principles and are just hoping that their $1000 in ShitCumShibaCoin is going to make them millionaires.
On top of that the cryptocurrency side has over a decade of unfulfilled promises to account for. As far as I'm concerned we've exhausted the discussion years ago. Any debate surrounding cryptocurrencies on HN from 2017 is equally as relevant today, there's no need to keep repeating the same arguments over and over again from both sides. So today I mostly dismiss anything cryptocurrency-related as a scam and move on. It works well, too.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#14> Despite crypto’s unquestionably right-libertarian roots I had trouble reading beyond that in the second sentences. You can’t just retroactively assign a political affiliation to the origin of an algorithm application.
To me it had leftist anarcho roots, but whatever floats their boat, I guess.
And on my desk as I type, a slim volume entitled "The politics of bitcoin : Software as right-wing extremism". To be fair, it seems to be more about some bitcoiners rather than bitcoin itself.
I suspect but cannot prove that we could argue any political leanings we like.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#15TIL: Being critical of a technology whose fundamental implementation promotes extreme negative externalities is "toxic"
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#16> Despite crypto’s unquestionably right-libertarian roots I had trouble reading beyond that in the second sentences. You can’t just retroactively assign a political affiliation to the origin of an algorithm application.
To me it had leftist anarcho roots, but whatever floats their boat, I guess.
For me it is rather hard to separate the Libetarians and Anarcho people... Other one might be right and other left, but there is some weird commonality when it comes to state and control of financial system...
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#17> Despite crypto’s unquestionably right-libertarian roots I had trouble reading beyond that in the second sentences. You can’t just retroactively assign a political affiliation to the origin of an algorithm application.
I don't think it's retroactive at all, unless you believe that the message in the origin block "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" is coincidental.
Beyond that Bitcoin's design decisions (deflationary currency, trustless) embed a political ideal. Algorithms can very well be political, it's absurd to argue otherwise. For example taxes are, effectively, algorithmic in nature and I don't think anybody would argue that tax brackets are apolitical.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#18How's that diversification and equalitization and cyber-web3-rallying going in the light that wealth inequality of crypto closely follows that of real-world currencies? [ref: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2021.7301...]
Isn't that like, failing to admit that nothing's changed, just the names of the wealth holders (and sometimes not even that)?
It looks like we as a species very much tend to form Pareto (or more accurately, power-law) distributions of wealth just by being ourselves.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#19No post body was provided.
Re: On anti-crypto toxicity
#20> Despite crypto’s unquestionably right-libertarian roots I had trouble reading beyond that in the second sentences. You can’t just retroactively assign a political affiliation to the origin of an algorithm application.
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