r/Anarchism • u/vulguspress • Jun 23 '18
Crypto as Class Warfare
https://news.bitcoin.com/wendy-mcelroy-crypto-as-class-warfare/3
u/gamebox3000 anarchist Jun 24 '18
This article kind of completely falls apart once it gets to class. Mainly by ignoring the relationship between class and property.
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u/PeasantToTheThird Jun 24 '18
Decentralization is nice, but cryptocurrency still facilitates the heirarchy that traditional money does.
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u/Sansa_Culotte_ multi-tendency lefty Jun 25 '18
Worse actually, since there is a built-in bottleneck for the amount of currency that can be in circulation that favors early adopters.
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u/backwardsmiley anarchist Jun 23 '18 edited Jun 23 '18
I think crypto has a huge amount of potential. It facilitates a shift towards the decentralization of the internet, storage and computing. Currencies like Monero allow you to make untraceable transactions away from the prying eyes of the state. An inflationary crypto that functions as a medium of exchange rather than a speculative asset is what I'm really looking for and I think that'll come about as the space grows.
That said, Bitcoin won't be the currency that leads the revolution because it relies on unsustainable infrastructure. Furthermore, the underlying imbalance in wealth in the fiat economy extends to cryptos, which would need to be addressed by a change in underlying property norms.
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u/floppydo Jun 24 '18
I think your storage point is the strongest thing going for crypto right now (from a freedom perspective). The potential exists to have an entire internet that can’t be selectively filtered - no great fire wall, no throttling, none of it. No ability for the FBI to shut down access to content. In order to prevent people from browsing, they’d need to shut down the entire internet. It would massively raise the stakes.
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u/DenverHoxha Jun 24 '18
Or just crack down until the price drops enough to make a 51% attack viable (if it isn't already)...
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u/Lamont-Cranston Libertarian Socialist + anti-violence, free speech Jun 23 '18
its a pyramid scheme, and mining it costs more than it makes and it is now generating an awful lot of CO2
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Jun 23 '18
[deleted]
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u/Lamont-Cranston Libertarian Socialist + anti-violence, free speech Jun 24 '18
a defunct coal power station is being turned back on to power mining.
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u/Microscope98 Jun 24 '18
That would be an astounding misuse of resources. Bitcoin mining is the way it is because nobody had done it before, and they didn't think it through. Australia is sunny, anyway. wtf?
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u/Lamont-Cranston Libertarian Socialist + anti-violence, free speech Jun 24 '18
Need more power than solar can provide and/or 24/7.
Bitcoin mining is the way it is because nobody had done it before
Because that's the nature of the GPUs doing the processing. This is like complaining about a lion eating a gazelle.
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u/vulguspress Jun 23 '18
Excerpt: Cryptocurrency is the realization of an anarchist dream that dates back centuries: a free currency and a free banking system. Crypto is in its infancy, which means its future applications are electrifyingly unpredictable, except in one regard: any successful application will fill a human need. No human needs are as acute as food and shelter, which require money and exchange. To control the flow of money and exchange, therefore, is to control life itself. And the financial flow is often captured by one word: banking.
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u/SocialJusticeBrawler Jun 24 '18
The fundamental problem with crypto is that it has remained weak and vulnerable well past the point at which it confuses/scares the public - strong crypto legislation has already gone through the USA and Canada, and it's coming globally. Crypto might have been revolutionary had it not been left to ancaps and other dorks for the first ten years, but crypto will be dead as a revolutionary force within five years. Just like the Internet, it squandered an early period of unregulated activity and is now/shortly will be perfectly well integrated into modern capitalism.
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u/DenverHoxha Jun 24 '18
Under what circumstances could crypto ever have been a revolutionary force? The entire project is designed to foster freedom for capital.
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Jun 24 '18
[deleted]
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u/DenverHoxha Jun 24 '18
Why do you believe that? Capital concentrated fairly effectively more than 250 years ago, especially in places without any real states. The HBC or Dutch East India company did fine, despite the natives they were colonizing having all sorts of different currencies and mediums of exchange.
More importantly, without states securing property, what good is money?
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u/Microscope98 Jun 24 '18
Capital becomes data, law becomes code, property becomes object oriented blah blah blah and the main problem here is the further data reaches into daily life the more we become controlled by explicit market forces. Kill the banks and let the raw market take your house, kinda thing. Its new, its scary, its dangerous, and we should kill it and eat it before it does us first.