Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.
Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.
People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.
Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.
Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.
Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions—things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis—while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.
It’s Cypher punk, not Cyber punk. Ones a movie genre about swords and dystopian tech, ones a decentralized trustless protocol powered by encryption
I’ve been a fan of cyberpunk for years, and I feel like an unsecured currency backed in computational waste (proof-of-work style) is a perfect fit for a cyberpunk setting. If I’d read it in a story years ago I’d have said it was a little on the nose
How is it insecure? Schnorr signatures and the txID system literally make it quantum resistant. Even if you cracked a transaction’s key, you’d only have access to already spent funds. Like a receipt instead of a debit card, with no certainty who has the money until they spend it.
Oh, and in terms of computational waste, the fiat backed inflation based currency system we have now, has incentivized a world of endless growth which isn’t sustainable. Switching to an asset with finite supply like Bitcoin would remove those incentives. There’s other costs to using deflationary assets, but if you actually value the environment, switching to Bitcoin would economically inventivize a world where people are encouraged to save more instead of spend more
Unsecured, as in stuff like mt gox where the nearest thing to a bank for crypto just closed one day and stole hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins with no recourse. Unsecured like watching the crypto scene reinvent/rediscover financial regulation one theft, scam, or disaster at a time. That’s a perfect fit for a cyberpunk setting.
Unrelated to my point about the genre, I’ll admit I’m especially skeptical that it’s the devaluation of currency is what’s responsible for the endless growth mindset of capitalism, or that systems that seem to be used more like investment stocks than a currency are structurally capable of fixing it.
I’m sure the some of blockchain technology has some practical uses, there’s probably a way it can work as currency, but I have a hard time seeing any way to separate the modern cryptocurrency scene from investment capitalism
Edit: I really do wish you luck in doing so though
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