by feoren | 2025-04-04 14:48:04+00:00
I know this is hard for techies to hear, but the way you fight existing power structures is by organizing, petitioning, protesting, voting. Political, in other words. No technology is going to come and save us from powerful people exploiting the poor if we keep voting for the biggest assholes on the planet. Ironically, most of the people advocating for crypto to save us from powerful people are exactly the same people voting for the absolute worst people whose campaign promises are to fuck over the poor and exact revenge on their political enemies. So it's hard to take the argument "I'm pro-crypto because it rages against the machine" in good faith when 99.8% of people making that argument are fighting tool and nail to make it illegal to oppose the machine. But I'll assume you're in the 0.2% for sake of argument. The point stands: these are political problems, not technological ones.

> Because the fiat system was not designed to solve any of the problems we're talking about. It was designed to feed the Roman war machine

This is exactly why I'm saying you're comparing fiat vs. crypto completely unequally. If fiat was designed to feed the Roman war machine, then crypto was designed to buy drugs online. You're being reductionist and pessimistic when describing fiat and blindly optimistic when describing crypto.

> its primary purpose has been to ensure that power structures established by varying forms of violence remain in effect without the need to trot out that violence again.

The primary purpose of the fiat system is to allow more control and regulation over the system, mostly to avoid huge boom-bust cycles in the economy and more Great Depressions. That's genuinely it. Yes, much of the purpose of government is to enable the transfer of power without violence. If we're redesigning government, can we please keep that part? Right now, if I break into your home and hit you with a wrench until you tell me the private keys of your bitcoin wallet, I can steal all your money assuming I get away. If I break into your home at hit you with a wrench until you give me your credit card, there's very little I can actually do with that. The violence you're talking about is the violence of anarchy -- the exact same anarchy that you're touting as a benefit of crypto.

> Take credit card companies for example. There's a lot they could do to prevent fraud

Credit card companies do an enormous amount to prevent fraud, and they're incredibly good at it. And are you seriously claiming that crypto will have less fraud? Most of the ways that credit card companies deal with fraud is by immediately detecting and canceling fraudulent transactions -- something that is inherently impossible with crypto.

> --there are many ways to build a system where payments happen without leaving secrets like credit card numbers out in the open

Yes, including in a fiat system! Here you are again comparing the current, flawed fiat system with some imagined future crypto system, but you can also imagine a better fiat system! And people are working on it, e.g. with chipped cards (yes it's annoying it's only for in-person purchases).

> Or consider health insurance claims. They could absolutely provide a price to the patient within a minute or two ... [previously] I'm not proposing that anybody should have to use crypto.

But if health insurance companies don't have to use crypto, and they benefit from the current system, then they just won't use crypto. So your problem is not solved. It's a political one, not a technological one.

Look, humanity has been getting incrementally better at this "government" thing over thousands of years. Yes, it's slow, and we backslide a lot. I'm pissed at entrenched power structures too. But these are political problems, and crypto just is not inherently a fix for these problems. The people "in power" could be megacorporations and aging narcissistic asshole rapist felons, or they could be scientists, human rights lawyers, passionate nerds, doctors, and even everyday people. It's largely up to us whether it's the former or the latter, and most crypto advocates today fight tooth and nail in favor of keeping power in the hands of narcissistic assholes.

If we're imagining a better world, why are we imagining one where existing shitty power structures just get torn down, and nobody has the power to stop scams, money laundering, illegal activity (we're not talking about buying fun drugs here either, we're talking about the bad shit), billions of dollars being funneled to North Korea (thanks, crypto!), small bugs in contract logic causing billions of dollars in losses, etc.? A world where a multi-billion-dollar project to build a new children's hospital requires some party to ever actually hold multiple billions of dollars in one pot, lock it up in some crypto contract for 5 years where it can't benefit the economy, and then have absolutely no possible recourse when it gets stolen and funneled to North Korea? Why is that the world we're imagining, and not one where power is just distributed better? Fuck crypto, vote better.