by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-04 17:52:27+00:00
> these are political problems, not technological ones

That's a false dichotomy. Social media platforms are a technology, and it's a political problem that the biggest assholes on the planet tend to use them to get elected. The solution is a technological one, which is to build and use social media which do not give special privileges to an owner.

It's all bound up together.

> You're being reductionist and pessimistic when describing fiat and blindly optimistic when describing crypto.

My purpose in this thread is not to convince anybody that crypto is better than fiat, it's that crypto's potential is greater than fiat's potential. I'm being reductionist and pessimistic about fiat not to point out problems that it has not solved, but to point out problems that it is incapable of solving.

It's a bit like The Architect's speech in whichever Matrix movie: it's fundamental to the system that it creates these anomalies. It's not "the one" but it's definitely "the few".

> The primary purpose of the fiat system is to allow more control and regulation over the system

...and it does so by giving hopefully-trustworthy people the privilege to rewrite transaction history despite the transacting parties not having explicitly consented to that person having that power over that transaction.

The argument that crypto holds no promise besides grift rests on the wobbly assumption that the benefits of regulatory control cannot be achieved without creating those privileged positions--positions which end up being occupied by grifters.

It was once a necessary evil. We have a financial system based around scarcity because it was the only readily available implementation. The laws of physics ensure that certain things are scarce, so there was no need to build anything in order to enforce that scarcity. But there was also no hope of rewriting the rules of the system towards the elimination of its systemic problems. That has changed.

> most crypto advocates today fight tooth and nail in favor of keeping power in the hands of narcissistic assholes

That's true. It's horrible. Most crypto projects today are just a reimplementation of the scarcity-based system that the laws of physics handed our ancestors re: gold and such. We moved away from the gold standard for a variety of good reasons. The idea of returning to a gold-like system appeals to grifters because they don't like being limited by the fiat system. But there's no reason we can't build something that limits the grifters even more than fiat already does--and when we do that, should we really avoid using crypto for the job just because the grifters tend to use it also?

Crypto is not about artificial scarcity and passing tokens around. That's merely a rule-set that it supports. Is promise lies in the idea that we can implement other rule-sets as well--ones which are more sensitive to the needs of their users than either the physics-imposed system re: gold, or the bureaucracy-imposed system re: fiat.

I share your objections:

> detecting and canceling fraudulent transactions -- something that is inherently impossible with crypto

> and then have absolutely no possible recourse when it gets stolen and funneled to North Korea

...but these problems are the same as they were when we were moving chests full of gold coins around. It's a shame that people have used crypto to reinvent a scarcity-only system that the rest of us largely abandoned in the 1970's. But nothing about that precludes somebody using the same primitives to implement something better. It's like you're attacking angry birds and I'm defending mobile phones. The platform has merit, despite the existence of shitty apps. Let's stop using those apps.

We also want similar things. This sounds great:

> The people in power ... could be scientists, human rights lawyers, passionate nerds, doctors, and even everyday people

The structural problem with the fiat system is that those privileged positions--the ones that I claimed end up populated by grifters--when they end up populated by an altruistic person, they end up placing too heavy of a load on that person. The only way to do some of these jobs is to be at least partially negligent. I know several people who fit the description that you've given and they're doing good work. The last thing I want to do is encourage them to stop doing what they're doing and instead go be a politician--they're needed where they are.

The bureaucratic computer which implements fiat's rules is not sensitive to which users trust which other users. Sure, in some cases you need a bureaucrat whose full time job is to be the authority over some domain. But most of the time you don't. Most of the time you can get away with explicitly indicating an authority and giving them narrowly scoped power. Some scientist, some doctor, some passionate nerd... One who knows both parties to a contract/transaction, somebody who has a track record of keeping their promises. By all means lets vote for these people if they want a permanent political role, but we shouldn't have to wait for an election to do that. With crypto it can be much more granular.

We can come up with a set of rules that lets us unambiguously grant those individuals the kind of control that the fiat system gives us, but over such a limited scope that they don't have to stop doing whatever they were doing that makes them awesome to go be a politician instead, and which doesn't give them so much power that they become a magnet for the corrupting factors that plague the fiat system.

Sometimes you need a judge and a court and a lengthy trial, but other times you just need another professional to look at the work and say "yeah, that's good work, you should be paid for it". Crypto is a more flexible medium through which both parties' trust of individual can be made explicit and through which their assessment can be made binding.

> Fuck crypto, vote better.

We can vote better while also building better things. But if those things are operated by a single corruptible party, then they'll never be as good as equivalents that aren't (that means using crypto). Fuck artificial scarcity, let's build a world without it, because it's where the biggest assholes on the planet get their power.