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.
There is so much misinformation here, it’s hard to know where to even start. Yes there are crypto scams, yes legacy technology consumes way too much energy.
These are all solved problems, but it you only know about crypto from scams you might think there is nothing else. Crypto solves real problems with our current financial systems.
Wouldn’t hurt to read from time to time. Solar Punk is as much about technology, as it is about knowledge.
crypto is just our current financial system but worse. more risk, more volatility, faster consolidation of wealth, slower transactions, and less actual utility. more than a decade on, there are only a very small handful of things you can actually buy with bitcoin, let alone any other cryptocurrency. what problem does that solve?
i do at least admire the utopianism of it - i’m not exactly going to bat for our current banking system - but if you see crypto in 2024 as anything other than a failed experiment at best then you’re just delusional, it has completely failed to solve any of the problems it set out to solve and it has verifiably made the world a worse place
If you’re actually asking what it solves:
Trust. Blockchain technology eliminates the need for trust where typically it would be required.
Sadly blockchain doesn’t even to that. It just shifts trust to a nebulous cabal of large miners in the case of Bitcoin or the big oligarchs in the case of Etherium.
Actual transactions for banks take longer than it shows, that how overdrafts still happen or bounced payments even though an accounts shows a recent deposits. They will show what SHOULD happen and over a couple of days the accounts process
Its why VISA was looking at using some of ETH smart contract stuff to potentially handle some of their payments on the back end, as well as the reason why central bank digital currency (CBDC) had some legitimate studies being done on it.
Its not utopianism, its basically just harm reduction.
Crypto is vast my friend. It is not a financial system per se. At its core it is tools for human coordination which, by necessity contains a financial system.
It is indeed an experiment but it’s a little premature to say that it has failed. The cake is still in the oven.
It’s true that plenty of crypto projects have failed. That’s to be expected in a bleeding edge experimental space. People try things out and sometimes they fail. That’s how it works. There are however, plenty of projects that are still going strong fueled by very talented developers working tirelessly to address all of your criticisms. It just takes time. This is complex stuff. It’s the merging of cryptography, economics and computer science among other things. It’s going to take a little while.
Where’s the solutions? Don’t say “proof of stake”
Proof of steak.
Prime rib only.
Excuse me friend but why not say proof of stake? It seems to me as if that IS a great solution. I’ve never mined any type of crypto currency but I do run Ethereum validators. I run them on an Intel NUC mini PC. When I first switched them on I started with 6 validators all running on the same machine. I noticed no discernable difference in my household power consumption. Then I increased to 12 and then later 27 validators, again all on the same machine and again no discernible difference on my power bill. I can repeat this for hundreds of validators all on this one mini PC and not use any more power than I’m currently using. To do the same on a proof of work chain I’d need one specialized, dedicated machine that would use orders of magnitude more power for each miner.
Because it’s not as robust or secure as it’s claimed to be, because it concentrates power to those with more money again, etc.
I see. Could you elaborate on that at all? What are the claims vs. the reality? How is power concentrated to those with more money? Genuinely interested.
All the decentralized concensus algorithms rely on some kind of way to “score” different branches of history versus others, Bitcoin uses an approximation of spent CPU cycles via proof of work while proof of stake uses money holdings over time used to vouch for a branch.
The problem is proof of stake is not rooted in something outside the chain itself, nothing is truly irrevocably spent so it’s possible to vouch for multiple branches with the same stake (“nothing at stake”). Most nodes (wallet owners) will also not be online all the time so they try to use delegation (risky because it centralizes power), and to coordinate block creation (because it doesn’t have an algorithmic timing source) all mining nodes are connected in a pool and track each other’s “liveness” (online status and connectivity) and pass around the right to create the next block (which is vulnerable to being gamed, your chance is proportional to how much money you have in the system which controls how many nodes you can enter). If you gain enough of a majority of online nodes at any point in time ever then you can permanently assign yourself as the next person to create a block and control all future blocks to doublespend or block transactions.
And if you can steal enough private keys including old long emptied wallets then you can create a new parallel history indistinguishable from the real current one to any new nodes because there’s truly nothing making the two chains distinguishable if you don’t know any existing nodes (which would require trust in a third party).
Thanks. That’s interesting. How many nodes would be required to gain control? How much would that cost? And why would anyone want to do that?
I imagine once someone managed to secure control it wouldn’t go unnoticed by the users. It would probably trigger a mass exodus from whatever chain it happened to occur on, effectively tanking the token price. The controller would have spent a considerable amount of funds only to be left with a dead chain and worthless tokens.
Doesn’t really seem worth it unless I’m missing something.
It’s a high percentage of the pool of known live nodes. It wouldn’t necessarily be expensive if you can steal keys by hacking as well as DDoSing a handful other nodes which would be voting against you to artificially boost your fraction of voting power in chain selection.
It might be noticed eventually, but it would take hours to weeks just to confirm it really happened and exodus would take weeks to months. You could make many small trades to increase the volume of coins through your wallet, then reverse all outgoing transactions from your wallet, then make a big payment, get something valuable, reverse the payment and keep what you bought, and repeat until it simply stops working.
Oh, I don’t think it would take that long to notice. There are many people who make it their business to keep up with what’s happening on chain. I’d wager that before the perpetrators even managed to gain control alarm bells would be going off.
Maybe a full exodus might take weeks or months but enough to tank the token price could happen in minutes.
I don’t believe that the scenario that you’re imagining would be worthwhile enough for anyone to want to attempt it even if it is plausible.
Proof of time and proof of burn are both interesting alts to me.
Proof of burn especially if it could be coupled a limitless mining pool that increased or decreased based on the number of transactions on the network. Basically a currency with that grows based on used and has a deflationary mechanism otherwise.
Haven’t heard of proof of time. Proof of burn sounds to similar to proof of stake with the same problems making it infeasible to resist long term manipulation of concensus.
Solarpunk is not just about technology, it’s specifically about being critical toward new technologies with a special emphasis on the social and environmental impacts they have.
The single largest blindspot that cryptocurrency enthusiasts have is in not recognizing that their systems are inseparable from computers, and that computers in and of themselves are an environmental disaster.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/the-monster-footprint-of-digital-technology/
That, I can agree with.