I feel sort of bad for Vitalik. If he genuinely hoped cryptocurrency would serve as a counterweight to authoritarian governments and Silicon Valley greed, I think he's going to be very disappointed. I think crypto is interesting and has utilities, but its not going to solve global social coordination.
I just think technologists need to "think dumber". Its easier to make money if you have money. Some people get lucky for no reason whatsoever. Some people win big out of raw talent or effort, and then they become criminals. It costs money to use computers. Some people like status and gambling.
Crypto very much suffers from a chronic case of "one bad apple spoils the barrel".
There was a time when I was proud of working on crypto, and how most of our users were actually, genuinely using our product to evade various forms of abuse from their local authorities. Once prices started going up and and a bunch of people started using it as a get-rich-quick scheme, that rapidly became a vicious cycle with people like me started leaving the ecosystem in disgust, and we lost what pressure existed within crypto-adjancent companies to stay true to the original goals.
This article makes it sound that Vitalik is reaching that state of disillusionment as well. Shame, he's one of the last few "true believers" I know of.
> There was a time when I was proud of working on crypto, and how most of our users were actually, genuinely using our product to evade various forms of abuse from their local authorities.
This is one of cases where the term "crypto" is genuinely confusing. I'd easily believe your claim if it were about cryptography, but I'm highly skeptical about it as applied to cryptocurrency.
I wouldn't be surprised if, when the final history of cryptocurrency is written, its main effects will be judged to have been scams and linguistic confusion.
This seems like a repeating pattern: brilliant tech visionaries attempting to undermine political/financial power with technology. Every time this is attempted it's subverted either by the application of power (firewalls, censorship, KYC/obscenity laws) or money (acquisitions, embrace extend extinguish, advertising[1], astroturf/spam). It seems like there might be a persistent gap in STEM education where each new generation of hackers is unaware of the underlying societal reasons why such attempts fail and convinces themselves: "this time it's going to be different".
[1] By this I mean that if a platform decides to be ad-funded, they often begin to self-censor to stay in the advertiser's good graces. Over time this gives increasing power to large advertisers to control content - see: Youtube.
> It seems like there might be a persistent gap in STEM education where each new generation of hackers is unaware of the underlying societal reasons why such attempts fail and convinces themselves: "this time it's going to be different".
I think that's true. More broadly, I think it's a totally unfounded belief that computer technology can somehow transcend human nature coupled with a general ignorance, disinterest, or even contempt for non-computer technology.
Take cryptocurrency: in large part its original vision was rooted in contempt for law (a kind of social technology), which just meant it repeated a bunch of mistakes that have been solved in well-developed legal systems, with little to no value-add.
> More broadly, I think it's a totally unfounded belief that computer technology can somehow transcend human nature coupled with a general ignorance, disinterest, or even contempt for non-computer technology.
This is an excellent point and the crux of the matter. Technology, particularly software-related technology, provides an amplification effect of the worst of humanity.
I'm reminded of the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the chimps discover bones as weapons. Well, now that bone is the Internet.
There's this belief amongst technocrats is that we can somehow be saved by technology. A good documentary on this is Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.
People try to do it with tech because it's easier, it's much harder to work politically to cause change. But ultimately that's what's required to enact real change, as we have seen the technical tools will be coopted by the political powers.
It's essentially the techno libertarian dream - build a profitable business that makes the world a better place. Unfortunately, profit and making the world a better place are pretty diametrically opposed given that profit is the centralisation of power and most social ills are caused by power imbalances. The error libertarians have always made is thinking that the problem of concentration of power is solely an issue with the government and not an inherent issue with markets.
> I feel sort of bad for Vitalik. If he genuinely hoped cryptocurrency would serve as a counterweight to authoritarian governments and Silicon Valley greed, I think he's going to be very disappointed.
Well, of course! If crypto is useful as a counter-balance to authoritarian governments, then the value of crypto is rooted in bad (other) government. Who wants to live in a world where all governments are shit but we can still move money around?
Crypto might be a temporary plaster over some wounds, but we still need to close the wounds.
My understanding is that technologists believe that this authority is founded on centralization, and if this centralization were removed, the authority would disappear. I, and likely you as well, don't agree with this at all.
No. Even with decentralization, we still need to have institutions, authority roles and hierarchical coordination.
What changes with crypto is that it gives people the chance to choose (a) who they affiliate with (b) on what terms and (c) allows unilateral disassociation at any time.
Think of it this way: imagine if getting citizenship to any country in the world was something that involved no bureaucracy and could be as cheap as getting a cellphone sim card.
Save from mass incarceration, there is nothing that authoritarian governments could do to stop people from participating in other economies. People would suddenly be able to participate in a "global market of governance models" without even necessarily having to relocate physically.
Authoritarian governments will of course try to stop this, but my bet is they will lose all type of support when the technology is accessible to the middle-class and they get to compare their relative status with the whole world, not just the local society.
This would lead (I hope) to the realization that governments are only necessary when they serve the people and that will be the most important piece to fix the current broken lack of "checks and balances".
We've got a glimpse of what could happen because of the pandemic and the millions of people who realized that they could do their job from anywhere in the world, and how lots of countries responded by offering "remote work" and "digital nomad" visas. Now imagine if more countries acting like Estonia and start offering "e-residency" programs. The countries would start competing among themselves to see who can attract the most people / most productive people.
It's the possibility of self-sovereignty that is important, not the actual realization.
Authoritarian governments do suck and I would love for them to not exist. But they coexist with oligarchs, who will only be further advantaged by unregulated markets.
The life of a tenant farmer in the Phillippines does not only suck because of Duterte; it also sucks because the wealthy family they work for is comfortable with inefficient plantation-based farming.
Now, its certainly possible that crypto could give people more access to the world market, and thereby improve their situation. Rural communities in Bangladesh now have YouTube channels showing the amazing talent they have for cooking. Its a weird world.
But there's a dark side to global exposure. Some Malaysians got rich from their global stock market in the 90's without having to relocate, but it didn't end well because the investment was in speculative consumer goods like real estate. Crypto doesn't have to end this way - it could enable real invention that would not be possible with rigid, local fiat currencies. But right now, crypto feels like a casino pizza party, and I'm increasingly worried.
Sorry, but you interjected a lot of assumptions, biases and opinions and are passing them as fact.
> oligarchs, who will only be further advantaged by unregulated markets.
No one is saying about "unregulated markets". The idea is about having regulations being localized and based on the principles of much smaller communities. Take the principles from Localism applied to "virtual city-states", if you will.
> wealthy family (...) is comfortable with inefficient plantation-based farming.
Because they have a monopsony on the labor. On a world where you can decouple "where you live" from "where you work", this goes right out of the window. And it goes both ways: it can be either because the locals leave the place because they can find better opportunities, but also because people from other, wealthier places might look at these places as an opportunity for a low-cost of life and cheap labor. Go checkout /r/digitalnomad and you will see how many people are already doing or planning to do such a thing.
For a more cynical person, this means "gentrification". For someone looking at things at a wider-scale, it means that people could eventually be able to do something that was only possible for the elites controlling multinational corporations.
> What changes with crypto is that it gives people the chance to choose (a) who they affiliate with (b) on what terms and (c) allows unilateral disassociation at any time.
In what way? Imagine NFTs take over as the mechanism by which we join and leave organizations. "Have you ever been a member of the communist party" is now a machine checkable property. Any organization can deny access to any person who has any affiliation (now or ever in the past) that the organization doesn't like.
Any organization can deny access to a public key associated with a person. The person is still completely free to create another identity and participate.
Identity centralization is inevitable. I do not believe that if the proposed future of DAOs mediated by NFTs comes to pass that it will be feasible to actually possess two public keys that both engage in various systems of any meaningful complexity and cannot be recognized as belonging to the same person.
I mean your affirmation re: "centralization of identity".
You can not prove that people identities can/will be easily correlated. If there are people handling multiple avatars successfully, you will see them as two separate entities!
I can't prove it mathematically, but it seems obvious given the development of web3 technologies, the motivations behind various organizations involved in these systems, the fact that tighter integration enables more desirable features, and the continued demonstration that it is super easy to reidentify people from all sorts of surprising places.
What you call "re-identifying" is basically correlating known identities across different systems. But what about alts?
You can quickly go to keybase and find out my "public" reddit account, and someone with direct access to reddit databases could even use the extra information to find some of my alts. But I can bet real money that no one could precisely look at any random reddit account and say "this account is/is not an alt from rglullis".
In a world where creating identities is infinitely cheap to create, you can not rely on identity as a mechanism for censorship or blacklisting.
> In a world where creating identities is infinitely cheap to create
Can you prove that this will be the case? Given that there is value in integration, I don't actually believe that useful identities will be infinitely cheap to create. In the same way that being able to set up a new email address with zero history doesn't actually mean anything when it comes time to apply to jobs.
You are moving the goal posts. The first issue was about denying access to someone completely based on one single identity. Now you are also trying to add the idea of having reputation as a requirement?
Anyway, it is still something to be managed. You just create multiple identities and you work with them to suit the target audience. To go with your "membership to the Communist Party" example, there is nothing stopping any actual communist to have an identity where they act as someone who is not a communist, and use it when needed.
> My understanding is that technologists believe that this authority is founded on centralization, and if this centralization were removed, the authority would disappear. I, and likely you as well, don't agree with this at all.
I'm pretty sure the authority (or power) spawns the centralisation, rather than the other way around.
Congratulations, you now understand how proof-of-stake works - and why it’s a bad underpinning of cryptocurrencies, although bad in a different way than proof of work. Destroy the environment or make the rich richer; pick your poison.
This is more or less true of the company stock of any startup that wins big, so I don't get the hate. If they managed to get stability, security, low transaction fees, and is actually useful to consumers, then it seems like it might be a worthwhile project?
The main difference is that startups add value to society through inventions that ideally improve our quality of life and put food on people’s tables through employment. Cryptocurrency investors do none of that; they just mint a bunch of tokens and roll the dice.
Cryptocurrency investors don't, but neither do startup investors. The question then is whether the startup produces anything of value to the world, so the analogous question is whether the cryptocurrency (not the investors) produces anything of value to the world.
I've personally used cryptocurrencies to bypass expensive international bank transfer fees when moving money between family members in different countries. To me, they had beneficial value for this. I'm not saying that's enough to warrant their existence, but saying they literally have no value whatsoever is clearly not true. So the question is whether they provide enough value, compared to startups. In my opinion, a lot of silicon valley startups in many industries (social media and advertising being big ones) also don't provide anything worthwhile to the world, so at least those are about on par with cryptocurrencies.
To me, investing in those startups is no different than investing in cryptocurrencies in the sense that they are equally negative forces on the world.
I just think technologists need to "think dumber". Its easier to make money if you have money. Some people get lucky for no reason whatsoever. Some people win big out of raw talent or effort, and then they become criminals. It costs money to use computers. Some people like status and gambling.