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.
The problem is that the method of securing that decentralized database relies on having a token to act as a payment system. Basically in order to have a public-ledger blockchain you have to have a cryptocurrency.
Not true.
The immutability of the thing is just Merkle trees. And integrity of the writings is any form of authorized blocks. From a certificate from an authority a la PKI to proof of work. And anything in between.
The thing is that there are not too many applications for slow distributed inmutable databases.
DNS is the only thing that I know that is globally distributed, with slow updates of domains being acceptable.
In order to have your system be distributed in a way that does not require a central authority, there has to be a way of determining which copy of the chain is the authoritative copy. In the context of public-ledger blockchain, that method relies on having a token as an incentive structure. If we’re going to start discussing hypothetical new approaches to distributed blockchain that aren’t a public-ledger blockchain system as laid out in Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper then we’re really starting to veer out of the context of this discussion thread.