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.
It doesn’t have to be a wasteful if it’s generated with clean energy. It doesn’t have to be a scam, either. Just because it is those things IRL doesn’t mean it has to be in fiction.
Instead of computing hashes you show proof how much of the sun’s energy you harvested this transaction block.
Boom I just solved blockchain and green energy. You’re welcome.
You could say a new algorithm was made that makes it barely use energy at all, too. It’s fiction. You can basically do whatever you want if you write it. lol
But that energy could be used for anything else. Those chips could be used for anything else.
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Oh. So the past two hundred years or tailorized bullshit and monkey paw globalism haven’t made a single energy intensive process geographically fungible? Huh.
I guess solving a lot of social problems will be easier than I thought!
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I’m not trying to sound clever, and this requires zero knowledge of crypto mining. It is, in fact, about every other industrial process from the past two hundred years.
You didn’t refute my point. You just said I sound smart and called me an idiot about an entirely irrelevant topic.
That seems like a pretty irrational defense, in that it completely avoids addressing anything I actually said. Do you think that’s going to convince anyone of anything other than ‘cryptobros are vicious irrational little goblins’? You’re not making your cause look good.
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No I just think very few of us are dim enough for cryptocurrency.
You seem to have responded as if I said something, so you didn’t read it as a question. Youre being extremely disingenuous here. Which is pretty standard for you sort, but I’d like to hope for better.