I sometimes wonder if crypto enthusiasts remain intentionally ignorant about how the tech and ecosystem work so as to not have any reasons to doubt, like how an ex-mormon friend was persuaded by their faith to not get too “worldly” in learning to avoid risking their immortal soul. Or in this case, if they get too skeptical about the claims of their ultrawealthy “betters” they will feel less revolutionary and more like stooges of the establishment, who hate regulations and love “disruption” the most.
When the wealthiest in the world, established capital management firms, and establishment celebrities tell you populist lies, they might not have your best interests in mind
I cpu mined in the early days of Bitcoin (in a pool, not solo), almost sold shovels to DAO gold rushers with a coworker but my spouse cringed a bit at the ethics of even that, but the longer i pay attention the less technical or skeptical the new waves of participants get.
Usually when an ecosystem develops it gets more sophisticated, not more desperate and uninformed.
…unless “working” as we understand it isn’t the point over obfuscation and abstraction.
Gawd, I didn’t even have recreational drugs on me but a similar experience there
It’s not emerging. “Chains” of events have have existed in IT for as long as databases have.
Hashing, cryptographic signatures etc are all well established and you use a huge amount of them right now while chatting with us.
The problem is that it reinforces “existing systems and power structures” - they’re there shorting and destabilizing because profit.
What it’s actually disrupting is environment, access to gaming hardware, power prices. And these disruptions affect the people you are trying to empower.
There’s plenty of good applications to hash trees!
Most have been around for many decades before the unnecessary ideological bits were grafted on.
Funny enough “blockchain” itself devoid of the ideology and tokenomics is unnecessary for most persons unless they’re selling shovels like IBM, Azure, AWS… the logistical problems it “solves” are resolved by other improvements in technology and industry collaboration.
Wherever they touch the real world through “Oracles” is a point of potential failure, garbage in, garbage on the blockchain.
Because why not, even some tax and regulation-hating Libertarians can see crypto for what it is, and why these toxic projects are designed to run until they explode in the short term.
Axie Infinity was one of the dystopian “killer apps” promised that would create an under-under class of oursourced gold farmers that wouldn’t make the minimum wage in the Phillipines and required you to become a gambler AND manage sweatshop teams.
It’s a cute example. Of course I feel aome empathy with imaginary plug-in developers.
Why would a developer want to give up control of their rights management to a distributed network?
What happens when the chain this system uses is forked? What happens when those left on the forked chain stop making money and give up running the servers?
What happens when my router breaks, or my ISP suffers a glitch/DDOS?
What happens when (like so many dead torrents) someone doesn’t host a node on your distributed file store and you lose access to the binaries within a few months?
There’s no financial reason for strangers to host your files for you, certainly.
Oh yeah, there’s an absolute spectrum of Libertarian* from “I think regulatory capture is harmful and predatory” to “Mad Max and cyberpunk dystopias are aspirational” to “Age of consent laws are violence” to Let’s sell some babiesand own them entirely
*My usage being moreso the American free markets capitalist model over the Adam Curtis sort, different axes and I’m not here to argue the nuances of each
Where’s the data breach? Reading the title I expected PII, passwords or source code leaked but it’s “just” the music + metadata copied which is more or less available for everyone anyway. It’s also not “stolen”, just copied
The “fraud” in the title is also more or less redundant because NFT became a synonym for fraud anyway. I also hope that all these “crypto” bros find some painful way to die very soon.
