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I think crypto isn't dying, it's being killed, and its killers have names like «Sam Bankman-Fried». You don't get more centralized than this goofy fuck pontificating on regulation while misappropriating your funds to help out his buddies. It's dressed-up anarcho-tyranny. FTX was scarcely any more legitimate an institution than 2014 style exit scam exchanges ran by Eastern European anons, but the impact is vastly greater precisely due to those pretensions of being the responsible backbone to the system. It doesn't matter that he has the markings of a trustworthy radical bro and signals the «spirit of crypto». What matters is what he does.
SBF was either grossly unethical, beyond incompetent or conspiring with the incumbent powers; seeing his EA affiliations and apparent nonchalance in the wake of the disaster, I believe the latter is very probable and hope not just crypto but EAs get the spillover reputation damage they deserve.
We do not need more Bankmans. We have TradFi already, @2rafa and@BurdensomeCount are doing their jobs there just fine, it has more than enough reach in the society. The whole point of crypto was to establish from first principles an alternative, trustless transaction ecosystem they are not involved with. Roon is another sellout to EAs, but he puts it well:
Crypto, as conceived of by Satoshi, is intrinsically incompatible with the USG hegemony, and with people like SBF as its champions; it was one of the few non-hopeless attempts to challenge the singleton and increase the richness of potential outcomes. Villain League leaders (Russia, China, Iran etc.) reveal their lack of vision, or complicity, in not throwing their weight behind it.
More generally.
You've asked me the other day:
Adding to those posts: I think that this, in part, will be implemented as the infantilization of the populace framed for midwits as interdependence in modern economy, and the disappearance of people with «fuck you money».
Ironically, it may look like the spread of practices typical for the super-rich down the social strata, but with one significant nuance: as your dependence on connections increases, your own agency and ability to decide whether someone else is connected does not, and indeed it degrades. Thus, a two-class system emerges: people who are connected and people who connect. Even the extremely rich plebeians, like Kanye, are but leafs of the graph; every link between them and the world with which they can affect it can be trivially snapped with or without a formal cause by even the lowest member of the patrician class, who is, in turn, able to fall back on an antifragile support system working on informal «understandings». Plebeian wealth is tied in contracts that can be canceled unilaterally if they misbehave, their social capital – on platforms with censors and politruks, hosted on vulnerable servers owned by people either terrified of another set of politruks or agreeing with them; their money in banks, ran by Bankmans, or in cargo-cultish meme assets like Bitcoin in a Coinbase wallet. We are being made into perpetual children, evaluated, tested and judged by the nebulous Adult Society, granted good boy points, credentials and access tokens which can be revoked at will.
If the realization of having been made into such a child is not terrifying, I don't know what is. My belief is that people gloating at the troubles in crypto, such as the Hacker News audience, are domesticated to the extent they cannot feel this terror and instead skip to obedience instantly, eagerly swallowing the bluepill cope about interdependence, regulations, «consequences of speech» and such. Maybe that's the historically normal mentality for a plebeian.
In any case, Crypto was our shot at resisting this atomization and subjugation trend. But it got infiltrated, discredited, devalued and now is being brought to heel, because, as I always say, social technology >>> technology.
True I think I misread the tea leaves in terms of FTX being non centralized.
I also tend to agree that the nanny state is growing more and more powerful. Our classic formal networks of family helping with raising kids, getting jobs, providing emotional support, etc seems to have been almost fully dismantled at this point. It also doesn’t seem to be enjoying a resurgence.
If you ask me now is the perfect time for a modern day messiah to bring a new religion focused on solving some of these major issues.
With regards to social tech, I think you also make a good point. EA is sadly a great example there, they’ve got so many smart people but fail to grasp how to work the social side of things. Without that too many of their projects are doomed before they start.
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BTC was down 70% before FTX failed. Bitcoin was already dying. This was just some salt on the wound. It collapsed under its weight of its unsustainable and unjustifiable valuation.
Of course a huge chunk of that 70% was hot air, nobody's denying that. The current price and market cap seems far more reasonable to me than the heady highs of normie hype.
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It's worth noting that Bitcoin isn't compatible with any temporarily disgraced hegemonies, either; China (in particular) needs to crack down on it because the first thing people do with it is use it to make their assets immune from seizure by the ruling party, and that means their so-far successful attempts at devaluing their currency stop being so successful. The only country that can make it work is one more freedom-minded than the US... and no such countries exist (or are allowed to exist).
The bans on raising children to be functional adults that were totally implemented by the end of the 1980s was always going to have terrible consequences.
Well, El Salvador tried.
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Can you expand here please? I’m curious.
Sure, here you go.
I'm really not sure how else to describe this other than "it's illegal to raise a kid properly".
If your kid isn't at home in front of a screen or within eyeshot at all times, you're a criminal. And that is the exact opposite of fostering adult characteristics like, y'know, independence.
This isn't an isolated incident, either; Utah fixed their law properly but Texas clearly did not.
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Not OP, but the current state of parenting is essentially the worship of infantilization.
Teachers are quitting en masse because nobody is willing to standup to parents demanding special treatment and refusing consequences. (Teacher's aren't saints either, but both things can be true). Letting your children trick or treat, as a practice, has disappeared in a handful of years. Letting your kid fall into the iPad vortex isn't frowned upon at all anymore, at least by 7 they'll be able to string together nuke-level kill streaks in COD.
Was this driven by legislative changes or cultural changes though? When he wrote banned that made me assume the former.
Mostly cultural practices. I recommend listening to some George Carlin, it seems like 1 out of every 3 of his routines has him talking about the coddling of children.
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I suppose that is the paradox of crypto at present: the countries that would benefit from it on the world stage are also the countries that probably would be the most undermined by it domestically.
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