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Comment by convexfunction | Hacker News Reader

Very weird to frame crypto as contrasting with "an open source culture that, at least aspirationally, built software around ideas of abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality". Were the "older grizzled engineers" all literal communists or what?

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Nothing weird about it. Crypto / web3 is about financializing everything. I.e, making everything about money.

The goal is to create a gamified world in which all human interactions are controlled via financial incentives.

The contrast is not communism, but rather the current gift economy model of open source, where people offer what they want out of intrinsic motivation rather than the desire to accumulate coins in a ledger.

This is the really icky part of crypto. It would be deeply ironic if crypto, which was supposedly created in opposition to traditional banking institutions, was able to open the door for those institutions to financialize every nook and cranny of our lives.

I don’t see what’s ironic about it. Those existing banking institutions may not prevail, but that’s irrelevant. The financial engineers behind crypto are not some different breed of human than those who work at Goldman Sachs. Their goal is nothing but financializing all interactions on the web. That is literally what web3 means.

There's no shortage of icky parts of crypto. The whole idea from the outset was to enable an end-run around societal regulation of undesireables like money laundering, hiring hits, funding terrorism, human trafficking, tax evasion, and trading drugs & child pornography.

Ah, Americans thinking that anything other than a rentier hellscape is literally communism. The early web and a lot of the US hacker culture was "anarcho-libertarian"; ownership matters a lot less when the answer to "who owns the means of production" is "everyone with a computer".

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