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lockhouse

Can cryptocurrency just hurry up and die off already?

I can’t think of any technological development that has been more of a net negative for society than cryptocurrency.

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Nuclear weapons? Leaded petrol?

We haven’t had World War III since nuclear weapons were invented. I’d consider that a net positive.

Leaded petrol enabled transportation on a grand scale until it was discovered to be harmful and replaced with unleaded. Again, cryptocurrencies are so much worse.

> We haven’t had World War III since nuclear weapons were invented. I’d consider that a net positive.

Not to take away from your point about crypto (which I agree with) but I wouldn't call that a positive. WW3 is near certain to happen some day. It's only been 80 years and we've already had multiple extremely close calls that we escaped by pure luck. 80 years is not a very long time when it comes to weapon history. How long was the sword and spear in use?

We've avoided an atomic holocaust in spite of nuclear stockpiles, not because of them.

I disagree, mutually assured destruction kept the Cold War relatively cold for decades of hostilities between two superpowers.

EDIT:

Also, don’t underestimate how many people (Soldiers and civilians alike) would have been killed in an amphibious assault on Japan itself by the allied forces. This was the reasoning behind using atomic weapons at the end of World War II in the first place.

I am quite certain that nuclear weapons have saved lives overall.

If not for nuclear weapons, WW3 almost certainly would have already occurred during the 20th century, plausibly starting during the Berlin Blockade in the immediate aftermath of WW2. And if not then when wounds were still healing, then a few years later.

Advances in weapon delivery have made WW3 less likely to start now than ever before. With very precise guidance, the feasibility of ensuring the utter destruction of leadership has improved dramatically. The idea is to make WW3 the least rational option for anybody who might start it. Even if somebody goes insane and wants to die in a fireball, it is unlikely that they would be able to convince everybody else in the kill-chain to go along with that decision. A "General Ripper" scenario in which only a few nukes fly at first is unlikely to escalate into a full blown war, because even in that scenario a full committed nuclear exchange would still be irrational for both sides. Furthermore, ballistic missile submarines make it infeasible to "win" a short nuclear war with a decapitating strike. The effect of all of these systems taken together is a strong incentive to deescalate even if a limited nuclear exchange were to occur.

> We've avoided an atomic holocaust in spite of nuclear stockpiles, not because of them.

If not for nuclear weapons, an "atomic holocaust" would never have been on the table, so that's basically a tautological statement. What we actually avoided with nuclear weapons was a WW3 fought with chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. The supposed ineffectiveness of chemical weapons is a modern myth; during the cold war both sides fully expected and prepared for the extensive use of chemical weapons. Such disasters were only narrowly averted during WW2; Hitler refused to use nerve gasses perhaps for personal reasons, and because he feared the allied bombers operating with near impunity over Germany would be able to respond in kind (the allies did not then have nerve gas, but Hitler didn't know that.) And if Churchill had his way, Germany would have been rendered uninhabitable for generations using anthrax bombs; thankfully his staff managed to talk him out of it. You might think that these are examples of chemical and biological weapons providing sufficient deterrence on their own, but they weren't sufficient deterrence to stop the war generally, and neither chemical nor biological weapons could be as effective at killing leadership in bunkers as nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have proven to be much more effective at deterrence.

> The supposed ineffectiveness of chemical weapons is a modern myth; during the cold war both sides fully expected and prepared for the extensive use of chemical weapons.

I thought it was the other way around?

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

1. Leaded Petrol was known to be harmful for a long time. In fact, some TEL Additives were very pointedly marketed as 'Ethyl' and did their best to leave the 'Lead' part out.

2. Ethanol was known to have Anti-knock properties at the time. The only advantage of TEL was that it helped the life of the valvetrain... oh and it was patentable.

The valve thing is urban legend, insofar as there's no evidence that TEL mitigating valve seat damage was a known phenomena before the 1960s. So mitigating valve seat recession was not the motivation of TEL when TEL was adopted and only became a motivation for keeping TEL decades later when the effect was discovered.

Leaded petrol was known to be harmful by the very person who drove the manufacturing process. People working with the stuff were known to not last.

How many deaths would you attribute to cryptocurrency?

Dollar hegemony's death toll is in the millions.

Let’s turn it around this way…what good has cryptocurrency done?

Enables storage and transaction of value without indirectly funding the war machine

Cryptocurrency directly funds criminal organizations and rogue nations like North Korea.

Dollars do that to a much larger extent

Democracy-destroying social media networks and weapons of mass dumbing down like TikTok are much more harmful to the world than cryptocurrencies.

As much as I agree with the first half of your statement, the climate impacts of crypto far outstrip the genocide-inducing effects of social media.

The smartphone

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