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Comment by Synaesthesia | Hacker News Reader

When I first was interested in cryptocurrency, or Bitcoin, this is the sort of thing which made me excited. The idea of a new currency outside of the control of states or banks, which will take back the power for ordinary people.

It soon stopped being about that and about "hodl" and self-enrichment. I applaud this project for being in the original spirit of Bitcoin.

I've since come to realise that the important thing is not how we organise our currency, but how we structure our social relations. We could have this currency, or Bitcoin or whatever be the global standard, but it would make no difference to our social relations based on wage labour for the owners of capital.

We are not going to solve that problem with technocratic solutions but with the working class taking power for themselves.

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> It soon stopped being about that

I submit that it could never have actually been about that. It may have been out of the states control but it was far to technocratic and dependent on first movers so it was always going to leave behind the class of people you hoped it would most benefit.

> the original spirit of Bitcoin

Is effectively "you don't need permission." That's _it_. People projected quite a bit onto that.

Yep, it was very obviously going to produce landgrab dynamics. Like... it would be utterly astounding for someone not to see that from day one.

All of the banks and state regulation keep getting in the way. It’s like there’s a fence in the middle of a path — all we need to do is get rid of the fence and everything will obviously improve.

Not sure if that's earnest or satirical - remove all the regulation, and things will improve for some, but I am not optimistic they'll be ordinary people. It seems much more likely to me that wild-west financial transactions will benefit banks and not ordinary folks? I am quite fond of regulations limiting arbitrary fees, for example...

I believe GP's comment is a reference of Chesterton's Fence [1] (an excellent image to load into your brain!). I think they agree with you.

[1] https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

That, and also adding that naive reformist attitudes are incredibly common. Chesterton’s fence is a cognitive tool a lot of people don’t have, or that they only manage to apply in one narrow field of expertise. “I don’t know how anyone could think X” where X is a naive position, is kind of funny, so I replied kind of funnily to remind people that the underlying principle is not obvious.

This was explicitly the aim of projects like Urbit too, literally feudal lords ruling over their virtual real estate lol

You say that, but I remember the talk in 2009-2011 being about replacing Visa, not about hodling and speculation.

Right, which was a mixture of dishonesty, self-delusion, and naivety from the start.

A deflationary asset will only ever be used for hodling and speculation.

Also, Visa works almost literally flawlessly for tens of billions of dollars of transactions (hundreds of millions of individual transactions) every day. A technologically inferior system wasn’t going to replace it regardless of its ideological purity.

>Is effectively "you don't need permission." That's _it_

Also anonymous or semi anonymous. Worldcoin is largely about that.

I'm glad you came around, yes the correct solution is to eat Sam Altman and not to let him invent his own private currency.

I don't want to be the wet blanket... but this is just another "crypto bro" peddling yet another scam, err... "ICO". Only this time the elite's behind the project will have everyone's biometric data too.

> with the working class taking power for themselves

This is exactly the opposite of that. Sam has a rocky history with conflicts-of-interest and self-promotion. I don't see any reason we should trust him or his organization with this attempted consolidation of economic and identity powers.

FTA:

> Last year, Kenya suspended World while it investigated its practices surrounding data collection (it has since dropped its investigation). Hong Kong asked World to stop all operations in the country over privacy risks, while both Portugal and Spain have also taken action against the project.

>It soon stopped being about that

It's because everyone forgot about Chesterton's Fence. Stuff like the emergence of exchanges and the story of Magic The Gathering Online Exchange in particular are the result of people realizing those fences were necessary.

There are very good reasons that the currencies we trust are managed and regulated by reputable banks and countries.

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