Imagine mortgaging your home to buy more crypto…
I really like her. On the surface, she seems to be nice young woman, but she is actually a Clint Eastwood character, in Grand Torino, or the Mule, cynical and curmudgeonly but with a good heart.
Plus quite a good writer.
Until mid-2021 or so, my feelings towards blockchains and cryptocurrency were ones of apathy and mild annoyance. I have been apathetic towards and mildly annoyed by many things—Bluetooth headphones, most “smart home” devices—and have found my general well-being is best served by just ignoring them and moving on with my life. Pick my battles, right? But I do try to balance my curmudgeonliness with a willingness to revisit my opinions, and some periodic reevaluations of my stances have resulted in change—in fact, I now have a pair of Bluetooth headphones that I use daily and quite like (despite my continued annoyance that I can’t use them while they’re charging, and their propensity to try to connect to any device besides the one I am using).
It was such a reevaluation that led me to shift my stance on blockchains and cryptocurrency. I had been hearing more and more about blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and some “web3” thing in conversations with friends, various technology spaces, the news… well, kind of everywhere. I knew my information and therefore my opinions were outdated and incomplete, so I did some research. As with Bluetooth headphones, my opinion changed. But instead of going from apathy to acceptance, I have instead come to believe that these technologies are so harmful that I cannot ethically continue to ignore them, and must instead do my best to educate and advocate against their wider adoption. I am picking my battles, and this is one of them.
Imagine taking out a payday loan to buy crypto. Jesus.
I think these guys believe they can just declare bankruptcy if it turns against them?
Nothing brings me more joy right now than watching the slow unwinding of crypto. It’s a bright spot in an otherwise terrible time.
I know a couple people who did that :\
I don’t know how a person could sleep knowing their house was bet on red or black.
On anti-crypto toxicity (by the amazing Molly White):
But I also think that these proposed solutions are enormously attractive to people who see them as a tangible option in a world where these problems are not being solved—where we are being failed by our political establishments in so, so many ways. I don’t think they are a feasible solution, and in fact I think they will worsen many of the problems they ostensibly aim to solve, but they are certainly being sold as the solution, and a solution that people desperately need.
And I really can’t fault someone for deciding to hitch their wagon to crypto and web3 because they are hopeful that those salesmen might be on to something. I can disagree with them, I can explain my point of view, I can think that their engagement is in some small way enabling something I fundamentally disagree with and believe to be harmful—but I can’t believe that buying some crypto, collecting an NFT, or joining a DAO automatically make someone a bad person.
The problem is that crypto is not remotely an answer to most of these questions posed in that article:
- How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services?
- How can we reduce the power that a small few currently hold over the web?
- How can we improve data privacy and ensure that people have control over their personal information?
- How can we create reasonable privacy in the financial system?
- How can we make information more available to everyone?
- How can we fix a society where so many people are in untenable financial situations?
- How can we reduce the enormous wealth disparity in today’s society—both in the existing distribution of wealth but also in access to new opportunities to earn it?
- How can we enable creatives to make a fair living from their art?
- How can we address inequities on a global scale?
- How can we create self-governing communities around shared interests or goals?
Crypto isn’t a way to lift the masses out of poverty. It isn’t a way to take power from the few and give it to the many. It isn’t an information-distribution infrastructure. It doesn’t introduce better data privacy into the financial markets for most people. It won’t solve existential financial distress for the many. It won’t solve wealth or income inequality. It won’t fund a massive, livable-income arts industry. It isn’t a solution to the problem of better local / community government.
It’s as if someone answered the questions with snake oil. Now we’re hearing don’t mock the buyers of snake oil. “Don’t mock people” is probably always good advice, but I’m not sure why we would start here. Buyers of crypto are also promoters and touters of crypto, after all.
How hard is it to have empathy for the people trying to get their problems solved, and being rooked into thinking that crypto is the solution?
The author specifically mentions those problems as things that need solving for ordinary people, and that crypto people tout crypto as solutions for.
Now the sellers and the celebrities trying to get people in, from the very next paragraph:
Now, of course there are other people involved in crypto projects, too, who are asking other questions. Questions like, “How can I make myself massively wealthy, even at the expense of others?” or “How can I take advantage of the pseudonymity of crypto to evade accountability for my actions?” Even, “how can I use this to destabilize society even further?” or “how can I become the lord of my own Bitcoin citadel?” These people may be truly evil, and should be held to account for it.
And here’s the point:
But when you come across someone on Twitter with a hexagon-shaped profile picture, your chances are at least as good that you’ve come across someone in the first bucket than in the second. I would like to think there are far more people in that first bucket.
This is about trying to have some empathy, and remembering there’s real problems out there, and lots of people are casting about for solutions and getting sucked in by the hype and hope.
Sure, empathy is important, and there are lots of problems in the world. And, in the grand scheme of things, “anti-crypto toxicity on social media” is a very very small problem indeed.
I’m sympathetic, but I don’t think the author sufficiently refutes that hostility towards crypto serves a useful social function:
Some might argue that there is value in ostracism, and that by “cyberbullying” crypto or NFT holders they are helping to discourage would-be participants from buying in. This may well be the case. But I know crypto’s toxicity and cult-like atmosphere alienates reasonable people who might otherwise be tempted to engage with it, and I don’t think there’s any reason that the emerging behavior from anti-crypto advocates wouldn’t result in similar outcomes. I also strongly question the usefulness of such behavior. If the broader goal is to diminish the negative impacts of crypto on society, targeting our ire at the individuals who casually engage with it seems like poorly-spent energy.
People aren’t going to buy crypto because they see it getting mocked and they’re contrarian. And targeting casual users is exactly who you should influence to counter the marketing and starve these scams of new buyers.
“We should not mock people who pay bargain prices for the Brooklyn Bridge” is a weird hill to die on. And, to be clear, this is why ordinary people buy crypto as an investment. It’s not because they want to solve wealth inequality in the world. It’s because they want to make a big profit personally, at someone else’s expense.
There is literally no reason to buy crypto other than to try to sell it to someone else for more than you paid. You don’t use it as money, you trade it to other crypto enthusiasts.
There are no people in that first bucket, because they are hoping to sell their crypto and make a profit, one day. Which makes them one of the predators.
For big coins that aren’t obvious scams, one thing that I think still needs to happen before anyone can get too serious about them being actual investment vehicles is the ability for large investors to (somewhat) easily short a coin. There are ways to do that now, but they seem really opaque and unavailable to anyone but hardcore tech folks.
Right now, because the only way to “invest” in a coin is to take somewhat of a long view on it (even if that “long” is 72 hours or less), people putting money into coins by the very nature of that investment are forced into evangelizing the coin. Which isn’t how mature investing in stocks, bonds, and commodities works. Traders of those assets on exchanges are agnostic to the movement of those entities – they just want to know whether they’re going to go up or down so they can choose to long or short them.
And until coin traders have this ability to have this agnosticism in their trades…it’s a sector that is going to take deserved lumps from the mainstream. Which absolutely serves a useful function.
Content creators who paywall access may use bitcoin pretty frequently, as it bypasses the heavier fees of credit card processors.
And if you are a content creator who makes content that Paypal does not approve of (and this means that major credit card processors ALSO are likely not to approve of), coin payments are probably your best option.
(No moral judgment on those content creators from me, though you or others may certainly justifiably have them – just pointing out use cases.)
What content is Paypal or Patreon squeamish about? Certainly not furry porn. Pedo anime? Hate speech? Copyright infringement?
So the use case is to allow criminals, or criminal adjacents, to get paid when major financial institutions won’t do business with them?
The problem with crypto, just as with multilevel marketing, is that while people may not enter the system with intrinsically bad motives, once people buy into the system it requires them to engage in the same bad behaviors the scammers who set up the system do, or else risk losing everything.
Anyone who invested enough to expect crypto to solve their financial problems will quickly find themselves relentlessly trying to pump and dump to the next sucker, because hey it turns out pump and dump is the only way anyone makes money out of this, and now they’ve maxed out their credit cards.
Are people who engage with crypto inherently bad people? No. Does crypto as a system make those people worse as part of the system’s design? Absolutely.
There were quite a few stories a year or two ago that Paypal was cleaning up its accounts for either an IPO or merger/purchase and removing its services from a lot of fairly run-of-the-mill porn sites and processors as a result. (As I remember it, it may have been back in 2016 or 2017 and on through the next few years when they began to gradually disengage from working with sites they didn’t like, after Ebay spun them back out as an independent entity.)
For instance, PayPal no longer is an OnlyFans payment option.
I do not personally consider sex work to be “criminal adjacent.” The federal government does not, either. But it is certainly well within PayPal’s business operating rights to prefer to not do business with them! And especially so if their stockholders would like to not do that, which is fully understandable.
