[tptacek]

It is possible that there is no idea in the history of mankind less punk rock than cryptocurrency.

[zoklet-enjoyer]

Cryptocurrencies enable people to do so much more than speculate on price and trade pictures of apes.

https://cryptome.org/ap.htm

https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_autonomous_org...

https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/09/crypto-remittances-are-a-l...

[tptacek]

That may be. But that was true of virtually everything punk rock opposed, too (that there were supposed upsides as well as obvious downsides). All I'm saying is that there's nothing punk about it. I happen also to think there's little redeeming about it as well, but I'm not prepared to lay out a case for that right now.

[twic]

Can I interest you in a Johnny Rotten NFT? https://www.johnlydon.com/mr-rottens-nfts/

[frereubu]

I think there's a good argument - made very well by Viv Albertine of The Slits in her autobiography Clothes, Music, Boys - that people outside the scene took punk too seriously. They weren't great crusaders for truth and justice, they were the court jesters who pointed out the emperor had no clothes but were mostly just having fun provoking people. Which includes John Lydon pissing people off by issuing NFTs and praising Trump. It's all the same.

[tptacek]

The Sex Pistols were a boy band, Lydon had a brief window of authenticity with PIL but has, in the last decade or so, become a caricature of himself, to the point of endorsing Thatcherism. Lydon today overtly rejects what he ostensibly "stood for" in the era of the Lesser Free Trade Hall show. You couldn't come up with a better illustration of how un-punk crypto is than a Johnny Rotten NFT.

[tptacek]

Exactly.

[everfree]

To me, they both seem to be about deliberate and organized defiance of social behavioral norms.

[danaris]

The only social behavioral norms that cryptocurrency is about defying are "people shouldn't be scammed out of their money".

[everfree]

The social norm defied is "money is to be regulated by the state". No more, no less.

Anything else is a result of what people project onto it.

[anigbrowl]

Only libertarians are so obsessed with central banking. It seems to me that crypto people willfully ignore previous history where money was not regulated by the state and people were frustrated by instability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907

[everfree]

In my humble opinion, it's best to have both state-regulated money and non-state-regulated money compete. The market for money itself should be a capitalist free-market competition, survival of the fittest. This is the first time in history where that scenario may come to fruition in a big way.

People have always been stuck with one or the other. Now, state-backed monies are forced to compete and maybe it will finally breed some innovation (of note, CBDCs).

If non-state currencies fail, so be it. If state currencies fail, so be it. But the competition is important imo.

[yellowapple]

As opposed to the incumbent socioeconomic system, wherein "people should be scammed out of as much money as possible" is the rule of thumb.

[grumple]

A system that has produced 25 million millionaires in the US alone is doing a bad job of scamming people out of money.

[yellowapple]

Sure, until you remember the hundreds of millions of people at whose expense those millionaires became such.