I honestly hope the utopian dream is smashed in the cryptocurrency community. It's not the kind of "utopia" I want to be a part of. I like the technical ideas behind cryptocurrency, but the terrible political views are off-putting.
At that point, the people who are interested in building something worthwhile will be the only ones who remain, and we can work in peace.
But no one would get rich quick, so it would probably never take off in the first place.
Right now we're seeing the tip of the iceberg of potential cryptocurrencies. Pretty much only token-based (ie. non-ledger) based currencies, where we need global BFT consensus to track the current position of every single coin. This is crazy. And, as it turns out, unnecessary (see: Holochain).
When the iceberg capsizes (as Git capsized the CASE industry), globally consistent ledger-based value-stable currencies based on peer-to-peer co-signed personal blockchains will supplant these unnecessary globally consistent token based ... things. (Do I really care that you just slid a nickel across the table to someone? Nope). Same with crazy Turing-complete globally consistent VMs implementing Smart Contract languages. Not necessary.
You are correct -- value-stable currencies won't have anyone getting rich quick. But, when every sub-saharan goat herder and neighbourhood kid with a collection of trading cards can independently monetize his/her wealth into a value-stable currency, we'll see the face ripped off of the global Fiat monetary systems...
Because this has already happened in 2014-2016. It happened before that too. Each time the speculative bubble rises, it is being driven at first by improvements to the tech and/or ecosystem. Then it gets a life of its own, goes crazy, and runs out of gas. But along the way, more people learn about it and decide they care enough to continue the project.
Even if you are only in it for the money, the tech matters. Because the closer you are to the tech, the better you understand where the long term value will be, and when the price has outrun that value.
Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it seems inescapable.
Which political views? I read the article and only saw a view on money, not politics.
What’s being criticized is the very idea that money should involve politics.
The argument is that we should be as free to choose which kind of money we use as we are to choose which kind of car we use. There should be no law giving competitive advantage — in the form of legal tender law, and the absence of choosing which numeraire to use as the basis for calculating capital gains tax — to currencies issued by central banks with whom the government has an account.
It’s entirely possible to deliver an argument for the separation of government and money without criticizing either in and of itself. It’s very much like arguing for the separation of church and state without saying anything negative about either of the two in isolation.
I obviously don't think anything is wrong with using alternative currencies, but I'm not sure that separation of currency and state can happen the same way separation of church and state has. Even if the government doesn't control the issuance of currency they will undoubtedly have an outsized influence on whatever currency they choose to support.
I honestly don’t see the big difference: the people, by voting on representatives, choose both which religions and means of payment the government accepts (assuming a democracy, of course).
This is perhaps what separates libertarians from liberals, conservatives, socialists, etc.: we simply do not deny others the liberty we claim for ourselves.
If a monetary system that cannot be debased/controlled by government is available, does that not allow you to elect to create and/or join a community of similar beliefs? Or, would you prefer that I (or someone else) be able to gain control of your government, and then choose to make it (financially) impossible for you to choose your associations and/or behaviors?
Or, perhaps: does your "utopia" require others to fund it, in order for it to work? This is, unfortunately, the case with most people's personal beliefs. They require the non-consensual forced effort of others to succeed...
In the unlikely situation where this happens and I'm alive to experience it, I'll be the most extremist libertarian you've ever seen. "You don't like this? Just create your own community on some planet a few light years from there and do your thing." Communists colonize their own little solar system, anarchists cohabitate in an other, fascists create the Germania consortium.
But that's not the world we live in currently. We're all stuck on the same speck of dust in the middle of an absurdly large ocean of empty space. So yeah, for now unfortunately it means we have to play nice with each other and compromise. Whether you like it or not you're part of a society.
Please keep generic ideological bickering off HN. It's always the same, therefore never interesting in the local sense of the word.