All-White Town’s Divisive Experiment With Cryptocurrency | Hacker News Reader

All-White Town’s Divisive Experiment With Cryptocurrency

wired.com

35 pointsthesauri35 comments

Although it's easy to figure out, the apostrophe in the title migrated ("An all-white's town" should be "An all-white town's", as in the article itself).

Right you are. Belatedly fixed.

Since the article keeps bringing up that everyone involved is "all white," i.e. a 10% minority in SA, that probably means that they won't be able to keep a good relationship with the SA government if it collapses and they'll probably end up with the military stealing all of their stuff. Too bad they can't immigrate to America, they are clearly smart and entrepreneurial. Unfortunately collapsing states tend to turn on minorities. Really, they should forget about surviving the collapse and focus on preventing it...

They’d have been sued out of existence in America because of housing discrimination laws.

As is appropriate.

Is SA collapsing? News to me.

We have too many racists already. They can stay there.

Its worth mentioning that this is Oranje. Pretty much the equivalent of racist extremely far right preppers in the USA.

The current SA government has so many many issues but it's still better than anything these fools could do.

As a South African expat, I've long thought that South Africa's poor service provision provides a natural laboratory for libertarian ideas. This piece highlights their strengths and weaknesses: high levels of cryptocurrency speculation (and a currency that's pegged to the rand and hosted on AWS!), but also small-scale local provision of electricity, water, sewage treatment, and security; and financial services based on face-to-face transactions and community trust.

> Commerce would continue, with state-backed currencies swapped for crypto alternatives that float freely on an open market.

I'm assuming this means a stable coin?

Has anyone figured out how to verify the backing on a blockchain? If that was possible Tether's fraud would have been exposed sooner.

Also, why is Facebook's new currency rumored to be backed by multiple currencies? That seems like it would add volatility instead of lessening it.

> Has anyone figured out how to verify the backing on a blockchain? If that was possible Tether's fraud would have been exposed sooner.

And this is always the problem with block chain. You can't cryptographically verify real life things that people care about like how much money is in someone's bank account.

>And this is always the problem with block chain. You can't cryptographically verify real life things that people care about like how much money is in someone's bank account.

There are a lot of problems with applying blockchain to solve real problems. This one is not one of the problems. What this is is people using the blockchain for things it was not designed to do.

I'm not necessarily pro-crypto, but a regulated and audited blockchain would be fine in the banking context. That's mostly because the bank itself is regulated and audited. The "trustchain" goes all the way back to the government.

With Tether, the trustchain ends at Tether. And even if you could audit Tether somehow, there's nothing stopping them from creating another stable coin and use the same currency they have in both coins.

> real life things that people care about like how much money is in someone's bank account

How is a ledger entry in a bank's computer more "real" than a ledger entry in a public blockchain.

Funny how blockchain discussions proceed in endless circles when people believe without evidence that familiar money is in any way "real" instead of an imaginary social construct, while blockchain money is somehow fake, fraudulent or unreal.

Let's guess the next argument in the endless circle: (a) money is backed by the military, (b) money is backed by tax payments, (c) money is backed by debt, or (d) tulips.

I'm not arguing it's more real, I'm arguing you can't cryptographically guarantee how many dollars some entity owns. In this context real life mean off block chain information. Basically the block chain can only verify whats on the blockchain. It can't make any guarantees about off block chain things except that someone with a possession of a certain private key said something at some time.

Sure, a blockchain provides cryptographic consensus about assets on the blockchain, but it can't control things that are not on the blockchain.

Things like legal contracts in a filing cabinet, bank databases, gold bars in a vault, or how many coins I say are in my pocket.

For all those things, the blockchain can act as a database, but you need to trust someone that the entries in the database correspond to these other things that the database is supposedly tracking.

Which is the entire issue the op asked about, can you verify a party has enough dollars to back a stablecoin on the blockchain.

Stablecoins aren't supposed to float freely, they're pegged. So I assume it doesn't mean that.

Racial discrimination aside, it gives me hope to see liberal/libertarian ideals holding against the ever expanding state in almost every country on Earth. Liberty and self determination are dying virtues, and people don't know what it is they're giving up so willingly.

Was any actual racial discrimination cited?

I'm just assuming that for a population that makes up 10% of the total population to make 100% of the community, race is probably an active differentiator, although of course that's not necessarily the case.

For countries where economic standing/language/culture are very highly associated with race, then it's entirely possible for populations to sort themselves along racial lines without race actually being an active factor...I think it's just the "100% white" part that is making me assume that it's likely a factor.

Orania is managed as a private company, and the town council retains a tight grip on who can move in. Each prospective resident is carefully screened—not by race, the council claims, but by avowed devotion to Afrikaner culture. Either way, the end result is the same: All of the town’s 1,500 or so residents are white.
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challenging me to name a country where "blacks have gotten it right"
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There is a map of South Africa, with a magnifying glass hovering over Orania. The village is surrounded by spear-bearing Africans and huts emblazoned with ANC flags. The introduction reads: "The year is 2017 AD. South Africa is entirely occupied by the blacks. Well, not entirely … One small town of indomitable Afrikaners still holds out against the invaders."

That's an allusion, not evidence. They're not a gated community in Johannesburg, they're a town in the sticks and every culture on earth self-segregates to some degree or another. It sounds like the Wired author found a peaceful community is wanting to change that because they read racism into where there may not even be any.

"all white" in South Africa is a minority struggling against majority. They can't be "far right". Far Right means nativists which in South Africa continues to be black people and not white.

> "all white" in South Africa is a minority struggling against majority. They can't be "far right". Far Right means nativists which in South Africa continues to be black people and not white.

I don't think that most people understand 'far right' in that way. For example, are you saying that someone whose political philosophy hasn't changed, but who moves from one place to another, might go from being far-right to not, or vice versa?

Obviously. Radical Christians in India are far left. Hindus are far right. In USA hindus are far left and not on right. White folks are on right.

Omar Ilhan is far left in USA she would be far right in Pakistan.

It is just boggles me how stupid western media is about rest of the world.

Their quarrel is with the government not the black majority. There are plenty of black South Africans struggling in that system as well.

Historically, you're right. But the meaning of right/left changed post WW2 (some would say WW1), at least in most european countries.

South Africa is not in Europe. It would be stupid to use European connotations for non-European countries. At this rate western media might call Hindu temples in India "churches".

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