Comment by southerntofu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by southerntofu | Hacker News Reader

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> A large % of people now believe that the finance industry only exists to work against them and make an elite minority rich.

Yes, because that is the very definition of capitalism: people own, others work. That's the reason modern forms of slavery, colonization and patriarchal control were developed, historically.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism or Silvia Federici for some great perspectives on the control of births/sexuality, patriarchy of the wage and oppression of women under capitalism.

> people are thinking "I will never own a home"

A lot of people i meet from the younger generation don't care at all about owning a home. They feel concerned that the privileged elites are ruining the show for everyone and by the next decade we'll be more and more struggling for drinkable water and basic survival.

Punks were derided for their "No future" stance, but it looks like the entire world has gone "No future" and just keeps fucking up as much as they can. Spending billions of KWh on blockchains so rich people can speculate on buying their own number (correct me if i'm wrong but to me a NFT is just a number) is just part of this.

We have to stop this madness, abolish private property and the capitalist industry entirely and go back to communal living and producing stuff based on actual needs, not dumb single-use Internet of Shit products and other planned-obsolete non-flashable-single-purpose computers.

> After many hours I couldn't find anything even remotely interesting.

The only interesting "dApp" i've seen so far is radicle.xyz, a decentralized forge built on top of git. Still i'm skeptical of tying money and financial incentives into my software development practices, but at least those folks (free software people) had the decency to make crypto-payments optional by adding opt-in Ethereum integration. Clever move.

> Spending billions of KWh on blockchains so rich people can speculate on buying their own number (correct me if i'm wrong but to me a NFT is just a number) is just part of this.

You say this as if numbers have no utility. Is an IP address "just a number"? What about a /8 cidr block? How much energy should we be allowed to spend to secure global address space and provide a secure implementation of identity for all people? This is one of the actual concrete uses of NFT tech, (see Urbit Azimuth.)

> We have to stop this madness, abolish private property and the capitalist industry entirely and go back to communal living and producing stuff based on actual needs, not dumb single-use Internet of Shit products and other planned-obsolete non-flashable-single-purpose computers.

Good luck making a non-disposable world where nobody has domain over their own numbers or is allowed to have their own distinct and unique identity secured by a leading consensus protocol. I for one am glad that you and others of a like mind are not empowered to tell me or anyone else that I can't have my own number if I want it, or to secure it with as many megawatts and global collaborators as I can muster.

Because you know what happens when private property is abolished? Spoiler, only the well connected and powerful will hold private property, and overall the scope and impact of inequality even broadens.

Edit: I'm getting downvotes but not sure which part you disagree with! Have you ever lived in an area where private property was abolished? (They tried this in Lithuania and USSR and that's exactly how it turned out! When nobody is allowed to own resources, who decides how they are allocated?)

"To each according to his need" sounds great until you get to see what an actual functional implementation of that looks like, and it turns out that Stalin is the one who is in charge of it all.

> Because you know what happens when private property is abolished? Spoiler, only the well connected and powerful will hold private property

If only a few people can own private property then you haven't abolished private property, you've just limited who can own it.

This was the main issue caused by the massive state control of Marxist Leninist countries like the Soviet Union -- by centralizing all control within one single political party you essentially just replace an economic elite with a political elite. Couple that with the democratic centralism you often find in these single party ML countries and suddenly you have something that's a lot less like the communal living the OP was referring to.

I'm not saying abolishing private property will be some magical fix all, but I also don't think using the soviet union as an example of why it won't work is a good example. You could have a society where usage of resources is governed by consensus rather than "lol stalin said so" but consensus is obviously a lot harder to do on a global scale than a small communal village

Thanks, that was probably my point. Consensus is hard. Ethereum is one of the global systems that currently exists for tackling the consensus problem. Shouting at clouds is on the other hand, not tackling the consensus problem.

Someone or something has to be at the helm of the command economy. I'm definitely not saying we should "go back to communal living and producing stuff based on actual needs" but I am saying that without a rigorous system for distributed consensus, you really don't have a chance of achieving this.

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