(Talking about Bitcoin here. Not all crypto applies)
D'you think an "ordinary person" is going to risk being thrown in a gulag?
The problem with all these tech utopians is they think the relevant problems are technical: we've solved trust! (Between machines negotiating over a network). We've solved currency manipulation (oh its not a currency, it's an asset; and oh it can be manipulated by the 3 people who own 50% of it).
All the problems are social, not technological. And crypto makes all of them worse! By an order of magnitude worse.
They can try, but it's very difficult to do. I hear we'll win the war on drugs any day now.
All the problems are social, not technological
No solution is 100% social or technological, you need both. The existence of cryptocurrencies doesn't remove the need for social coordination.
Is a worse situation, right?
Crypto is just fedualism with land=coin. Really. That's what it is.
It's about as anti-freedom as one can imagine. It's "freedom in form" and not in content. It's the freedom of the colonizer on new land, and the oppression of all else who live there. A necessary oppression, not open to revision, and executed by machine.
Satoshi advertised the currency and the start of mining beforehand, to give other people a chance to participate. There was no pre-mine.
In the early days there were faucets that handed out bitcoins for free.
Due to the boom and bust cycle of Bitcoin, many of the early holders cashed out instead of holding all the way to untold wealth. This is actually a nice side-effect of the early stages of Bitcoin adoption.
Very early holders of Bitcoin had to take the risk that the currency was somehow flawed and would go to zero, in some sense, the gains they made are a function of the risk they took.
The solution to wealth inequality is not to force everything to be equal, it's to allow both upward and downward mobility. The wealthy must be allowed to fail and not be bailed out.
Interestingly, bailouts are a common feature of the fiat monetary system.
A deflationary asset, like land for example, is not a good currency. As a powerbase, it's called feudalism. And that's not a good politics.
Power in crypto is radically centralised to the owners, not the users (unlike democracies).
One has to imagine people like you know this, or feel it, in the lust for the value increases to your own stake: that is, a lust that you are the one in control. Either way, you're playing the role of a daemon here, whether you realise it or not.
And the devil you are putting on the thrown are a handful of billionaires with power and control executed by a machine.
Thankfully bitcoin has no army, and all of this will fade into the obvious malicious stupidity it already is.
I wrote about Bitcoin, not Ethereum. There are lots of Bitcoiners that think Ethereum is a scam due to the large premine and larping as a decentralized project.
Either way, you're playing the role of a daemon here, whether you realise it or not.
And the devil you are putting on the thrown are a handful of billionaires with power and control executed by a machine.
The fact that you have to start using flowery religious language of condemnation appears to me an indication that you're running out of logical arguments.
Thankfully bitcoin has no army
That's one of its features, which proponents value.
Then some people comply and some don't
The ones who are paying for these open ponzi schemes by having their electricity stolen by the state?
How about El Salvador, or Argentina, or Nigeria where the poorest lost significant chunks of their capital from btc crash to terra/luna collapse.