Neal Stephenson doesn't seem keen on crypto anymore
gamedeveloper.com
gamedeveloper.com
The Baroque Trilogy is less clear as Isaac Newton mints new currency.
Does that mean that perhaps Stephenson's opinions were always that currency needs to be backed by something whether it is gold or national borders.
> It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold (or silver, or diamonds, or various other mythical and magical elements and gems that the Creatives would later add to the game world).
> Other online games did this by fiat. Gold pieces were reposited in dungeons guarded by monsters. The more powerful the monster, the more gold it was squatting on. To get the gold, you had to kill the monster, and building a character powerful enough to do so required a certain amount of time and effort. The system functioned okay, but in the end, the decision as to where the gold was located and how much effort was needed to win it was just an arbitrary choice made by a geek in a cubicle somewhere.
> Richard’s crazy idea was to eliminate the possibility of such fudging by having the availability of virtual gold stem from the same basic geological processes as in the real world. The same, that is, except that they’d be numerically simulated instead of actually happening.
> The media net was designed from the ground up to provide privacy and security, so that people could use it to transfer money. That's one reason the nationstates collapsed-as soon as the media grid was up and running, financial transactions could no longer be monitored by governments, and the tax collection systems got fubared.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Simoleon_Caper
In the story, the protagonist is an underemployed mathematician who resides in the house of his brother's family in Chicago. The brother, owner of an advertising agency, has won a large contract to create ads for "Simoleons", a form of non-governmental electronic "currency". To launch the product, they plan to give away 27 million Simoleons to the winners of a contest. The contest is based on the long-used format of "guess the number of jelly beans in the container", with Chicago's Soldier Field and 26 other football stadiums as the containers.
so, 1995 cryptobros, sports stadiums, and damn near NFTs.
Doesn't Snow Crash have hyperinflation followed by a plethora of private fiat currencies?
That's why I was so baffled as to why Facebook glommed on to the term "metaverse" with such fervor. The "metaverse" comes from that book, and is a major aspect of the dystopia. The term does not have positive connotations.
The real world is dominated by corporate domination, Regulatory capture, and stagnation. In the metaverse, it doesn't matter if you are a pizza delivery boy. You have power and agency if you have skills and determination, at least in comparison to the default world
I read the metaverse as a mechanism of control. People will put up with the dystopian hell of their everyday life because they can have the fantasy of power and control in the metaverse -- but in the end, it's the real world that is the only thing that actually matters and that's why it's fought over. Even the fights in the metaverse are just to further the fights in the real world.
Nobody with actual power /really/ cares about the metaverse except insofar as it can affect the real world.
How many brilliant minds signed off on that metaverse presentation I wonder. I'm still shocked. That's a lot of either coercion or people that enjoy smelling their own farts. They spent billions on it. Did I mention I'm still shocked? Shocked! None of it makes sense.
I've long thought that if I had to live in the world of Snow Crash, I would totally want to be in Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong over the other corporations. In context of the book, Mr. Lee kinda slapped.
One of the most amusing parts of that book was how the Mafia had recruiting booths at college job fairs, just like the other corporations.
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Here is a tiny story I once heard or read. I know it's only a very simplified, used to show debt based money creation, but such partial stories is all that's possible for this arbitrarily complex story of "money", because it's mostly a mind game of artificial rules. (If anyone can find this story I'd appreciate it, I don't remember where I read it, some book?)
A boy writes on a paper that he gives to his parents the promise to mow the lawn whenever that paper is presented to him to fulfill the promise. He got something in return from them right away, apparently the lawn didn't need trimming at that time so they resorted to the "debt paper". Instead of using it themselves the parents gave it to some neighbors in exchange for something they needed from them. And the neighbors too gave it to yet other neighbors. The promise to mow the lawn had become "money". As soon as somebody actually uses it to get their lawn mown it is destroyed, the "money" is gone.
So, all our debt based money, at least as far as it was created through companies or firms taking it on, is backe by various promises for money-cresting projects, for example
For a business it could be something like "I/we promise to build a factory that builds xyz and markets and sell it to _somewhere_."
For an individual consumer something like "I promise to work hard for ten years to create more value, i.e. make more money than the amount just created for me in advance of my promise."
So all that debt based money we keep using everywhere is not "merely paper without any value", it's backed by people's and businesses signed and certified promises to perform work and/or create measurable value.
Yes actual money is way more complicated, yet I find this story quite revealing. In all sciences we regularly use very simple "stories" too (e.g. the first model of the atom everybody learns, or the second, and third too, all way too simple from the PoV of the physicist, or molecular bonds taught in chemistry, getting more complicated with each iteration of level of education).
As far as I can see having the promise of a human to do something (valuable) is way more useful than anything else when averaging over all contexts. I'm sure one can easily think of specific contexts where something else is more valuable, but pointing it back at humans seems to me to be the most genius way of putting "value" behind the currency. That we have created soooo much more other stuff on top of the idea, for special situations and for special interests, IMO does not detract from it.
Also, that the banks can create money but need to find people willing to sign also looks like some really genius balanced design to me - as an idea, how it is then implemented in practice of course always suffers from the pulls of all the interests from all directions.
We also have a system that puts significant pressure on the debtors to fulfill their promises.
https://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Desire-Meaning-JAMES-BUCHAN/dp...
The only use-case for it now is for the criminal underworld (who have to somehow convert to fiat privately using novel techniques, and that gets harder with regulation and sanctions and outright banning of tumbler systems).
That and moving cash out of China / Russia / Saudi. You can see changes in the price to BTC (and housing in Vancouver, etc.) every time big moves like that happen, such as MBS taking over in Saudi, and Xi's anti-corruption purges in China.
Hasn’t it been? I mean, aren’t the other stories largely just the things you say in polite company because “we are engaging in the business deliberately to enable and profit from the criminal underworld” has…potentially adverse social consequences.
You must not have a need to send money to recipients in other countries.
I tried every option I could find until giving up in frustration and sending crypto instead.
Not denying the negative aspects but it's a privileged position to assert criminality is the only use case.
I’ve only ever really transacted with big countries’ currencies (EUR, USD, GBP, etc.), and I’ve found that the ordinary banking systems (especially with fintech like Wise) serve me quite well for this use case. I’d love to hear more about the flipside of that.
It could've been my fault, I don't frequently send internationally. But the experience sending crypto was far and away easier and is now my default choice.
But I imagine your specifics are quite rare. We've had a long time for crypto get significant market share for retail money transfer and it hasn't happened yet.
https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2023-crypto-crime-repor...
There are different kinds of anonymity, I think. There's anonymity of the identity of people, and anonymity of the nature of the transaction. Most cryptocurrency is bad at the former and good at the latter.
Those are detectable by analyzing the order book of exchanges for instance. No identity is needed
[1] Notes on our illicit transaction volume chart:
These are lower bound estimates that will likely rise over time as additional illicit activity is discovered.
This does not include off-chain criminal activity where proceeds may have been moved into crypto for laundering, though that activity can still be traced.
This does not include volumes associated with centralized services that collapsed in 2022, some of which are facing charges of fraud, given lack of off-chain insights.
Funds received by sanctioned entity Garantex accounts for much of 2022’s illicit volume. While most of that activity is likely Russian users using a Russian exchange, most compliance professionals treat this as illicit activity.
Money transfers, goods purchases, etc. as opposed to converting BTC into USDC.
Not so ironic ; wolf of wall street was funded by the billions stolen from Malaysia's pension funds and they threw huge parties and orgies in Vegas and paid off massive amount of douche-bag celebrities, including DiCaprio (who himself was a victim of trafficking in hollwood as a kid) as well as a bunch of other actors....
The wolf of wallstreet is basically the Inception of fraud IRL.
At least that added validity to the currency; but over time it's become increasingly less useful for any of the criminal underground other than middleweight tax dodgers, embezzlers, and people trying to beat embargoes or currency controls.
My suspicion is that these generally elite crimes (by volume, not by incident count) are tolerable to elite decisionmakers, and the network enables covert transfer of funds to "freedom fighter" groups, informants, and politicians - so the US covert community can hide their activities within the swarm. They surely have the tools and funds to track and unmask everything going on in the network in real time, and if they see something they're truly bothered by, they can use a parallel construction to go after it. Bitcoin becomes Tor.
edit: Back in the day you had to fill a plane with cash and fly it to the Contras. Hell, you had to fill a plane with drugs, fly the drugs to where you could sell them for cash, then fly the cash back. The CIA were very early victims of the cashless society.
Speak for yourself.
Some of us saw right away it wasn't a solution looking for a problem, it was a scam looking for a mark.
I mean, plenty of people were pointing out that trying to rewind finance to the era of privately-issued money without controls would lead to a recurrence of all the problems that that has historically produced and is the reason why that’s no longer a norm, while the entusiasts were just chanting “zero-trust” and “outside of government control”. We weren’t all enthused, or surprised with “the Wolf of Wall Street types”. (And I doubt very much the pioneers in the field were historically ignorant enough to not know exactly what they were creating.)
2. There was nothing sophisticated about crypto Ponzi schemes. It was always trivially obvious that if X money is used to purchase or prop-up crypto then X is all that is ever coming back out.
That's hilariously false.
https://www.reuters.com/article/argentina-dollars/argentina-...
Perhaps that was the only use case for it all along
I used to work for traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a privately held marketplace for commodities and derivatives. It was an extremely capitalist place, and over the years it had evolved extremely tight internal regulations. You just did not fuck with the exchange or with your clearing firm. If you did, could end up a grease spot on the pavement.
All the extreme capitalists I worked with were fine with that. They wanted to keep on making lots of money, and strong regulation created something where people felt safe engaging. That meant high-volume, high-velocity money flows. They were all greedy, but long-term greedy.
I feel bad for the sweet summer children who were like, "We'll invent a money with no regulation and it will be utopia!"
Greed has never been good, but the entire premise of the US form of capitalism is that greed is inevitable, so we should try our best to make it as close to a force for good as possible. Even if the greedy people don't care about that.
> The only use-case for it now is for the criminal underworld
This conclusion doesn't follow, neither logically nor empirically. [1] The exact opposite actually happened: we went from the vast majority of the volume being a darknet market, to most volume being saving/speculation and non-criminal e-commerce settlements.
[1]: https://twitter.com/malekanoms/status/1626583628099784705
One nitpick - it’s easily $10s of billions of in investment, more than likely approaching or surpassing $100s of billions.
A16Z alone has raised roughly $10b. Throw in other big VCs, a bunch of coin/crypto specific funds, likely thousands or tens of thousands of angel/seed rounds we’ve never heard of capitalizing on the hype (or just outright frauds), initial coin allocations (the Ethereum foundation alone had over $1b last I looked), etc, etc. Then there’s trying to figure how to “value” “investment” in things like ICOs and ICO 2.0 stuff like NFTs, etc.
Not to mention the tendency for crypto projects to be outright frauds from the start. OneCoin alone brought in $4b in what could be characterized as “investment” from the perspective of the victims. One incomplete analysis[0] shows this specific category of frauds (of which there are many in crypto) to be at least $26b in total.
It’s been 14 years, hundreds of billions in investment and roughly speaking zero non-criminal usage and no real-world killer use cases. That’s just fact. Time to move on.
[0] - https://www.comparitech.com/crypto/cryptocurrency-scams/
Yes, people pouring their savings in tulips, fake railroad companies, and beanie babies is absurd. Does it follow that tulips, railroad companies, and baby plushies are scams and criminal in nature? The grifters and their victims moved on, and the underlying objects of speculation seem to exist and do their respective jobs just fine now.
Crypto is doing its job just fine of being a trustless and permissionless way of transferring value. It doesn't care if grifters hype, pump, and dump its tokens. The few actual decentralized networks in existence just keep running and securing their immutable ledgers. The few actual peer-to-peer researchers and developers keep improving them.
At the time that those things were happening? Definitely scams. Not necessarily criminal, though.
> It doesn't care if grifters hype, pump, and dump its tokens.
True. But, as I think you've noticed, a whole lot of people do care, and don't want to have anything to do with the whole idea. Maybe even most people.
It doesn't help that pro-cryptocurrency people cannot articulate a real, practical use case (outside of one or two niche things, like moving money across contested national borders) that isn't already done at least as well by the existing monetary system and also isn't scammy.
Consider Theranos as a non-crypto example. Fraud, yes, with two people convicted under those charges. Holmes was charged with defrauding investors and not convicted on those counts (IIRC). Balwani was.
I think it's relatively safe to say the parallel between people investing in what ended up being a bubble, fraud, etc (from tulips on) was considered as investment from the source of funds - the investors. It's why they call it "speculative investment". Speculative but investment nonetheless. Any early money on moonshot tech companies could be characterized the same way. Just turns out for Facebook, Google, etc it worked out because the founders and team weren't defrauding from the start, executed well, etc. It helps that the fundamental premise of these companies didn't go against human nature and demonstrated tremendous value and therefore significant user adoption from day 1.
Where it gets more complicated is going back to the original argument - money poured into the space for what ostensibly should have been work to legitimately further the ecosystem. Frankly I'm not entirely sure how to characterize it but the other issue here are situations like FTX (which I didn't include or mention). They did a lot of legitimate work for a while. How would this be accounted for in this distinction? What about companies like Coinbase that have had wildly swinging valuations? The other scary thing - what about companies/projects/etc that have taken investment but just haven't collapsed yet (due to outright fraud or otherwise)?
So... Very complex scenario but I think it's safe to say the core point remains - there's been a ton of money, effort, and time (over the course of 14 years) committed to this space with essentially nothing to show in the real world. I've spent a lot of time analyzing on chain data and at best there are MAYBE 100m crypto "users" worldwide. If we say $100b of investment that's a user acquisition cost of $1000 - and investors can't even fully capitalize on those users due to the decentralized nature of crypto. Hell, let's call if $50b of non-fraud "legit" investment. That's still $500/user which is at least one order of magnitude beyond anything you see in the non-crypto space.
If the entire crypto space was a tech startup funded by VCs they would have cut their loses, exited years ago, and crypto would essentially be back at the "investment" model of early Bitcoin (which IMO is perfectly fine and even preferred by many). Even the early web investment period (with the 2000 bubble burst) saw enough successes and returns within the span of a decade (1995-2005) to keep the money pouring in (and returning) to this day.
Here are some stats for any passerby who might be convinced to think crypto really has ~zero non-criminal usage [1]. Surely calling 5-25% of many countries' populations criminals (including the US), should be relegated to a fringe extremist view.
Triple A is a crypto payments company with much more self-interest than those of us who are skeptical towards crypto. The base methodology for all of their statistics is ridiculous: "Let's take a cherry-picked dubious survey of crypto adoption done by the Bank of Canada and extrapolate those numbers to the entire world POPULATION". Bonus points for their "creativity" with this methodology - worldwide population is roughly 8 billion while internet users (the real TAM for crypto) is closer to 5 billion. So already you need to shave at least 35% off their numbers.
Their baseline "420m crypto users worldwide" estimate (which is already bad considering TAM is > 5 billion internet users) can be easily debunked to at least 1/3 of that number (100m - which is still incredibly optimistic) by spending an hour looking at block explorers across the top 10 chains (evaluating daily/monthly transaction counts, tx/rx address pairs actually used for daily/monthly transactions, etc). When I last did it to get to the 100m number I was VERY fair to crypto - round up everywhere, assume address = user (it doesn't), count each address as a unique user per chain, etc. If crypto had anything resembling the legit DAU/MAU metrics you see from publicly traded companies the total for the entire crypto space would likely be closer to 50m (or less).
I'm always fascinated by this - crypto advocates constantly talk about the transparency, openness, etc provided by blockchain while simultaneously touting those absurd Triple-A statistics. You will never see them do a real (yet still easy) analysis like I have because the real numbers look terrible.
If there was any real interest in the crypto ecosystem succeeding crypto enthusiasts would take a real hard look at the real stats, acknowledge they have a problem with adoption, and try to fix it. They're just too personally invested financially and thus spend their time "pumping their bags".
I doubt a FAANG or other non-crypto employee is worried in the slightest by the "threat" of an entire ecosystem that has acquired a whopping 50m-100m users over 14 years.
Simply owning digital tokens is not a real world usage of those tokens, full stop.
That being said, I can fully accept that 5-25% of a countries population is gullible enough to buy cryptocurrency.
It's as much real world usage, as people owning stocks and precious metals is.
> I can fully accept that 5-25% of a countries population is gullible enough to buy cryptocurrency.
In many countries, it's the 75% of the population saving in their local fiat currency that are the gullible ones. I know we all love United States Dollars, but in many local economies, there aren't enough of them to go around. Acquiring, storing and transacting with cryptocurrencies can be easier, and more secure and discrete than going to your local black market USD dealer and stashing stacks of bills under your mattress.
Nobody is supposed to save fiat except as a liquidity cushion against personal tail risk for which you pay the spread between interest rates and inflation. Nobody has ever advised people to save fiat anywhere. They advice is to keep an emergency savings account and invest the rest.
The number of people actually using it on a daily basis is probably somewhat lower.
There was never a hope for Bitcoin replacing or even competing with regulated currencies. It had its fun in the sun, but now it (and just about every altcoin) will bleed their values from the layman's wallet while opportunists and whales exploit an already-broken economy. Depending on who you ask (or what chain you trade on) we're already there.
It's a hobby, I promise :)
> Surely your motives can't simply be the fear of being out of a job if bigtech fades into irrelevance. AI would logically be a way bigger threat to your occupation.
In my role as a critic (or I suspect you'd say cynic) whether crypto succeeds or fails doesn't matter. If it finds a killer use case and makes my life better I win because my life is better. I'll be the first to use any technology that makes my life better, or the things I do faster or cheaper. As I am not invested, it doesn't hurt me if it fails. The stock I own is broadly agnostic to the success or failure of crypto and the idea that any FAANG company is under threat from crypto is silly. If it takes off, the FAANGs would quickly find a way to profit.
> Surely calling 5-25% of many countries' populations criminals (including the US), should be relegated to a fringe extremist view.
They're not using it, they're speculating on its price. That's not the same thing. To use it they'd have to be exchanging it for goods and services and they're simply not because it's a bad store of value and a worse medium of exchange.
The title of that page is "Cryptocurrency Ownership Data" not "Cryptocurrency Use Data."
In re your reply down the line:
> It's as much real world usage, as people owning stocks and precious metals is.
Stocks are productive investments because their appreciation is derived from non-investor participants. Crypto doesn't derive it's value from non-investor participants. Crypto is only re-arranging the wealth in fiat terms, distributing money from later entrants to earlier ones. A better analogy would be to other zero-sum products like options or futures contracts but of course those have use as a hedge against risk which oviously crypto does not as it's simply correlated to the bubble stocks in the NASDAQ.
It is a lot like owning gold (well, except that gold actually is used industrially) but generally owning shiny pebbles has been a fringe sport dominated by William Devane and his 2am coin commercials on Fox. I think gold is a silly investment too and I don't hear anyone selling it as the future of anything.
This isn't necessarily a praise/defense of crypto currencies. At large, I confess I don't understand what value they have if it isn't reflected outside the chain they are counted in. I just don't understand this take on trying to find intrinsic value of it. There is none. Same as the paper in my wallet.
I do find the artificial scarcity of in game items amusing. The scarcity is, essentially, required for many of the plot points in so many novels. When it starts happening, though, we rightly recoil at the absurdity of it.
Except paper money is understood and used by all today to make transactions and thus useful.
My point here was largely that I don't get where Stephenson was trying to argue. Even some of the points made in the slides are somewhat silly. If Jack's family could have sold their home to get enough money to build a new one and have food, they would have done so. But, of course, that wasn't the story. So trying to nitpick odd choices there are post-hoc justifications.
Are we just wanting to beat up on the silliness of scarcity in video game items? I mean, I'm all for that. It is silly. It is also silly that people are willing to pay money for the items. But that happens with or without market wide scarcity. (Just see the items in Candy Crush and its ilk.)
That's his thesis. Crypto is useful, but not for game items, because there is nothing honorable worth buying with real money. Just like how no one should buy a certificate that says "I bought this certificate from someone who is really good at chess." Unless you are a patron of the art of playing the game, I guess, but that doesn't seem to be use case in practice.
I could easily imagine a world where I get "crypto currency" that I can use across games. If only so that trying a new game doesn't mean starting from zero for those that did build up a lot of stuff in another one.
Why would any company use a decentralized token to let you purchase things when they could simply make their own store currency/points and sell that instead? Look at all the F2P games that have in-game purchases, they all use points that are sold by the publisher that are bought with dollars because they make more money that way. There is no incentive to allow a decentralized currency you don’t control for in-game purchases.
There are so many hypotheticals and logical leaps here... This is not a useful argument anymore ... it's just you fantasizing.
I am out.
If there is something there I should treat more seriously, I'm game.
Except it doesn't.
Real currency resale markets obviously come with a cost to the publishers, who are the original sellers of the good. However, they also have upsides to the publishers and players.
Magic the gathering is a good example because they have two online versions with different approaches.
In Magic The Gathering Online, you can transfer your digital goods. This means there are all kinds of 3rd parties making the ecosystem more efficient. You can buy and sell cards for real cash on dozens of websites, and you can even pay cash to rent expensive cards from bots. All in game purchases are also done in a tradable currency, so in theory, you could play the game without spending a penny with the publisher, but the publisher is still the origin of all consumable game currency.
The publisher also has a 2nd generation online platform, Magic the Gathering Arena. This version has no transferable assets and no financial ecosystem. They capture every penny, but miss out on users who want a financial exit option, and a ton of free publicity and events hosted by businesses operating in the MTGO ecosystem.
I think this is one of the better examples because Magic is already a collectables card game. That said, similar ecosystems have existed in games like eve online, Diablo, ect...
As with most things, I wonder what the value add is from Crypto, but perhaps it is there. I know some games have struggled with duplication and fake goods, which is particularly problematic when people are paying real cash for them. Perhaps crypto can address this issue
I don't agree with your opinion that item transferability is necessarily silly, though. I was happy to be able to sell the rare Dota 2 items I accumulated after playing it for a couple years. It was never a central motivation for playing, but the transferability didn't detract from the experience in any way. It just made for some nice pocket change when all was said and done.
___
Meta remark: It's pretty sad that one of the only HN comments correctly pointing out the disconnect between the article title, the HN knee-jerk reactions, and the actual content of the article, seems about to be downvoted to oblivion. The article is barely 3 paragraphs. Is it too much to ask to read it, before jumping in with the same tired crypto takes as every link to crypto-related resources on HN gets?
I also don't see why any of the companies would be on-board with it, given that accomplishing it would take a lot of development effort for little reward, and the game companies are in this business to maximize their reward.
The creators of Fortnite don't want you to take your DLC with you to play another game. They want you to keep playing Fortnite and spend money in their store.
If you mean transferable as in able to sell an in game asset to another player, Valve has offered that for at least a decade.
Literally and actually, with no exceptions, no consumer cares about a public ledger or any of its other features. They do care about being able to dispute a transaction if they are scammed or unhappy.
Crypto solves tons of problems for paranoiac techbros and get-rich-quick schemers.
As you say, this doesn't help most people in normally functioning societies, unless they're doing something where any sort of regulation is dangerous to them (often criminal activities and get rich quick schemes).
On the other hand I can see it being useful if the country is in complete meltdown, either due to a war, massive economic problems and overinflation (to Zimbabwe or Weimar Republic levels) or an authoritarian dictatorship.
Oh really? So when there's no laptops or phones to buy, or electricity to make them work, Cryptocurrency will be, you say, at it's most useful?
That's certainly a point of view.
If you have a problem, do not partake.
Any useful case with ledgers being used in anti-censorship communication can be criminalized by the SEC.
Way around this is not use cryptocurrency. Use decentralized protocols like Nostr instead and the SEC can’t make up some bullshit to stop you.
Sergey Nazarov's interview on Lex Fridman lays out some uses for smart contracts if you are actually interested in it.
Oh wow I bet this is going to be an excellent, well reasoned explanation based on a deep understanding that the author has of the underlying technology, applications, and motivations:
>Except for this time they want to wrestle control of money from the state and distribute it to private enterprises.
>we would then have to go to the likes of plutocrats like Jeff Bezos and crypto exchange CEOs to make the final call about foreign policy.
This article is absolute nonsense written by somebody who either has absolutely no understanding of this technology or its application, or is just willfully lying about it.
Here's the author's twitter: https://twitter.com/smdiehl
The currency would ideally facilitate trade. Even if it's not baked in it evolves. I remember Diablo 2 people would trade using a particular rare ring (Stone of Jordon). It was essential as you might find rare items that don't fit your character configuration
Ideally crypto would facilitate trade and not take away from the game. But I understand the incentives with the game company using a token as opposed to a natural market that evolved may be off
Thaught me about specialization, trade, trolls and creativity. I had a buddy research hacks and would just ping me to join a game, watch him drop some items, exits and enters a few times and came back with dup items that he would share. It was one of my first forays in trying to find exploits and the excitement associated with it
A lot of people looked at bitcoin from the beginning, and asked what the point was, or if it would ever go anywhere. And bitcoin bros responded by telling everyone that the real game-changer wasn't bitcoin, but The Blockchain.
That the value of goods is collective but entirely personal. It is the basis of why we might trade away a cow to receive a sheep
> Science fiction author Neal Stephenson gently criticized cryptocurrency in games.
He thinks they are important for trading commodities.
Welcome to every neal stephenson book. You get used to it.
I like stephenson fine but he has a huge blind spot about the role of tech companies in positive transformations. I read seveneves a couple years ago and it was so intensely offputting to see obvious neil degrasse tyson and elon musk standins in straightforwardly heroic roles. For someone with such a sophisticated eye for power and change it just seems mindbogglingly naive. I think the crypto thing fits into that same blind spot as well.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120319135605/http://www.worldp...
The idea being sci-fi feeds scientific discovery, but recent sci-fi had stopped doing this, so it was an attempt to address this.
To me this view is extremely american, contemporary and unproven, having emerged just in the last few decades and already running into serious issues with its viability as a mechanism for wide spread long term positive change.
It's not that I mind someone exploring this model, or portraying it in fiction. I think it's a backdrop for some genuinely interesting and dynamic conflicts, as demonstrated by the book itself.
My issue is that this system has been taking on an almost religion-like character in some groups, and stephenson seems to be a true believer. Again not necessarily a mortal sin, but it leaves him with some blind spots that are frustrating as a reader and as someone who is also, on a good day, an optimist about technology and the future.
The belief doesn't arrange itself along a left-right scale. It's mostly a self-serving belief held by wealthy upper-middle class professionals who insist that the WeWorks and Ubers (that they work for or invest in) are where these magical people will come from. It's the material philosophy of people who have never missed a meal unless they were on a diet.
Edit: Wasn't Probst supposed to be from New Jersey?
I could prove it, it's just that I've had several HN accounts banned since then.
e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/ohb0xp/magic_beans_and...
And I'm not saying that to defend crypto, I hate that shit. I'd rather buy a pet rock.