The more crypto grows, the more it resembles the absolute worst parts of government and capitalism. These people absolutely want laws - for example, that if you acquire a monkey picture in the wrong way you must hand it back, for free - they just don’t want the laws that mean they have to pay tax, or anything that might slow the flow of money into their corrupt systems (which of course is nothing like any corporations you might have heard of), even if said flow-slowing might protect people from being scammed or harmed.None of this is “true” libertarianism - it’s old, boring, scummy opportunism. The obsession of crypto with metaverses and web3 isn’t anything to do with human contact, it’s an intentional attempt to create separate, unregulated societies through which to monetize and exploit people. It may have a different process, but this is just a messy mixture of company towns and lobbying - creating little societies where you control the economies and can arbitrarily influence or outright change the rules to match whatever belief system you’ve chosen today.
Anyone claiming that crypto is “different” isn’t seeing the current state of crypto for what it is - manifold ways to extract, store, exploit and obfuscate capital. The evil bankers and hedge fund managers and their shareholder meetings are replaced with people with ugly portraits that post “GM” and vague platitudes about how they’ll change the world. The key difference is that there are so many suckers who are willing to market these concepts for free, and willing to go to war on social media with those who don’t buy into the spurious visions they poorly describe. It’s because they’re truly invested in the outcome and that they can manifest destiny through the power of posting and vaguely suggesting that you might become a multi-millionaire - that you are “going to make it.”
Who is going to get rich off of all of this? The same fucking people who were rich already. Sure, some people got wealthy as a result of gambling on extremely stupid and pointless shit, but the people who are actually making money are generally a small group of people manipulating a system to their advantage. For every person whose life was changed because of their childlike sketch of a person sold for $50,000, hundreds of thousands of others are desperately talking about how they are going to make it and that their particular picture will be what makes them one of the elite.
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The consistent pro-crypto argument is that big companies control the platforms we use every day, and decentralization is the only way for us to be truly “free.” The problem is that there is no real difference between a web3 company that has transferrable ‘votes’ and a regular company - those with the money still have the power, except they have the ability to directly monetize each vote. Democracy is quite literally for sale by the company (and regularly sold to wealthy investors before anyone else!), and those buying votes under the auspices of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ are really just participating in an even more corrupt and punishing system than we have in the real world.
What’s amazing is how blind the average crypto users appear to be to the naked industrial cronyism. Who gets access to hot tokens early? Investors and friends of the developers. Who gets early knowledge that things will get listed? Investors and friends of the project. There are no insider trading laws that stop this from happening, because we’re in a beautiful libertarian paradise where anything goes, because of how good freedom is.
― but also fuck you (unperson), Tuesday, 4 January 2022 01:08 (two years ago) link