>Bitcoin et al. are a very real promise that the future of banking and finance and money will be decentralized. Which as far as I'm concerned, is about freedom as much as speech is. You don't have any freedom if you have to beg VISA or PayPal for permission to spend your money.
The moral high ground you are trying to claim in your second argument is undercut by your first argument. If this was all about freedom, we would see similar sized investments in open and decentralized platforms focused on free speech. The reason we aren't seeing that is obvious. It is much easier to see a path to profitability in the cryptocurrency space.
Most cryptocurrency investments aren't about freedom, they are about carving out a piece of the pie from the existing financial services industry. There is nothing immoral about turning a profit, just be open about it. It is dishonest for cryptocurrency investors to claim their intent is to save the world especially considering how much electricity and therefore fossil fuels some of the popular cryptocurrencies waste.
Sell the tech on its own merits and accomplishments. There is a reason why the "making the world a better place" pitches have been parodied for years.
This is already a mostly solved problem. There are lots and lots of places on the internet, when I can engage in speech and it won't be censored.
Yes, the big platforms might censor you, but there are still lots and lots of small platforms that won't or can't.
A lot of people in the US don't seem to realize how extreme we are as a country when it comes to free speech. We fetishize free speech in a way that I feel is not healthy. I don't think any country's laws are perfect in this regard, but all the other western democracies seem to be just fine with their laws against things like hate speech. I don't see how the US allowing hate speech is beneficial to the country or its people.
This opinion tends to be an unpopular on HN and I figured I would meet the original OP on their terms.
If mere functioning is your goal for the country, then certainly countries without strong free speech protections can function. They can even function without democracy at all.
But most people want more for their country.
Western democracies with weaker free speech protections do function, but they also have a substantial pressure outlet in the form of websites hosted in other countries that don't kowtow to oppressive governments.
It's not implemented well enough to detect the fine differences between western countries.
Hate speech laws reduce the range of discourse. They suppress dissent. That's inherently undemocratic.
Relegating that permissiveness to a particular entity allows that subjectivity to be enforced in perverse ways.
Many people feel it is better to tolerate the objectionable and hurtful speech than to allow a 3rd party to use subjective judgment to censor.
...unless you think they are terrorists.
Money is a collective action problem, a public good - it requires a solution that bounds everyone - just like defence.
Competing tethered currencies aren't gone because they're a bad idea, they're gone because they've been made illegal.
Crypto gives the power to operate such a currency back to the people in a way that can't be stopped.
Thats fine. If you don't like deflationary currencies, then feel free to not use them.
Other people disagree, though, and are preferring deflationary currencies.
Everyone can get what they want.
Why do you think this? Ethereum has changed its inflation schedule a few times recently.
It seems you are basing this on the hard capped supply model of bitcoin which is not the same as every cryptocurrency.
But maybe there are some good in-between solutions, less dogmatic, more pragmatic.
The possibility of forking is a necessary deterrent in cryptonetwork governance.
If the maintainers of a network become compromised or get coopted by special interests, the collective owners of the network(the holders of the cryptocurrency) have the right to exit.
The right to exit is a necessary part of governance.
There is no guarantee that decentralized anything has a place in the future. So far the trends have been depressingly centralizing, whether it's government, finance, manufacturing, or even our great hope, the Internet.
Tech people have been warning about this forever because they have a strong grasp of the consequences and they also better understand what we have (or had) with the internet and other parts of the economy and politics.
I’m starting to see far more ‘regular’ people outside of tech concerned about the top down centralization of communication and payment networks.
And for all this technical progress there's still the human problem that the core team/individuals decided exploiting vulnerable contracts' and hard forking the failed DAO were morally right ideas.
As long as those team members are involved then the truth is that no one in the Ethereum ecosystem can escape the Spectre of their will. They've historically proven to be operating as simply a different centralized body of power that isn't a government issuing fiat.
I can imagine at least a couple of scenarios where it might be in the interests of (some?) investors to spruik such a thing.
There’s a lot of power being generated by, and flowing within and between, various organisations throughout the world. It’s probably possible to tap in to that a gather some of it close to you, especially if you are a group of tech minded wealthy folk.
Could you clarify? Do you mean flowing as in transactions between major banks or major manufacturers? Or something less obvious?
Where is it you live that Internet service is provided by a free market, that can't be disabled?
Oh come on, this american-centric meme has to die off already. Drugs. Every drug-related transaction I know or heard off for the last ~2 years have been done through bitcoin.
In some aspects, US is ahead of the globe. In others, though - like having people such as drug dealers who meet their clients in person and make transactions in cash - it's way behind.
10 years ago, people who clamored about a subset of the NSA's dragnet could have been justifiably labeled "conspiracy theorists".
Cultures and public opinions change over time. In America, and certainly for the most part on the internet, the ability to express opinions, including and especially controversial ones, is both a hallmark of and litmus test for freedom. Censoring controversial statements based on the current cultural temperament is antithetical to it.
Perhaps because the people you label "right-wing trolls" are, sometimes, actually just people with different opinions, and deserve (at least in their minds) some protection? They aren't merely getting kicked off Twitter; in some cases they are being demonetized.
It's all well and good to sit back and say, "too bad for them", but it would be diligent to at least concede your "side" may not win this fight, and one day you might be getting the label.
Yes, 2017 was over-hyped. The tech was not mature then, and while it has matured some since then, there's still quite a ways to go.
Bitcoin Lightning network is growing. Ethereum has successfully navigated core upgrades and has a clear path to scalability. Other platforms are doing great innovative things.
But to the core of the argument that crypto has no use case. It's 2019. We've seen our internet rights to speech and expression violated by companies imposing their values on their user base. We've seen digital ghosting, deplatforming, fake news manipulation, propaganda and all kinds of insidious behaviors from corporate giants that are too big to be truly accountable anymore.
Bitcoin et al. are a very real promise that the future of banking and finance and money will be decentralized. Which as far as I'm concerned, is about freedom as much as speech is. You don't have any freedom if you have to beg VISA or PayPal for permission to spend your money. That alone should be enough to justify the existence of block chain technology and we should all be cheering on its eventual success.
But besides that, the tech is being used in novel ways. From gaming to loans to tokenized asset trading. Cryptocurrency is programmable in a way that is just not possible with dollars.