The crypto holders would love if the world switched to using the cryptocurrency they’re invested in because it would make them extraordinarily wealthy relative to the average person buying in late.
I don’t understand how anyone can honestly suggest that a gradual changeover to a specific cryptocurrency would be anything other than disastrous for financial inequality.
I feel people think “if everyone had bought Bitcoin when it was cheap, everyone would be rich now” and then think that Safemoon rugpull #42053 will somehow do it.
'The majority of cars worldwide are not electric. They are all petrol and diesel cars. That means that ALL cars are bad for the environment and that will not change and thus should be all banned.'
Not all cryptocurrency projects are scams, just like not all cars are burning up the planet.
The absolutism towards whether if all cryptocurrency projects will go away due to a 'bUnCH OF Scam PrOjEctS' or 'it's ALl a scAm™' is just as silly as suggesting that all cryptocurrency projects are guaranteed to survive, 'becAuse iT is the FutURE, bRO™' or 'JUst WaiT fOr ThIs PrOJEct ReAL sooN™'.
I'll tell you that both extremes are incorrect. That is even before accounting for regulations getting involved.
Okay, I'll bite.
What's incorrect at the anti extreme? In other words, what crypto-currency isn't a) burning down our planet and b) disproportionately rewarding early adopters?
It can just take a single example to invalidate that question and Nano [0] perfectly does so. Unlike the others, it is not 'burning down our planet', was not 'pre-mined' / 'pre-allocated' or ever did an ICO back when it was launched. sorry.
Now here's my question to you since I answered yours: Hence your support for the anti crypto-extreme: Are they all going to go away 100% guaranteed despite all the other scam projects existing and with looming regulations on the horizon?
And that's great. But why is everyone and their dog still using proof of work? Large nations worth of power is being burnt to process all the others.
Why would they go away? Regulation, even bans will only disrupt the price, push wallets offshore. While there's an anonymous currency you can throw around, accept K&R payments through, it's going to be popular with tax cheats and criminals for a very, very long time. See: the effect of regulation on drugs.
Are you sure that's an argument not to use 'cryptocurrencies' (since you tried to label all of them as 'burning up the planet' which that was debunked) or was that more to do with those using PoW? It's like asking 'Why is everyone and their dog still driving diesel and petrol cars and trucks, with those still emitting tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, despite the existence of greener alternatives?
> Regulation, even bans will only disrupt the price, push wallets offshore. While there's an anonymous currency you can throw around, accept K&R payments through, it's going to be popular with tax cheats and criminals for a very, very long time.
That's the same way of saying that they are not going away 100% guaranteed and there will be lots of regulatory compliance; exactly what I already said. That's why mining PoW cryptocurrencies are banned in countries like China [0] and Kosovo [1]. Instead with regulations, it is going to get a lot harder for tax cheats, criminals, etc to use their privacy coins as the exchanges will delist them to prevent undesirables from converting it to fiat. [2]
[0] https://fortune.com/2021/11/17/china-bitcoin-mining-ban-cryp...
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59879760
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/31/eu-parliament-vot...
Exactly. More crickets that are unable to respond to my question(s). Is that why you also haven't responded to my latest question and went on to vent your anger on to the latest crypto post?
> I'll tell you that both extremes are incorrect.
Being extreme or not have little bearing on an opinion being correct. Some opinions, such as "murder is bad", are both extreme (they suffer very few exceptions), and correct.
And it happens quite often that the most informed opinions also happen to be the most extreme. And as far as I can tell, this seems to be the case for crypto currencies: the more I look at them, the more I think they cannot be redeemed: to date, I have seen no problem that is best solved by a blockchain, and I increasingly doubt there ever will be.
---
> Not all cryptocurrency projects are scams
I can believe that. However, I do believe that all crypto currencies, without even a single exception, are a net bad for the world. If we restrict that to proof-of-waste crypto currencies, that belief is a near certainty.
Long story short, it seems that in practice, all crypto currencies eventually devolve into a pyramid scheme. They're also used as an actual currency, but their volatility is such that it's not very practical to begin with, and that use is so marginal compared to "investment" that the financial freedom gained by people who actually need it is outweighed by the harmful side effects of the pyramid. (We ruin more people than we save.)
Add proof of work (or space-time, or whatever scarce resource you can think of), and you end up with a massive waste of resources on top of that. A waste so massive in fact that it manages to influence electronics prices around the world, not to mention the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network alone, in a world that really really needs to reduce its CO2 emissions. Like right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Sixth_Assessment_Report
They may not be all scams, but as far as I can tell all honest attempts are doomed to fail.
As opposed to our current financial system which is built on the idea of creating real (except when we reeeeally want some extra money, in which case we just make some more), regulated (unless your regulated activity is conducted by an entity that is sufficiently rich or powerful) money and then control a global hegemony with it.
Crypto is not a solution to every problem and it definitely makes some new ones, but it sure would make for an interesting redistribution of power. I think there reaches a point where the levers of the modern currency system are much, much too attractive for human governments to be trusted with.
No that's not what I was saying and this is one of the most terrible things about any cryptocurrency discussion. People can't seem to avoid viewing it as something "opposed" to any current financial system, when that's not true. Cryptocurrency at best is the same as the current financial system and that's a huge stretch if you can somehow avoid all the negative externalities created by the insistence on using blockchains. So I would really suggest you avoid this angle when talking about this. Yes, all money is technically "fake". The difference is that real currencies that function as currencies are backed by some kind of real productive human activity to sustain that thing. Cryptocurrency by definition is not this, and it never can be unless you discard the fundamental concepts of it.
>but it sure would make for an interesting redistribution of power.
No not really. If you define "interesting" as something unpredictable and dramatic, then it would be more interesting to have the government raise tax rates to 99% and then randomly redistribute the proceeds via lottery. But nobody wants to talk about that because it doesn't require any kind of tech solutionism like cryptocurrency does. And also it would just be awful for most people. But hey, if you just want to convince some rich people to voluntarily pool their money into a trust that then redistributes it via lottery, you might as skip straight to that and avoid all the cryptocurrency shenanigans.
As for your next point, I'm not sure in what sense our current currency is backed by real human activity in a way that crypto is not. Currency is backed by bullets, bombs, and bayonets ( and sometimes softly spoken implications of the aforementioned alliteration). I guess that's a sort of human activity.
"But the regular financial system is a scam too!"
It has lots of flaws, but it grew organically over thousands of years, and so did regulation that offers some reasonable protection that lets people use currency without massive risk of getting scammed (I'm sure there is a pedantic counterpoint to this, but overall, people get by on real money, much better than if they "invested" - because that's all you can do, you cant actually transact in any normal way - in the current crypto nonsense.)
Anyway, if your best argument is that real money is also a scam, it's hard to believe anyone would be lining up to switch to your scam
Cryptocurrency is not an industry and doesn't have any good parts. The technology itself is useless and universally bad for any practical purpose. It solves no problems, it only creates them. The "good things" done by companies using cryptocurrency are in spite of the technology, not because of it. Some companies don't even seem to bother with this though, and I'll call those out specifically.
I would also call out a virus-scanning company if we found out they were secretly developing and deploying the viruses on the side and then selling the solution to increase their own profits. The same thing is happening here with a lot of blockchain products except they aren't even trying to keep it a secret what they're doing.
Honestly, the arguments are basically the same as the gold bugs and the motivation is the same. People are invested in gold so they want it to succeed even at the expense of other people. Same with cryptocurrency.
As I understand it, “equality” in a society refers to people’s equal access and treatment in some aspect of society (health, education, financial, legal, …)
Whereas “inequity” in a society refers to different outcomes for people (billionaires vs the indebted unemployed, for instance).
Outside of scams and fraudulent or deceptive launches, crypto seems to be very equality supportive to me.
That it has magnified inequity isn’t a reliable indicator of a lack of equality.
Equality enables everyone equally, it doesn’t provide equally for everyone.
Even if everyone had equal access to capital, we would still be talking about the equality of restructuring economies to wildly benefit a minority who gambled and got lucky. Should a single currency gamble "win", it will be in no small part due to heavily invested and politically powerful people making that happen.
People pursue very different paths in life. People dedicate themselves to the paths they do take with varying degrees of effort, thought, etc.
Inequity is going to always be the result. Enforced equity has (so far) simply enabled enforcers to create inequity in there favor.
I think it is a mistake to treat all inequity as “the” problem. Because it isn’t, and because that distracts from solving problems that can be solved. (To a higher degree.)
The crypto holders not only would love if the whole world switched but they actually depend on it to realize their profits, and for the latest adopters to not be left holding the bag, which at least the last 50% of adopters will be holding some portion of the bag/losses before and once it collapses; the wealth transfer will already have happened to the early adopters, and so whether the "community" or army of HODLers pity themselves and keep dabbling in it to keep their dream alive or not, will be interesting to watch at least, perhaps if it's not too embarrassing for the majority; the ones who exited with millions to $100s of millions, at least some of them of course will proudly showoff their gains by being in the MLM-Ponzi scheme(s) early - not being shameful of the unknown harm and losses their gains caused others and society as a whole. A lesson, to say the least.
But the above is why those of us who see what Bitcoin et al are for what they are need to take a stand because regulatory/systems and policy capture will happen and is attempting to happen, perhaps the most extreme example of this so far being El Salvador - where their current "elected" leader at one point brought in military with guns into their parliament to threaten their parliament if they didn't adopt whatever he is/was gunning for; then you have a government/organization that's shown an example of what they're willing to do wanting to then influence the rest of the world (by whatever nefarious/violent means they may be so inclined to do) in order for a global-decentralized financial database to be required to be used, to then realize their gains, which richness wise, if they succeeded at getting the world to adopt - would make them as relative early adopters, very rich indeed - at least those in government who actually control the keys to their kingdom's crypto vault.
Once I saw a significant portion of the mainstream VC-finance industrial complex buy into it, arguably heavily lead by USV with their Coinbase and other ecosystem investments - gaps they knew someone would have to fill, including funding a crypto lobbyist organization, then I knew things would get too serious to ignore. The solution however simply seems to be thoroughly educate the population so they understand the mechanisms - as most of what they will have seen or heard about is easily considered propaganda to hype up to sell more of whatever flavour of MLM-Ponzi scheme they can convince/trick you into buying.
Edit to add: Forgot to link to article re: "Heavily-armed police and soldiers enter El Salvador parliament" - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51439020
I don't know what an equitable monetary policy would be, but I know that intentionally deflationary currencies look nothing like it.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deflationary-spiral.asp
Every employee in Germany is required to pay a share of about 20% of their income (1) into the retirement „fund“ — which isn’t one really as the money is not invested to gain interest but instead is immediately payed out to the current generation of retirees. On the other hand, employees are promised to receive a future pension based on the payments by the next generation of employees (i.e. their kids). In Germany, this is called „Generationenvertrag“ („contract between generations“).
This is almost like a Ponzi/pyramid scheme where obscene „profits“ are payed out purely based on the exponentially growing number of payees until the day the growth stops and the system collapses like a house of cards.
This breakdown has been happening for decades already albeit at a glacial rate in the German public pension system as the population has been shrinking and therefore the number of payees. It is artificially kept alive as the German federal government pumps 100 billions of tax money every year into it which is 30% of the whole federal budget …
Of course, a redistributive pension system can sustain itself as long as the population age distribution looks like a literal pyramid. But that’s not the case for most Western countries.
(1) Formally, the employee pays only 10% and the other 10% are taken from the employer. But, of course, the employer could as well pay his 10% share as salary instead. So, either way, it’s the employee paying everything.
Now if we think about it for a moment: social security need money for 3 major things: unemployment, retirement, and health care. At any given point in time, you can divide the population in 2 categories: those who are currently working, and those who are not. And those who are currently working pay those who are not (gross oversimplification). The question is whether the workers pay enough money to sustain the idle.
Now health care and unemployment ought to be fairly constant (barring some major crisis), and you can have rules so people don’t abuse the system too much. So no pyramid there: we adjust how much workers pay for health and unemployment and that’s the end of it.
Retirement however is subject to longer term variation because of that age pyramid. And at a time where we have boomers retiring, we have less working people to sustain them all. And it’s made quite worse when the salaries of the working people don’t even keep up with inflation. We could have solved this by having an exponentially growing population, but that is bound to crash at one point.
So okay, I understand the pyramid analogy there. There’s a problem though: the boomers will die. Population will eventually get over that hump, and we’ll have a more reasonable proportion of working & retired people again. So the temporary deficit is just that: temporary.
And if that’s not enough, there’s something simple we can do to solve the problem. It’s so obvious that (at least in France) people don’t even dare utter it on national television: just raise contributions a little bit.
But no, doing this is so unthinkable that our rulers would rather have people retire later. Which won’t work, because of structural unemployment. So what we’ll have instead is lower pensions, and an increased reliance on pension funds.
There’s a snag however: pension funds are actually a form of redistributive system. Because redistributive systems are the only system there can ever be. See, even though you’re ostensibly investing money so you can retire later, what happens in practice is that your money is being injected in parts of the economy to fuel your investment. And ultimately, part of that money will be used to pay currently retired people. And when you retire, and the time comes to get your money back, you won’t get your money from a frozen value store. You’ll get it from the current economy, be it interest rates from your investments or currently paying people. However you cut it, your pension has to be taken from the current economy, and the only way you get paid is if your pension fund (and by extension the whole economy), can support it.
I’d rather have an explicitly redistributive system, it’s more honest that way.
On one end of the spectrum, you have personal and "defined contribution" saving and investment schemes: the individual carries a personal pool into their later years where they draw it down. How are differences between the contribution+performance and lifetime needs reconciled? Estates pass inheritances or individuals are bankrupt and we recursively ask ourselves what sort of system will cover their needs.
In the middle, you have what I think you want. An insurance pool redistributes the contributions, performance, and needs among a cohort. How are the aggregate assets and lifetime needs of the cohort reconciled? Contributions could be curtailed in response to excess accumulation or increased to cope with unexpected needs. Like any insurance scheme, the risk management has complexity around managing liquidity in the face of time-varying needs, contributions, and investment/economic performance.
But what skeptics see is an ugly reality unfolding further down that spectrum. Population growth and the long delay between contribution and withdrawal is (either naively or willfully) misinterpreted as excess accumulation. This is used to justify either insufficient contribution or "theft" of assets to fund other initiatives than the insurance pool. This leaves a hollowed out pension systems with defined benefits that cannot be satisfied with their meager holdings. As with a Ponzi scheme, they appear to work while the incoming contributions from an ever growing cohort are used to pay outgoing benefits to an earlier, smaller subset of participants. They collapse when the participation rate fails to grow fast enough to meet the ever growing needs of the aging cohort.
Even if you save your retirement in a real estate, it's value is tightly correlated to amount of people in productive age when you try to sell it.
The only thing that can save one, is to start saving money early and give it to componding effect. Albert Einstein once said “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it”.
Anything else wont work because demographic at least for europe is bad.
The good information is that to make componding effect to work, crypto is much more compund effect friendly asset in the world. Of course, in the mean time you need to use your brain to not lose your priv key or being phished etc.
Good luck
If the future population does not drive a large enough economy, there are dwindling products and resources available to swap for all existing financial instruments. These real resources are things like clean water, food, medicine, shelter, energy, technology, and services which cannot be stored over a person's lifetime and then consumed decades later.
It seems to me that the instruments with meaningful value in this picture are those rooted in a right to capture future production. That is things like ownership shares in continuing business enterprises, industrial infrastructure, natural resources, buildings, and developed land for housing and commerce. Of course, infrastructure and buildings decay over time, but they do represent a kind of real stored value for a planned service lifetime.
An actual plan to take care of a shrinking population would need to think about how automation can increase the efficiency of production such that a smaller future generation can generate sufficient output to satisfy the needs of the whole population including the elder non-workers. To avoid the Ponzi threat or more generally the "musical chairs" game mode, this plan needs to accomodate continous, incremental decline. The important technological and cultural skills to operate this system need to be passed down to ensure continued production for all who remain alive.
In USA, social security and health care are different issues. SS can be patched up. Health care is on course to consume the entire federal budget.
Well, after the boomers have died, Generation X and the Millenials will demand their retirement package. The population age distribution will not become a pyramid with the next generations.
> just raise contributions a little bit
A little bit. Lol. In Germany the contributions are quite unpopular, too (and rightly so with 20% removed from your gross income), but the government just increased the tax subsidies over the years. Nowadays, they amount to about 30% of Germany‘s federal budget — on top of all the contributions. How much money do you think does a society need to pay for their retirees to make a redistributive pension system sustainable?
> See, even though you’re ostensibly investing money so you can retire later, what happens in practice is that your money is being injected in parts of the economy to fuel your investment. And ultimately, part of that money will be used to pay currently retired people.
No. You have a weird notion of how capital markets work. In a capital based system an individual saves for his retirement. Money is put aside every month and invested over a long time. The individual‘s money and its returns of investment are used to pay the pension.
You can make this a public system where everybody is forced to pay and even set up a national fund. It can be subsidied a little to support the poor when retiring.
This is how to render this system fair and sustainable.
My point is, you can't eat money. You can only exchange money for food. You can't heat your home with money. You can only pay for energy. You can't drive with money… well you get the idea.
So you're saving now so you can retire later. From an accounting perspective, sure, you increase a number there now, so you can decrease it later. What you cannot do is store actual food for several decades, accumulate enough energy for several decades, or store all the material you'll need several decades from now.
What you'll eat 20-30 years from now will not be taken from the current economy, it will be taken from the economy we'll have 20-30 years in the future. If there's no food there you will not eat, and that's the end of it. Maybe you'll have your money all right, but food will just have become too expensive for you to buy enough of it. (Now I talk at the individual level, but this is obviously a scale thing: some people will eat all right, just not everyone.)
Hence my argument that even capital markets ultimately are a form of redistribution. Because at some point, either the young work so the old can enjoy retirement, or we leave the old to fend for themselves. Or something between the two ends of that spectrum.
When you go from 10 active people to 1 retiree to 2 active people to 1 retiree, you can't solve a problem by increasing contributions by a little.
And no, investing money for retirement is absolutely different from spending it on the retirement.
I've addressed this remark here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31107334
I am not sure how it works in USA, but in Poland it's similar scheme as in Germany.
Pure Ponzi-like scheme, but if you decline to participate in it, then you go to fail for avoiding it.
Anyway, there are many more people who can join the crypto trend than polish Social Security system. Growth trajectory is downward, and only printing more many can save it from collapsing.
Had 4 points upvoted and now down to 0 points, arguably Bitcoin et al enthusiasts/gamblers who instead of actually responding to my points can suppress my comment from the top of a thread by a quick click of a downvote - giving them a reward, dopamine hit at the same time; ideologues who are financially incentivized to suppress counter narrative and promote their propaganda, whereas I'm not financially motivated or incentivized to spend all the time I have to write out what I do.
Those are all political problems. Technology does not solve political problems. Politics solves political problems.
All cryptocurrency does is obfuscate the politics behind its monetary system. As flawed as our monetary system is, the politics behind it are visible and under control of a government. In my country, my government is elected, and I'm an active and informed voter.
Thus, I think the best way to solve those problems is to be an informed voter, vote, and encourage other countries to adopt democracies.
Bitcoin has solved an international transaction of money which were political problem.
That is a problem that was already solved. I've personally bought things from foreign countries (in person, and via mail order) with a credit card.
> Try to buy something from not-so-friendly urisdiction. And you will see the difference between storytelling and business.
Give an actual example, rather than a vague hand-waving hypothetical.
Some random points:
1. For mail order: paying is only part of it. Shipping is just as important. Are you hypothesizing a "not-so-friendly [j]urisdiction" where international payment difficult but international mail is easy?
2. For in person: would the person prefer my crisp American dollars or dicking around with Bitcoin addresses and waiting hours for transactions to confirm?
3... I could go on.
My general problem with cryptocurrency "use cases" are they tend to assume the utility of cryptocurrency, ignore alternative solutions, and latch on to some narrow aspect of a situation when zooming out even a little would reveal contradictions and problems.
Sure, bitcoin maximalists love to point out that if you bought it a year ago, it's up XXX%. But what if I bought near its high value? Not so good a proposition then.
Do you not notice what’s been happening to it at an accelerated pace over the last 30 years?
I’m not arguing for bitcoin either way. But I implore you to take a hard look at your definition of real value in a system with inherent inflation that forces you to speculate in order to preserve any “real value.”
Cash encompasses physical notes, bank deposits and Treasuries. On one end, we have a form optimized for transacting. On the other, for transporting value over time [1].
Bitcoin is less efficient than Visa or Mastercard. It's more volatile than a Treasury.
It always feels strange talking to people for whom the hoard of cash is the important bit. For many people it would be far more useful to stabilize house prices - which are affected by a completely different set of factors.
Even pensioners are still dependent on a young population that is earning/producing.
Today you get a loan (if you can) to start a business.
It used to be you saved to start a business. But today savings is literally penalized.
This debt based system makes you depend upon it. I wouldn't need a home loan (or at least not such a large one) if the government didn't subsidize loans and cause inflation.
You are mixing up money and land. Those are completely different topics. You need a land value tax for land. Your monthly payments are going to be limited by your salary. A higher interest rate means the bank takes a bigger cut. You're spending the same amount of money either way. A higher income would help you more.
>It used to be you saved to start a business. But today savings is literally penalized.
You are saying this, while savings are at an all time high. The money supply is growing significantly faster than inflation. If anything, we are pandering to savers way too much. What people don't seem to understand is that the rich save way way more than anyone else so increasing overall savings doesn't matter for the vast majority of people.
Also, let me tell you something. Let's say you visit your family and your parents make you food. Would it be reasonable to tell them that you want to make your own food? It makes no sense, your parents already made food. Just take it. Don't pile up more food that nobody wants.
It's the same with money. The rich have saved such an incredible amount of money, that there is literally no point in saving your own money.
When?
While we've just hit an 8% inflation spike that may not persist, the past 20 or so years have been uniquely low inflation.
Please describe how loans are "subsidized", other than various countries' first-time-buyer schemes? Is your explanation US-specific?
This ^^^
Right now, if you're willing to buy in decent quantity you can still get 90% constitutional silver at only $28.64/$1 face value.
Wow, also this!
Say inflation is 8.5%, and you're holding an ounce of gold, then that gold raises by 8.5% in kind, you are still losing value as now you have to pay taxes on the 8.5% gained even though you didn't really gain anything.
Gold is volatile in real terms [1]. If inflation is 8.5%, your gold might be worth 10% more, 100% more or 90% less.
[1] https://goldprice.org/inflation-adjusted-gold-price.html
If you had some perfect asset (not gold since the volatility distracts you) that increased in dollars exactly as much as inflation, then you would still lose value to taxation even though you only gained as much as inflation.
In the real world, yes, no perfect asset like that exists, so it's worse than that. You have to risk your earned value to keep your earned value over time.
Why doesn't this happen? Two reasons, people have loss aversion so they prefer being lied to through the money illusion. They get to blame you when the truth is that they are at fault. If they preferred taking the loss they wouldn't have to find a scapegoat. The other reason is that inflation has an uneven impact on the economy. Some gain and some lose and many people want to be winners or at least for there to be the possibility of winning, even if it is a detriment to society overall.
TIPs [1] come damn close. The interest is subject to federal tax, but you're still coming out ahead.
[1] https://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/annceresult/annceresul...
TBH I don't know too much about them, but from what I'm seeing they're something like 1-2% interest. Inflation is > 8% right now per the government's own numbers
https://www.bankrate.com/rates/interest-rates/treasury/
Am I mistaken? If so, I'd love to find a way to get guaranteed inflation beating returns.
That's a real yield. TIPs "adjust in price (principal amount) in order to maintain their real value" when inflation rises [1].
So if you buy a TIP for 100 that pays 2%, and inflation is 8%, the face value is adjusted to 108 and you get a 2.16 coupon. (Super simplified, to the point of being technically incorrect, but framework-wise fine.)
Wrong, as soon as governments needed to drop the gold standard they did it. Why wouldn't they do the same with the bitcoin standard?
What surprises me is that people think that the problem is evil/incompetent governments mismanaging the currency. Wouldn't it be more productive to think of reasons why such mismanagement is inevitable instead of just sweeping it under the rug? Greece did austerity and it didn't work. If Greece hadn't done austerity, it could have gotten a few more years of 5% growth. Austerity ended up increasing indebtedness instead of reducing it by massively reducing the GDP of Greece.
It's only rational to "mismanage" your economy away from such a financial crisis. The real question should be, why is growth required every single year? Why can't we just stand still for a year and then pick up growth again?
In my opinion it is quite simple. Savings and debts must equal in the global economy. So if the government introduces a debt brake, the private sector must reduce the amount of savings it holds. If those savings are held as cash, the government can't do anything about it. It can't just recall the bank notes. So debt can't go down. If it does anyway, then the money that is currency circulating, moving around from person to person is saved as cash until the amount of money that is actively circulating shrinks so much that daily transactions can't be made. That is what recessions are. A sudden malfunction in the medium of exchange function of money.
This is such a weird belief. Is the claim that prior to the 20th century there were no wars of conquest or colonies? No kings and countries running up ruinous debt?
To me you're saying nothing's money unless the government says it is.
In my community there's a whole ecosystem of people trading goods and services in Bitcoin, silver, and Monero.
Governments have always had the ability to dictate who is a citizen and who isn't. Someone born in Angola is not protected by or subject to the US Constitution.
> To me your saying nothing's money unless the government says it is.
Now you're learning! Granted in a democracy the people have a say in what governments do, so if you convince enough people that using bitcoin as a medium of exchange is a good idea then it may eventually be so. Good luck!
Here's what happens right now if you try to pay your taxes in Bitcoin and refuse to convert to dollars:
1. The IRS warns you and charges you back-taxes for the delay
2. If you still refuse to pay after a certain period of time, they audit you and garnish any accounts they have access to until your taxes/back taxes are paid
3. If you have no IRS-accessible accounts, men with guns show up and seize your property, including but not limited to your Bitcoin, to make up the difference.
And for extra points you may get charged with Tax Evasion, which can send you to jail. This entire process may take decades, but it happens.
Sounds like pretty crappy money to me if that's the result of trying to use it at any significant scale.
> In my community there's a whole ecosystem of people trading goods and services in Bitcoin, silver, and Monero.
Great. You and I could also arrange to barter bars of extruded aluminum for goods and services. That doesn't make extruded aluminum money, or at least not "sound money". Note however that in the US those transactions are taxed just like any other, with the amount of tax determined by their value IN DOLLARS. If you're not reporting those transactions you're theoretically subject to the previously mentioned series of events.
Now the IRS can't see literally everything, so you can get away with it to a point. But if Bitcoin/crypto eventually reached the scale where a significant number of economic transactions are transacted in it, one of two things will happen:
1. Enough voters/lobbyists will be convinced of its viability that political changes are made to accept it as currency (unlikely, given the traits of bitcoin)
2. An epic tax-evasion crackdown that will make the conviction of Al Capone look like a Cub Scout picnic.
One can dream
> 2. An epic tax-evasion crackdown that will make the conviction of Al Capone look like a Cub Scout picnic.
Monero FTW.
Your response to governments dictating who's a person:
> Governments have always had the ability to dictate who is a citizen and who isn't.
You're saying a non-citizen isn't a person? I find all your viewpoints defeatist. Maybe that or you still side with governments worldwide? If so, fine, but I don't.
> Granted in a democracy the people have a say in what governments do
Do they though? In America, from a purely signals and systems perspective, my choice comes down to red or blue (1 or 0) on a number of representatives and measures I do get to vote on--that's ignoring possibly corrupt voting.
In the myriad of complicated laws that are passed, and even wars that are fought, I don't get more say than a binary choice on abstractions (representatives)? In what way is that government ruled by the people!?
Monero makes things more difficult, not impossible. If the government decides to outlaw Monero then by definition it will only be used by outlaws, and so long as the majority of the population doesn't see trading in Monero as worth the risk, it will remain limited in scope.
> You're saying a non-citizen isn't a person? I find all your viewpoints defeatist. Maybe that or you still side with governments worldwide? If so, fine, but I don't.
All right, you define what a "person" is and how it's relevant to this discussion. For all practical matters a random person in Angola might as well not exist to the US government, unless the US government decides they're important enough to warrant attention.
I fail to see how the government not being able to deny my being a biological human is relevant here. And actually theoretically they could deny it and refuse to treat me as a person, it just wouldn't change the laws of physics. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia were notorious for telling people they couldn't be starving because "we're all equal, so if we're not all starving how can you be starving?"
I also wouldn't call my views "defeatist", I'm just presenting uncomfortable truths that I've yet to hear a coherent strategy for tackling. Which can be summed up as: "How do you plan to handle the men with guns, and the authority to use them, who don't agree with you?"
> Do they though? In America, from a purely signals and systems perspective, my choice comes down to red or blue (1 or 0) on a number of representatives and measures I do get to vote on--that's ignoring possibly corrupt voting.
> In the myriad of complicated laws that are passed, and even wars that are fought, I don't get more say than a binary choice on abstractions (representatives)? In what way is that government ruled by the people!?
I'm not saying the system is not corrupt or that it's perfectly representative. No system is either. But changes do generally follow the will of the populace in the long term on issues that affect a given population as a whole. Just look at Marijuana legalization, or the fact that we did withdraw (albeit with criminal incompetence) from Afghanistan. Now whether those changes are objectively positive or negative is another story, the whole process is full of half-measures, short-term thinking, corruption and unsatisfying messes. And citizens don't have perfect power as they would in a direct democracy (for good reason, lots of issues there). But we've yet to figure out anything better than some variety of democracy, and I don't see how crypto solves any of these problems unless you think the government has already collapsed beyond the ability to enforce laws on crypto users (it hasn't, at least in the US).
You can either try to reform the system or replace it. Either way you need a solid plan for what comes after that accounts for the known variables, and I've yet to hear a "crypto will replace the dollar" argument that does so, from even a cursory reading of history.
I appreciate your well thought out response. Thanks for the discourse.
> All right, you define what a "person"
I was only originally using this to say that the government can't tell me what money is in the same way it can't say I'm not a person.
That said, you're correct the government will likely try to destroy private currency that is out of their control.
> Either way you need a solid plan for what comes after that accounts for the known variables
I agree. This is where I spend my time in the crypto-sphere.
Here's a fun resource on agorism:
https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/black-market-activism...
Maybe it's a bit over optimistic. Either way, crypto and agorism is my current plan, and you're probably right in that I should shore up this plan.
Bitcoin was actually the answer to the government having shut down all attempts at alternative digital money prior, but for sure it's not perfect.
Cheers,
reedjosh
I actually don't know what that is supposed to mean. You know, I am tired of these word games. Democratic People's Republic of Korea sounds cool until you realize that this is the official name of North Korea which has absolutely no relationship with democracy.
In theory sound money would imply a money system that acknowledges the existence of the real world and human needs instead of deferring to theoretical models that are known to diverge from reality. Since money is capturing reality perfectly, it introduces no representational errors i.e. money that is in your bank account actually represents the capability to purchase a good or service immediately.
Gold does not do this, unless you want to exchange your gold certificates (gold standard) for gold. When people save gold by putting it under their mattress, they effectively shifted their production schedule ahead, i.e. they produced today and they shifted their consumption schedule back, i.e. they consume later. The problem with this approach is that they are not asking anyone, whether they are willing to switch roles. By that I mean, is there anyone who agrees to consume now and produce later?
If nobody made such an agreement then you will be surprised to hear that there is less produced than you planned to consume in the future, after all, you didn't tell anybody, nor did anyone approach you and explicitly gave you permission to consume in the future. There is increased demand and you get inflation. At some point people start working again and end up overproducing, there will be deflation. This mismatch in the consumption and production schedule is the cause of inflation or deflation over the short term with a gold standard. Sound money does not solve the problem. In fact, it is the root of speculation.
If Bitcoin is sound money then the world doesn't need sound money. It needs money that isn't divorced from reality. It needs money that rewards planning ahead. It needs money that signals both abundance and scarcity of capital. It also needs to account for capital depreciation of idle capital and the loss of time of the unemployed.
I don't think this is true, bluntly.
Technology does not automatically solve political problems. But technology does sometimes render bad political actions unviable.
I would argue that a large part of the widespead acceptance of homosexuality in Western society was due to the deconstruction of singular media gatekeepers by the move of discourse from newspapers to the internet.
That is absolutely technology solving a political problem.
And yet folk from my (mostly homophobic) part of the third world argue the opposite: that homosexuality is widely accepted in the west because it was promoted by media and entertainment gatekeepers. I disagree with them (and with you) - I think sexual liberation was an idea whose time had come; and the progress can be plotted to the 60s and beyond (maybe even as far back as WWII, when women were economically empowered); preceding even ARPANET.
Put another way, technology allows groups to organize who otherwise wouldn't have been able to. In Bitcoin's case, it's largely libertarians.
That is most definitely a political question.
I think the article has a strange reasoning about crypto trying to "save the world".
For me it's pretty clear: individuals can now store and transfer value on the internet using a consensus algorithm. Plenty of you claim that it's enough to have a democracy that controls a central bank. That way you also have some kind of consensus on your value storing and trading. Problem is that this democracy/central bank is not stable in every country. So crypto provides real "internet money", with all benefits and drawbacks.
Whether that improves or worsens society, is purely a political question. But it's clear that cryptocurrencies try to live outside of governmental control, which is of course where most of the benefit comes from.
Except that, from a practical perspective, if you live in a country without a stable "democracy/central bank," using fiat from a stable country (e.g. dollars or euros) is a better solution than cryptocurrency in pretty much all cases. AFAIK, cryptocurrency isn't in proper circulation anywhere, so you're likely going to have to do the same kind of forex transactions to get it, plus you're going to need a computer and internet to use it. Also stable-country fiat also doesn't come with weird ideological monetary policy ideas baked in (e.g. "money should be deflationary!").
The idea that money should be stable with mild inflation seems to be the consensus view of the people (in multiple countries!) who actually have responsibility for the economy as a whole, and the economies that have stumbled into deflation don't seem very healthy.
Deflationary money seems to mainly appeal to people who are most concerned about jealously guarding the value of their little private hoard. Bitcoin was likely designed by someone like that who happened to be a talented programmer.
Inflation ruins the store of value function of money, but a little inflation isn't a bad tradeoff if the medium of exchange function of money keeps working.
The reason for this bias is that our society defines itself through a high degree of the division of labor. If money stops flowing, the division of labor stops and without the division of labor we are going straight back to the stone age (hyperbole). This is why economic recessions and depressions are feared more than economic booms.
So how do you get your money out of the country when you are not allowed to get your money out of the country? Strap dollar bills on your chest, or just use crypto?
For that scenario, the better question is: how are you supposed to get cryptocurrency if you're not allowed to get your money out of the country?
But that's not the scenario I was addressing, what I was addressing the circumstances that lead to the very real practice called "dollarization":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_use_of_the_U.S._...
> The U.S. dollar is also the official currency in several countries and the de facto currency in many others, with Federal Reserve Notes (and, in a few cases, U.S. coins) used in circulation.
A list is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_substitution#US_dolla...
I believe it’s naïve to expect that it will remain outside of government control. That it won’t get slammed with the same laws and regulations applied to fiat currencies.
Governments live on money. As alternatives gain traction, the governments take notice and start regulating. There’s a fair bit of historical precedence around this.
Not sure what about crypto is outside government influence.
Crypto is regularly taxed, seized and landing people in jail. Countries that can't manage that wouldn't find an offshore bank account, as evidenced by their entire population of elites having one. "Government can't touch my crypto" is a founding myth.
Make crypto-crypto transfers: no problem.
Of course when government cracks it down, it will be hard to turn into fiat or buy/sell legal stuff.
But fundamentally, I believe we agree.
It's counterintuitive to think that a financial instrument that increases transparency would make people more difficult to govern, and it would - unless the government is very corrupt.
As a species, we have developed government control because in general, large-scale anarchy doesn't work well.
Not really. Society has long since been a push and pull between governmental control and anarchy of disobedience rendering some control irrelevant or impractical. And we are much better off for that - governments worst authoritarian instincts are frequently tempered by the general public simply ignoring their pronouncements.
In the EU - easy - get rid of PSD2 which requires banks to add OTP before actions, account number and password are not good enough anymore. Information and transaction providers now exist because of that but they require an application and a certificate that costs money.
If in the EU we get rid of those and go back to old "home banking computer interface" everyone can access their own account in an automated way.
Instead we now have to pay an external service which pays the state for certs each year to be able to automate our bank accounts.
This is essentially legal theft or a protection racket.
Image you have to pay a 3rd party for every sale you made. That is PSD2 in a nutshell.
Also easy - provide free bank accounts. Banks make enough money as is and are bailed out with citizens cash if they crash.
All crypto(currency) does is contribute to the pollution of the planet and provide no real value (progress). I'm not talking about all the scams that are going on in terms of value and I'm aware people got filthy rich by gaming the market, which isn't a market to be honest. It's a manipulative scheme, unregulated and I repeat myself, bad for the environment.
Ms. White's point, here, is that there shouldn't be so much toxicity directed at individuals taken in by the crypto hype in the desperate hope of getting ahead. That level of discourse should be directed at the influence peddlers and grifters who are drawing folks in in the first place.
The paragraph you quoted is intended to help set the stage for why folks who don't know any better might look at crypto as the answer to their financial fears and anxieties. Later she points out that "I don’t think they are a feasible solution, and in fact I think they will worsen many of the problems they ostensibly aim to solve, but they are certainly being sold as the solution, and a solution that people desperately need."
There are some nice ideas there, but in practice everyone seems out to "get theirs".
I dabble in cryptocurrencies, but I can still see the inevitable inequality inherent in the rise to dominance of any one or small group of them.
I do have to say, however, that Vitalik Buterin says all the right things to appear as someone that does want to help the world be better. Separately to his creation which, if it dominated, would also not be a harbinger of equality for all.
More to the point, how can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to a banking license?
People should abandon the shared hallucination of believing money can have a physical manifestation. Money represents relationships between people. You can't own relationships without them becoming abusive.
People who maintain abusive relationships against the will of other people should be stopped and punished.
The way most cryptocurrencies are designed as if the people involved truly believe they can own someone else's time indefinitely.
I'm not suggesting crypto is some panacea, but it does eliminate this very important problem for people on the bottom of the economic ladder.
Some people can pay for groceries with crypto, for example in Slovenia there is a supermarket chain that accepts Bitcoin Cash (BCH) [0]. map.bitcoin.com [1] displays local businesses that accept crypto.
Then there is acceptbitcoin.cash [2] which lists online stores and services that accept Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin and/or other cryptocurrencies.
That is one of the main things I like about Bitcoin Cash: it focuses on user adoption as money and not as a store or value or speculation investment. Avoiding the exchange to fiat money is essential for P2P electronic cash like Bitcoin was meant to be.
I don't know if adoption will increase, nor do I have a strong opinion on whether it should. But it does solve the specific, narrow problem of lack of basic banking for the poor.
This fantasy of banking the unbanked has remained a fantasy. In fact it is so impractical that barely anyone is working on it.
Meanwhile technologies like UPI have actually transformed people's lives and actually made banking accessible to millions.
Why focus on a dead end technology like crypto when we already have better options?
Why focus on dead end legacy currency controlled by corrupt governments when you can adopt more modern modes of transacting?
> How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services?
Is a government mandate away. If you want it, got to the streets or call your representatives. In most countries, a simply executive decree is enough to get it.
There's nothing there about equity. It's a completely different problem.
We've become rather fixated on the notion of systems that can somehow produce good outcomes no matter how vicious its members are. The problem here is that any political and social order is only as good as its members and governing bodies. There isn't some disembodied "system, out there" that can strap us all into externally imposed restraints and put us all in cages to constrain our bad actions. The quality of a society is absolutely dependent on its members respecting the common good which includes respecting good laws. (That's another point. Leaders are not free to impose any old law and claim it is legitimate. Laws can only determine the general good as proscribed by natural law, i.e., human nature.) Indeed, I wouldn't want to live in a society of savages in which a tyrant exercises such control. This is precisely the lesson to be learned from Hobbes' Leviathan: the more immoral a society becomes, the most governments clamp down to try to maintain order and the viability of that society.
That doesn't mean we can't discuss better or worse political orders. Indeed, political orders are determined by law and law by objective moral principle.
And a word on equality. So far, crypto seems to be a place for wild speculation and the amassing of (real or imagined) wealth by a relatively small number. That's probably a large part of the appeal, like the lottery. But more to the point: equality is not a virtue. Justice is. But who said we are all due the same? We're not. No two people are economically equally valuable (nor is economic value all there is). The problem is poverty, or the excess influence of money in politics and culture, or usury and left, or unjust pay, but not inequality. How is crypto a solution to these social problems, and in ways that surpass traditional currencies?
If people are genuine about solving the world's poverty and inequality problems, recognizing that cryptocurrencies are unlikely to help with those problems is a valuable first step.
Avoiding that is the original and prime goal of crypto currency.
Like anything new get rich quick schemes exist, but that's not Bitcoin and it's not Monero.
If so, excuse my lack of respect for your goals, but they strike me as dishonest/villainy.
If not, well then I just have no idea what you were trying to say but apologise for misinterpreting.
But cryptocurrency doesn't address any real problems. The claims that it does are mostly BS and marketing.
The problems cryptocurrency solves are ones that are created by holding to peculiar ideologies and/or speculating about problems that haven't happened and may never happen.
The one thing cryptocurrency has succeeded at is being something for financial speculation, which has given a lot of people strong incentive to hype it relentlessly.
> “In a situation like this, where the national bank is not fully operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately,”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/technology/bitcoin-ukrain...
Is this BS and marketing?
>> “In a situation like this, where the national bank is not fully operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately,”
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/technology/bitcoin-ukrain...
> Is this BS and marketing?
Here are the next two paragraphs after your quote:
> But Mr. Bornyakov [Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation] seemed wary of overstating crypto’s importance to the Ukrainian cause.
> “I don’t think crypto is playing a major part,” Mr. Bornyakov said. “But its role is essential in this conflict in terms of helping our army.”
Ukraine needs every bit of support they can get, and they won't turn away tens of millions in donations from cryptobros, but it's a minor part of their effort. You can also easily donate USD or do a bank transfer to send them money:
https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/natsionalniy-bank-vidkriv-sp...
And they've gotten far more donations that way:
https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/nbu-pererahuvav-na-potrebi-v...
> But cryptocurrency doesn't address any real problems.
Nobody was comparing the market share of different forms of currency or anything like that. We can discuss the viable rate of market share growth for new forms of currency some other time.
This is a high ranking government official saying that bitcoin is helping solve a real problem. Can you at least acknowledge that maybe he's telling the truth? Or when the next bitcoin thread rolls around will you just repeat the same tired old complaint about no use cases?
...that aren't better addressed by other, existing technologies. There might be some weird corner cases where it makes sense, but that's not anywhere close to the "future of money" hype.
> This is a high ranking government official saying that bitcoin is helping solve a real problem. Can you at least acknowledge that maybe he's telling the truth? Or when the next bitcoin thread rolls around will you just repeat the same tired old complaint about no use cases?
Sure he's telling the truth. I'm not saying cryptocurrency can't be used to solve problems, what I'm saying it's not anything special as a solution and is often a pretty bad one.
If I add some horse-drawn carriages to my fleet of trucks, because I'm so desperate to haul the absolute largest quantity of something that I can that I'll do anything, that doesn't mean horses are the future of transport or are even a good transportation solution in the modern world.
A lot of that money has been withdrawn via an exchange registered in an offshore. My bet is that someone who set it up has profited nicely during the war.
Has it actually helped Ukraine? Who knows.
For one thing, this advantage over the national bank, is during a WAR. Assuming the war disrupts the national bank, yet over the long term will not also disrupt all the infrastructure that bitcoin needs (cheap high speed computing, available networking, reliable electricity, etc) strains credibility.
> Russia's invasion has caused untold damage to lives, buildings, and roads. It also threatened to destroy Ukraine's banking system.
> But a month into the war, Ukrainians in most of the country can still put their money in savings accounts, pay their telephone bills, and withdraw cash easily.
> Today, we speak to the CEO of Ukraine's second-largest bank to learn how the country's banks are continuing essential business in the wake of devastation on the homefront.
There are costs and benefits to every action. If former are bigger than latter, we should be dismissed the action.
that said, given the ecological and economic costs of crypto and its failure to produce anything of value so far. sitting on your ass is more a service to society than getting involved in it is.
Knowing what will not work is important. And just because there is no proposed alternative does not mean we should keep doing the thing we know won't work. Especially when the thing we know won't work might even exacerbate the problem it is trying to solve. Sometimes, nothing is the right thing to do.
Blockchains do create fundamental value, not just speculative value. Tech people often dismiss this claim and do not want to analyse further. To demostrate this, I wrote a post where I am comparing stock and cryptocurrency trading venues and showing that a decentralised system is the most cost efficient choice at least with some data points and why it is so:
https://tradingstrategy.ai/blog/most-efficient-market-is-on-...
> Maybe the shadiest form of these deals comes from the public equity markets from a no-fees online broker Robin Hood and its Payment For Order Flow (PFOF) because of the conflict of interest of a broker making more profit when it is "saving in customer transaction fees." > > In decentralised markets, such shenanigans do not exist.
MEV is an extremely well-known, well-studied empirical phenomenon that happens today and does not have a known solution, and it's exactly analogous to front-running. It's especially funny that you put out this blog post almost exactly on the 3rd anniversary of the publication of the Flash Boys 2.0 paper.
What I want to know is, are you just ignorant of MEV-related problems, are you trying to mislead your readers, or do you have some sincerely-held belief that MEV front-running is somehow morally okay in a way that PFOF isn't?
I am well aware of MEV issues, as I have been developing for Ethereum for the last 6 years or so. They hurt me as a user as well. However, due to the already long post, I decided not to include them in this post and hope to write a comparison in the future. As you said, the comparison could be really interesting.
I believe MEV hurts the ecosystem overall. It is wrong, but I know it can be technically solved, as opposite to solved with regulation, on multiple levels. Some of the current solutions include e.g.
- Avalanche commit and reveal subnet
- Short-term auctions like Cowswap
Basically, everything where you can wait for a better trade execution effectively counters some of HFT issues, both in traditional and crypto world. You can always decide which price you are willing accept and then just wait for it.
Unfortunately Ethereum 1.0 generation AMMs and swaps are not built this in mind, because they come from the era when MEV was not an issue yet. But as I said, this is being addressed in the next generation of the technology. Also unlike on stock markets, as a user you have more transparency on the execution so you can verify that you did not get screwed over (unlike with Robin Hood).
I agree, Uniswap has its issues with scams. Even with added compliance and listing policy, it is highly likely to be most cost efficient. For example what we can do is that we focus only known good trading pairs like Bitcoin and Ethereum that are not scams. These are not scams and they still trade more efficiently on Uniswap.
There are efficiencies you do not see in traditional financial systems like - Open source - Open data - Open ledger
I think the most relevant talking point is about the open source. We know Linux beat UNIXes on the server market. We know Android beat Microsoft Windows Phone.
More about this in-depth in the blog post, of course.
In my humble opinion you were not, so I hope you don't mind me sharing some background context.
the range of possible exploits on centralized equities and futures exchanges is very limited. HFT works, and works well, to drive down costs for retail and institutional traders.
there is no happy path in defi which results in narrower spreads, and less risk of block re-orgs, or other exploits which either drive up costs or massively undermine the entire ecosystem.
once again, trust is a lower energy state which pays for itself. this trustless, decentralized mania only serves a tiny subset of early entrants, arbitrageurs, and VCs. it does not result in a better market system by any way of measuring that I can see.
> the fact that most of the alpha in defi is in arbitrage tells the whole story.
What measurements do you use to define cost-effective? I am happy to do an apple-to-apples comparison if you tell what would you like to see in comparison. Also if there is a post/study that shows that there is only arbitrate in DeFi I am happy to read it and try to understand if I am wrong. While this might have been a situation in the past, I am seeing it changing over the last year and half.
In my post, towards the end, I pointed out some facts that even with HFT and industry consolidation, traditional finance has not always worked in the favour of a consumer.
"How can we create a more equitable financial system, where everyone has access to banking services? How can we reduce the power that a small few currently hold over the web? How can we improve data privacy and ensure that people have control over their personal information? How can we create reasonable privacy in the financial system? How can we make information more available to everyone? How can we fix a society where so many people are in untenable financial situations? How can we reduce the enormous wealth disparity in today’s society—both in the existing distribution of wealth but also in access to new opportunities to earn it? How can we enable creatives to make a fair living from their art? How can we address inequities on a global scale? How can we create self-governing communities around shared interests or goals?"
Cryptocurrencies as a tech are not the answer for any of those questions, they could be a tool to support some of those things but as of now are not the most efficient way to improve those. Maybe the "movement" / hype behind cryptos could help but you have to an absolute uncynical person to think that given the types that are most loudely hyping it up, society won't be worse off in the end.