>>Good post, I appreciate your points. However, don't you find value in the work being done to create a network that can be trusted by transacting strangers and theoretically the cost to use said network (electricity, depreciating hardware, etc.) will become a commodity? Meaning, the protocols being built will result in the network (hopefully) having no ability to be captured by centralized players.
Well, sure - but I think the whole idea of treating cryptography as a form of a 'trust chain' as silly - and especially silly when you're burning resources to build that 'trust'.
Mathematics in this case are being used as a stand-in for an objective basis for trust. And I've worked in several jobs where cryptography was used to secure secrets worth lots of money before - I know where this logic comes from.
But that's not trust. What they're building is not trust - it's a backwards placeholder for trust, built on top of a market system that manufactures fake trust as a matter of course.
None of this is new - the founders of the US at least had to deal with these same issues at the start of this nation at least - these debates and the tools of these arguments are not new at all.
Cryptocurrency is essentially an extension of the idea of a gold standard - in this case, using enough electricity to be worth sort of the value of gold, to be the basis of trust.
But that's a band-aid fix to pretend like you're building real shared trust - a weird kind of trust that never demands trustworthy actions on the part of those participating.
No - it's trusting a made-up inherent value in place of that.
It's expecting that since something is rare, or requires noteworthy sacrifice, or is a bit more popular than a large set of other options - that is is trustworthy.
Which is exactly why I call it fake trust, or a placeholder for trust.
Doge is properly mocking more than a bit of that.
But yeah - it's still wasting a ton of electricity as part of that - and I certainly don't invest in it - but it's a worthwhile example of the set it is mocking - of why they all are absurd.
The larger thing worth mocking is how much shared effort we as a culture put into proposing definitions of value, then going in endless circles sacrificing things to better fit into those definitions, before some crash happens and we redefine value. There's tons of other ideals we all live for - but we're so often willing to see people starve amidst the wealthy for the sake of the ideals of currency and value.
It's kind of a repeating problem - we do need trade systems, and there is real purpose behind such value - but not at the exclusion of so many other crucially important things, like people's lives, and our own shared environment and welfare.
If we're missing anything about the classic debates of the founders of the US now - it's the side arguing for the inherent value of man above monetary value.
Ryan Fenton