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Be kind to your elders
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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To be fair, us elders had grifts and money laundering too, so crypto is nothing functionally new.
No hate, but this is exactly proving the point of the meme. There's so many new concepts and paradigms, each so complex and constantly evolving, that we need to rely on familiar comparisons that strip away the true identities of the subject. And I think this is true for pretty much every everyone in this information (bombardment) age, myself included.
People tend to forget that cryptocurrencies are based on cryptography, and were founded on the dream of building a decentralized system, built by the people, free from "big player" censorship and influence, in the wake of the 2008 crisis. If you are on the Fediverse, I guess you share that dream. But then the finance "bros" started coming in and badabing badabang now it's another asset you trade through your bank like stocks or gold. Then came the NFTs and yes, somehow "crypto" evolved into being the prime speculation and scamming vector.
And the same goes on for every news topic. "Trump!" "Gaza!" "AI!" "Climate!". Our brains try to reduce these mind-melting concepts hitting us all the time to simplified good/bad or us/them categorizations. And we're left utterly unable to actually tackle and act upon anything at all.
No, no one is forgetting they're built on cryptography. It just doesn't matter. The underlying technology of a thing doesn't have much bearing on the properties of the thing as far as practical usage goes.
You don't care what your car is made of as long as it has good fuel efficiency and crash rating. Steel ceramic and aluminum are just tools to that end.
Research into cryptocurrency started long before 2008. Academics and odd crypto enthusiasts have been working on it since the 80s.
The intent from the beginning has been a mix of curiosity, paranoia, and buying drugs.
Bitcoin was hardly a "for the people" project. It was initially used almost entirely for black market purchases, largely via silk road. "The people" did not give a fuck about perfect anonymous digital cash. It solved a problem that most people didn't and still don't have.
The adoption order was: Math nerds > drug lords > finance > small investors. It's still not actually adopted as currency by people.
When you create a thing for the purpose of making monetary transactions untraceable, and your first major users are all using it to hide where their money came from from the government, it's really fair to say that you created a money laundering tool.
Bitcoin wasn't taken over by finance people, they're the reason it didn't taper out like previous cryptocurrencies, which either fizzled or were shutdown for being nuggets of financial crime.
Sorry, but then by that argument cryptography itself is bad because "pedos use it"? Criminals will always use privacy-preserving technology/techniques/strategies. Should we renounce our right to have secure communication, or a decentralized currency because of that? Hasn't this argument been done to death already?
Excuse me, what? Of course it does matter if the backup for all your life's photos is in an hard disk in your living room, or it's on Google's server. Of course it matters if the platform we're talking on is Lemmy, and not Reddit. It does make a difference if the car you're driving is gas or electric, where it was made, if it shows you ads or not. What are you going on about? It makes all the difference in the world, but that's on "the backend" and no one remembers that it does matter
You missed the point and heard one that wasn't being made.
No one said cryptography was bad, or that cryptocurrencies were bad because they were used for drugs and criminals.
I said that the cryptographic underpinnings of things like Bitcoin are irrelevant, and that what matters is the behavior of the system. It's history as a vessel for laundering drug money speaks to it being a tool for money laundering, as opposed to some populist tool for freedom taken over by fintech bros. The fintech bros where there before any populist usage even started to take root.
The underlying technology of the thing doesn't matter. Pointing out the properties of things you care about doesn't contradict that. You care about privacy, reliability, security and all that good stuff. You care that your car is electric because it has lower emissions and lower environmental impact than gas, not just "because it's electric".
The means are not the ends.
You went on a rant about how there's too much in the world that confuses people, but I think it might be you who's a bit confused.
It's really not proving much of anything. These new "concepts" and "paradigms" are nothing more than buzzwords thrown onto old concepts. Every scam is a scam that's been done before even if there's a new layer of glittery wrapping paper over it. Who're you trying to convince more, the potential suckers or yourself?
The internet is a buzzword thrown onto old concepts? Instantaneous transfer of large amounts of data? Democratization and seamless diffusion of anything, from memes to "money"? "no but crypto is indeed a scam" is completely missing my point, and hitting the meme again
Your point is adding fancy words to make something sound smarter, likely screwing someone along the way, if the track record of the use of "paradigms" is any indication. It's okay to let at least some things stay simple. If someone broke into my home, I wouldn't call the cops and report a "spry possession-reappropriating malcontent", I'd report a thief. Same with crypto, I wouldn't report a "financial savant", I'd report a money launderer. You see, sometimes adding fancy, unneeded words to something does nothing but make you sound like a pretentious tool.
"Paradigm" is a word I chose to convey a specific meaning, which is "the way you approach/think about something". It might be more common in my language, I'm not trying to make either crypto or me sound smarter. I'm for precision of language, if you're more into newspeak you do you. You also seem to think I'm trying to convince you that "crypto is good", which is not the case. You have either misunderstood my comment, or are just trying to pick a bone. Either way, that's not very debatable for a racoon :)
My point is that people fall into fallacies by simplifying things too much, and only looking at the surface. See how your doubling down on "crypto actually bad" is beside it? Granted, I really should've picked a different case in point than cryptocurrencies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I keep saying that humanity's toys do evolve spectacularly while humans are still working on the same basic impulses they've been dealing with for millennia.
Trump is a petty conman who does everything in his power to consolidate as much power in himself as he possibly can so that he can funnel as much money to himself and his gang as he can. That's not new. The environment he's doing in may be more complex, or differently set up than in previous iterations, but the core is depressingly mundane.
Gaza is just people hating people and other people supporting different sides while all sides give each other more reasons to hate each other perpetually, some more war-crimey, some less so. Tragic,, quagmired to hell and back, but not groundbreaking in and of itself.
As for AI, the framework is the usual capitalists trying to convince everybody that their new best revolutionary thing is a word sorting machine that can sort very, very many words now very fast. Trying to cash in on the hype is the eternal constant, the occasion this time is a very sophisticated chatbot/image generator based on all the materials the inventors could get away with stealing.
And climate stuff is just this generation of capitalists stripping the planet for parts while they can get away with it. The scale is bigger, but vulture capitalism is also not even remotely new.
Just like the principle of singular attributability of data via the blockchain is a fancy way of assigning stuff to one recipient. We've had approaches to this before. This time the blockchain's ledger system is the big new anchor for the human element, which will invariably at first be either grifters or people who wanna bash in other people's heads with it.