cryptocurrency, but more generally
Now that the cryptocurrency hype has largely died down, maybe this will finally be the right time to say this:
The lesson from cryptocurrency ruining everything it touched, wasn't just "cryptocurrency is bad". The other lesson is that making something *about* money, of *any* kind, is the fastest way to stamp out any kind of healthy community dynamics and turn it into a race-to-the-bottom.
If you start your project by focusing on "monetization" as the goal, it will never become an enjoyable place for people to be. You cannot "monetize" your way out of a capitalist society. That people need to pay the bills, doesn't change this.
re: cryptocurrency, but more generally
@joepie91 Although I do understand the anti-cryptocurrency impulse, it does frustrate me to see such untempered negative sentiment.
It's not possible to monetise your way out of capitalist society. The speculative market that emerged around cryptocurrency is destructive. The environmental cost of proof-of-work coins like Bitcoin especially is high.
But simultaneously, it does have utility as a facilitator for prefigurative politics.
As a personal anecdote, I'm trans. I live in the United Kingdom. State healthcare waiting times are often measured in decades if they resolve at all. Private healthcare is priced to exploit trans people, with providers adding hundreds or thousands of pounds extra per year for their services.
So I made the decision to DIY hormones, as many of us here have. And the most cost effective way to do that by far is to buy compounded hormones from members of the community.
Selling prescription medication without a license or to those without a prescription is illegal, and the police exist across borders.
But the relative anonymity of cryptocurrency facilitates this with a relative safety and convenience for the sellers that few alternatives can match. If not for cryptocurrency, I don't think that medical transition without so many obstacles would be nearly as accessible.
And to sidestep and enable the sidestepping of gatekeeping for medical transition is a revolutionary act allowing us as an oppressed group to more effectively self-actualise and assert ourselves. To make material changes which benefit us.
It'd be nice for communities to just be able to offer each other these things without expectation of payment - but we do live in capitalism, unfortunately, at least for now - and having tools to confer value transfer which are less easily monitored by the State can be a useful thing.
re: cryptocurrency, but more generally
@AFriendlyBeagle I am well aware of all of this - and I have been around usecases like this (often activism-related) for a long time.
The thing that often gets missed, however, is what we had *before* Bitcoin. Because before Bitcoin, there was already an industry of anonymous/"risky" payments that *didn't* use cryptocurrency. Often it was more accessible to people than cryptocurrency is today.
Some examples included UKash, PaySafeCard, Liberty Reserve, and so on. These were absolutely not without their problems, and they were absolutely run by sketchy people, but they fulfilled the exact same requirements as Bitcoin, just without the destruction of climate and communities.
But the hype around Bitcoin ate basically all of them, and now you need to deal with privacy-invasive cryptocurrency exchanges instead of just buying a giftcard in a local shop, like you used to be able to.
Anonymous payments did not start with cryptocurrency, and I would argue that the diversity of them was actually another victim of the cryptocurrency hype.
re: cryptocurrency, but more generally
@AFriendlyBeagle (Also, none of this is *really* relevant to the point I was making originally, anyway.)