Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.
Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.
People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.
Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.
Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.
Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions—things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis—while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.
Because it’s not as robust or secure as it’s claimed to be, because it concentrates power to those with more money again, etc.
I see. Could you elaborate on that at all? What are the claims vs. the reality? How is power concentrated to those with more money? Genuinely interested.
All the decentralized concensus algorithms rely on some kind of way to “score” different branches of history versus others, Bitcoin uses an approximation of spent CPU cycles via proof of work while proof of stake uses money holdings over time used to vouch for a branch.
The problem is proof of stake is not rooted in something outside the chain itself, nothing is truly irrevocably spent so it’s possible to vouch for multiple branches with the same stake (“nothing at stake”). Most nodes (wallet owners) will also not be online all the time so they try to use delegation (risky because it centralizes power), and to coordinate block creation (because it doesn’t have an algorithmic timing source) all mining nodes are connected in a pool and track each other’s “liveness” (online status and connectivity) and pass around the right to create the next block (which is vulnerable to being gamed, your chance is proportional to how much money you have in the system which controls how many nodes you can enter). If you gain enough of a majority of online nodes at any point in time ever then you can permanently assign yourself as the next person to create a block and control all future blocks to doublespend or block transactions.
And if you can steal enough private keys including old long emptied wallets then you can create a new parallel history indistinguishable from the real current one to any new nodes because there’s truly nothing making the two chains distinguishable if you don’t know any existing nodes (which would require trust in a third party).
Thanks. That’s interesting. How many nodes would be required to gain control? How much would that cost? And why would anyone want to do that?
I imagine once someone managed to secure control it wouldn’t go unnoticed by the users. It would probably trigger a mass exodus from whatever chain it happened to occur on, effectively tanking the token price. The controller would have spent a considerable amount of funds only to be left with a dead chain and worthless tokens.
Doesn’t really seem worth it unless I’m missing something.
It’s a high percentage of the pool of known live nodes. It wouldn’t necessarily be expensive if you can steal keys by hacking as well as DDoSing a handful other nodes which would be voting against you to artificially boost your fraction of voting power in chain selection.
It might be noticed eventually, but it would take hours to weeks just to confirm it really happened and exodus would take weeks to months. You could make many small trades to increase the volume of coins through your wallet, then reverse all outgoing transactions from your wallet, then make a big payment, get something valuable, reverse the payment and keep what you bought, and repeat until it simply stops working.
Oh, I don’t think it would take that long to notice. There are many people who make it their business to keep up with what’s happening on chain. I’d wager that before the perpetrators even managed to gain control alarm bells would be going off.
Maybe a full exodus might take weeks or months but enough to tank the token price could happen in minutes.
I don’t believe that the scenario that you’re imagining would be worthwhile enough for anyone to want to attempt it even if it is plausible.
Even if there are people who know something is wrong in minutes there are simply not going to be a large enough fraction of the holders who can sell that fast.
And even if there were, you could just make money on shorting the cryptocurrency instead
Really? Where can you short crypto?
Multiple cryptocurrency markets offers it