I’m going to keep this short but I just fell down the rabbithole of crypto again and maybe it isn’t as bad as I thought. Many of their ideas are very similar to the fediverse’s. The idea of decentralized finance using a stablecoin sounds awesome to me. (though i’d much prefer to live in a world where money isn’t needed) Maybe the technology is actually good but the techbros and scammers ruin it with their false promises and complicated words. Hopefully, in a few years after the rest of those scammers have moved on to scamming with AI this tech could be truly used for meaningful purposes.
The actual idea of crypto is reaaallly cool: a decentralized trust system that enables incredibly difficult to fake transactions and records without the need for a trusted third party.
Unfortunately a lot of the implementations relied on ‘capital’ as the proof of trust - GPU work (money) and number of controlled instances (money) are two big ones. Which really all led them down the path of ____coin which is fundamentally incompatible with the ideal of ‘no third party can govern trust’ because suddenly whichever party that has all the proof of trust is now the third party that can govern trust and approve transactions. Someone can own a ___coin.
Crypto could have been a decentralised system that can keep public records, documents, ideas, etc. - it can guarantee authorship and date if a user is willing to submit identity information. Lots of actually useful functions!
There are a lot of documents that would be good to “falsify” though - I know I’d like to not have my birth name all over “unfalsifiable” document histories.