Did you actually read this? I don’t think you did. Either that or you’re being extremely dishonest right now.

Doctorow is briefly mentioned in passing in this blog post. His only involvement was a single tweet that in absolutely no way mentioned or even implied it was about Wu. Despite that she decided to make it about her anyway, and declared that Cory was leading some kind of witch hunt against her based on no evidence other than her own decision that she automatically counted as a “garbage person” in his mind. We have zero evidence that this was actually Cory’s intent, just her assertion that it must have been his meaning.

To take that and turn it into “he was involved in the media harassment and witch hunting of a famous Chinese tech girl Naomi Wu” isa disgustingly disingenuous twisting of the available facts.

It’s not impossible that Cory shares some blame in the events described - no one is perfect, every hero is some kind of bastard, yada yada - but the evidence you’ve offered doesn’t come remotely close to backing up the claims you’re making, and it’s dangerously irresponsible to share such a claim on such a flimsy basis.

All money is fiat. Nothing has inherent value.

Actually I’m going to disagree on that one. Fundamental value is actually an important concept when talking about money, and understanding why both backed and fiat currencies do actually have fundamental value is key to understanding why crypto doesn’t, and why that matters.

See, the key here is that any currency can possess fundamental value if there is something that only that currency can buy. Fairground tickets can actually have a form of meaningful value, because they’re the only thing the fairground will accept in return for that teddy bear you really want. Within the realms of the fairground, those tickets are a currency, just one with no exchange rate, and a very very limited definition of fundamental value. This is how Bitcoin briefly attained fundamental value; for a while it was the only good way to get drugs and hitmen.

More importantly, this is why every fiat currency (to my knowledge) still has some form of fundamental value; there is one particular service that you can only pay for with US dollars in the US, Canadian dollars in Canada, pound sterling in the UK, and so on… Taxes.

Every country wants you to pay their taxes in their issued currency. Which means there will always be some value to owning that currency, because even if you don’t need it, it’s basically guaranteed that someone else will. It doesn’t matter how many people suddenly decide that the US dollar is just a meaningless number on a meaningless piece of paper, because once every year a few hundred million people still have to come up with a whole bunch of those pieces of paper.

No, but printing things that trade for them is.

This is, in fact, shockingly common in the crypto space.

Step 1: Create a new ERC-20 token. Call it Dickcoin or whatever.

Step 2: Sell a hundred of them to yourself (using different wallets) a few times to establish a trade price.

Step 3: Trade your Dickcoins for ETH or BTC at the newly established rate (if need be, you might have to trade for some more well established alt-coins first, then trade those up to the big boy coins). Alternatively, just use the billions of dollars worth of coins you note own as collateral to take out loans in other cryptos, then default on the loan and let the worthless collateral get seized. Thanks to DAOs running as automated banks powered by smart contracts this is hilariously easy to do because the tiny piece of code will automatically approve the loan at instant speed without ever checking with a human.

None of this is hypothetical. It’s been done an absolutely ridiculous number of times.

They’re not, and I didn’t say they were, so I’m really not sure where you even think you’re going with that.

In order to have your system be distributed in a way that does not require a central authority, there has to be a way of determining which copy of the chain is the authoritative copy. In the context of public-ledger blockchain, that method relies on having a token as an incentive structure. If we’re going to start discussing hypothetical new approaches to distributed blockchain that aren’t a public-ledger blockchain system as laid out in Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper then we’re really starting to veer out of the context of this discussion thread.

The part where you said “people interpreting regulations and codes” is really, really important, and I don’t think you quite understand why. This is where the advocates of DAOs and smart contracts constantly trip up; they think that the interpretation of law is a failure, and not a feature.

This is exactly why we don’t allow police officers to judge guilt and assign sentences. It’s why we have an adversarial court system; because no law can ever perfectly encapsulate all of its own implications. Laws will, inevitably, need to be interpreted at some point in time, because sooner or later you will encounter a scenario that could not possibly have been envisioned when the law was written.

This is why you cannot programmatically enforce regulations and contracts. There must be room for interpretation for any community or society to be able to act in a manner that is truly equitable and just, because - inevitably - most often the least imagined scenarios will involve the most marginalized members of that community.

The problem, basically, is that everything you can do with a DAO can be done just as easily without one. Working out the legal particulars of contracts is still a job for lawyers, for example. That job doesn’t get better, easier or cheaper because you now have to pay a lawyer and a programmer. It’s all just added complexity for the sake of added complexity.

while BlackRock has pushed the SEC to allow for Spot ETFs

This is the part you’re missing; institutional investors like Blackrock are only willing to be involved in the crypto space because stablecoins exist. Moving real dollars into and out of crypto is a messy and unpleasant business that big firms want as little to do with as possible. Stablecoins give them a way of buffering those transactions without exposing themselves to additional risk. If you take away stablecoins, you no longer have stuff like Blackrock pushing for bitcoin ETFs.

Proof of stake also rewards the biggest holders of the currency with the biggest payouts. It’s an inherently regressive system designed to give more to the haves at the expense of the have nots.

It’s not a question of “turning your attention.” If I say “murder is bad” that doesn’t imply that I think rape is therefore good.

Yes, AI is also a huge producer of ewaste, as well as using power and clean water for no real purpose other than enriching investors and destroying job security. It’s also notable that most of the firms that were heavily shilling crypto and public blockchain products have now pivoted to shilling AI products. Almost like these are just tech bros looking for a new scam to sell. All of that is bad. Everyone agrees it’s bad. But it’s not the subject of conversation here. All you’re doing is engaging in whataboutism.

Real world money gets into and out of crypto via stablecoins. They basically underpin the entire notion of crypto as an investment. Without them, none of the apparent dollar value in the space would exist.

Obviously, if you’re a true believer in the ideology then none of that matters; 1 bitcoin is 1 bitcoin. But since actual use of crypto as currency is effectively non-existent, for now the only thing that could be meaningfully called a crypto economy is investment.

Because other stablecoins were able to fill that void. As you yourself noted, even one stablecoin collapsing was enough to trigger a total meltdown in the crypto space for years. And Terra-Luna didn’t have anything like the market dominance that Tether has. If stablecoins as a whole went away, any institutional interest in crypto would go with them (and that’s without getting into the fact that the price “recovery” is almost entirely down to Tether printing money and using it to buy up the price of Bitcoin, which drags every other crypto coin with it, because the market is very tightly corellated).

Ah, the Skaven solution.

And yet, the entire crypto economy relies on them.

The problem is that the method of securing that decentralized database relies on having a token to act as a payment system. Basically in order to have a public-ledger blockchain you have to have a cryptocurrency.

“Crypto” has become a common shorthand for “cryptocurrency”. Unless I’m missing something, I saw nothing in their post that references cryptographic technology as a whole.

Basically, DAO’s aren’t inherently evil, just useless, because they cannot solve any of the problems they purport to solve; you can’t code away human behaviour. Well, useless, and in the right circumstances actively harmful.

A DAO is, in theory, a system of governance where you have a token used for voting, and a set of “smart contracts” which are programs that operate on the blockchain (more or less). The smart contract part doesn’t work, because thousands of years of contract law have proven that there’s no such thing as an unambiguous contract, so a computer can never be allowed to automatically execute the terms of a contract. That will always create issues. The voting token doesn’t work unless you tie them to a real world identity (in which case the whole purpose of the public-ledger aspect is meaningless), because as long as they can be traded away in some form or another you’ve now opened up the possibility that a wealthy person can directly purchase voting power. The public-ledger aspect of blockchain also makes DAOs a terrible idea for purported left-wing uses like union organising, because it’s not actually that hard to tie a crypto wallet back to a real world identity, so now your future employers can all see your union voting history.

Everything that DAOs purport to do, leftist groups have already been doing for forever. It’s just techbros trying to reinvent the wheel we made and sell it back to us.

Actually they can. Tether is basically running an endless printing press right now. They’ve produced billions of dollars “worth” of Tether backed by absolutely nothing, and most of it is used being used to bid up the notional value of Bitcoin.

First off, sooner or later someone will invent an ASIC for any sufficiently popular coin (even the article you cited acknowledges this). Trying to make them ASIC resistant is a losing battle. Most of these have only held out as long as they have because the return on investment isn’t worth it.

Second, mining on GPUs doesn’t actually solve the ewaste problem. They’re still constantly buying and constantly replacing endless amounts of computer hardware, all for the purpose of running a very inefficient database. As long as the money put into buying more hardware is less than the money obtained from using that hardware for mining, people will continue to buy and run more hardware. That kind of infinite growth and infinite resource exploitation is completely counter to any notion of living on a green planet.

It’s not just about power.

First off, solar power still comes at a cost to the planet. It’s not an infinite energy hack. You have to build solar panels, which involves a lot of labour and resource extraction. That should be going to things that will make the world a better place for everyone. Is a really inefficient database really the best use for those resources?

Second, that’s not the only physical resource involved. Modern crypto mining is done on ASICs, single purpose chips designed for only running crypto mining apps. These chips burn out after about two years of continual use, and they cannot be recycled or repurposed; they can only be used for crypto mining. That means that crypto, as a whole, generates an absolutely staggering amount of ewaste. This is a business that demands infinite growth, because the difficulty of the chain scales with the amount of compute power applied to it, so the miners are all locked in an endless arms race, and that infinite growth comes at the cost of infinite resource extraction.

That’s exactly the kind of thing we have to get away from if we want a green future. We cannot keep building infinite growth engines and expect to have a livable planet.