Just before New Year’s, Mozilla posted a tweet talking about how they’re going to accept cryptocurrency as a donation method, and a lot of people in the replies are very upset about it. Jamie Zawinski, a Mozilla founder, has also directly responded to it.
What’s your thoughts on this?
Wayback Machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220105052253/https://twitter.com/mozilla/status/1476951030638260225
Update: https://lemmy.ml/post/140209
Proof of work cryptocurrencies have pretty much ruined the concept of free compute: https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disaster.html
The other complaint is that a huge problem facing humanity at the moment is insufficiently-regulated capitalism, and cryptocurrency makes that worse instead of making it better
It is natural for the capitalist state to be deregulated. And it is desirable that it be so that the system is fragile and incapable of fully controlling the masses. It is, of course, mainly used for tax evasion and in criminal or speculative activities, but it is possible and desirable that it be used for noble causes.
Cryptocurrencies are helping palestinians and many other peoples and groups around the world.
I’d suggest that “natural” and “ideal” are not necessarily the same thing
I agree that it’s natural for capitalism to be unregulated, because it is all-consuming and unsustainable by default, because it is inevitable that the few will centralise wealth, care only about their own interests, and subjugate the many
An ideal setup (for me) in a carefully-balanced capitalism would be to have equal power between the masses, the media, multi-national corporations, the wealthy, and the various levels of government: all would be doing important things in a society, but each is capable of holding the others accountable, none is able to gain control of the others
I believe we are very unbalanced currently, far from that ideal
Imho, technology and cold mathematical algorithms is the only thing that can enforce that balance. Every attempt at putting humans at the helm ends up leading into corruption.
Capitalism is actually being regulated, but by the rich and corrupt. The banks are not doing anyone a favor, and the current judicial and tax systems are designed to favor the richest, who can afford the most expensive lawyers and have connections everywhere.
The tricky thing is finding that key algorithm that could allow us to reach that balance… and then getting it adopted (which would be even trickier). For this, FOSS p2p systems like blockchains and cryptocurrencies could be a useful tech. Even though it has a reputation of being “untrackable”, that’s actually not necessarily the case… a bitcoin address can be tracked in the public p2p ledger. A well designed cryptocurrency can actually open the door to full disclosure and transparency in the transactions of public funds so that they are publicly auditable with no way for any records to be lost “by mistake”, for example.