Monero is an also-ran cryptocurrency, in the same proof-of-work family as Bitcoin and Etherium.

Monero.town is a Lemmy instance whose main communities are: Monero, privacy, Monero Memes, Meta, and Monero Mining.

Enough has been written on the negative ecological effects of proof-of-work based cryptocurrency that I think it’s not controversial to say it is incompatible with the Solarpunk vision.

Pictured inciting incident is a person advertising the crypto-capitalist Lemmy competitor “Nostr” in the anarchism community.

I don’t personally mind a debate about Nostr, but like most of the content from Monero.town, it doesn’t belong here. More sales pitches from a crypto-currency hype instance are going to be tedious, and crowd out the kind of progressive politics and human interactions we’re looking to nurture here. Reddit’s /r/anarchism had to constantly repel assholes trying to pass off their edgy capitalism as anarchist, Lemmy gives us the unique opportunity to send a strong message and nip this in the bud.

Fediverse sites that have already blocked Monero.town

reject (10): solarpunk.moe, polyglot.city, freethought.online, icosahedron.website, sunbeam.city, vtuber.house, fruef.social, cutie.city, fuckcars.social, karas.social

followers_only (3): toot.cat, orbsafe.masto.host, partyparrot.social

Image Description

[Image description: Screenshot of an exchange between user [email protected] and Five containing the following text

[email protected]

Yea, that’s just not how Nostr works. Take a look here: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips These are implementation possibilities that the protocol enables. Every client must implement NIP-01. All of the other NIPs are optional so every client that you use (an app for example) has decided to implement different NIPs. You decide which client you use and how Nostr should feel like. Almost no client prioritizes content that received bitcoin.

Your “login mechanism” (private cryptographic key) has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. If you want to send btc to people you have to set that up yourself, manually linking a wallet to your key.

Five

I’m confused why you’re downplaying Nostr’s primary selling point - its close integration with Bitcoin. It’s clearly a cryptocurrency capitalist con job.

Almost no client prioritizes content that received bitcoin.

That’s not what I was saying, but I’m fascinated that you’re implying it’s much worse than I anticipated. Which clients have their priority linked to received bitcoin? ]

  • cacheson@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Cryptocurrency will never replace government money so long as it doesn’t improve on its ability to avoid periods of deflation or hyperinflation.

    Quibble: Hyperinflation typically only happens due to government mismanagement of their currency, and not as a result of regular market forces.

    As it stands, the monetary supply of bitcoin may be increasing with each minted block, but it is also tempered by the amount of bitcoin ‘burned’ - people losing their keys, or dying with no-one inheriting access to their account.

    The effect of this should be minimal once infrastructure around and knowledge of Bitcoin becomes more fully developed.

    Ending the minting of new coins will not cause stability in the price - its price will still fluctuate with demand.

    My point was that the current level of instability, with 2000% increases and 80% drops, is only a result of the low current level of adoption, combined with uncertainty over whether Bitcoin is going to be the global currency to replace all others, or a fad that is going to die out. Once the “final” level of adoption is reached, you wouldn’t leave your money “sitting in the blockchain” in hopes of a big return. It’d be more like having your money in treasury bonds. Some return, sure, but fairly unexciting.

    Take an absurd and simple model of the world where the entire population uses bitcoin: an increase in the population means the same amount of coins for more people

    Annual population growth from 1950 to the present (the era for which we have good numbers, I assume?) topped out at 2.24% in 1964. We’re currently at 0.88%, and projected to go negative in the 2080s. I assume it won’t be negative forever, but figure maybe 1-2% annual price deflation over the long run?

    What do?

    Shifting gears a bit. Let’s say for the sake of argument that the deflation thing is actually very bad. Maybe not catastrophically bad, but at least bad enough that we should prefer that Bitcoin does not succeed.

    What alternative do we, as anarchists, offer to the world? Besides anarcho-communism, that is. I’m skeptical of it as a totalizing vision, and a lot of people just won’t go for it.

    I assume that in a post-state society:

    • There will be some kind of hard currency that is widely but maybe not exclusively used
    • The world will standardize on a single unit of account, probably the aforementioned hard currency
    • People will remain at least moderately self-interested

    Let’s say that all of the other altcoins were obliterated, and that only Bitcoin and Dogecoin remain. Dogecoin would be the better option for society as a whole, due to the supply inflation. However, for individuals it’s preferable to only accept Bitcoin and refuse to accept Dogecoin (Thiers’ law). Dogecoin is unlikely to catch on because of this, even if we ignore Bitcoin’s first-mover advantage.

    What other good alternatives are there? I don’t think “anarcho central banking” would be viable.

    • Five@slrpnk.netOPM
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      1 year ago

      Your claim about the US having abandoned the gold standard around the great depression didn’t sound quite right to me, as I remembered we were on the Bretton Woods system until 1971. It turns out there was indeed a gap in the 30s though.

      Your memory is correct - though I did mean to communicate that it was the lessons learned during the great depression that lead to the end of the gold standard, not that those lessons were immediately absorbed. Constraining the money supply is so good for the rich, naturally they’d argue that the societal collapse it correlated with was just a fluke, and use their considerable political power to bring it back. But when black people organized militias and poli-sci students demonstrated considerable organic chemistry knowledge, visions of a return to the revolutionary chaos of the last cycle weighed heavier on the scales than even the economic demands of the war.

      McCarthy, Nixon, and the Vietnam War

      In looking at the chart on the Bretton Woods article, I remembered that the decoupling of real wages from productivity (article) also started in the 70s. I wonder if there’s any connection. I know that Reaganomics was a thing, but that would have started in the 80s. (I promise I’m not doing a conspiracy theorist “ah ha!” thing here, the correlation may be entirely coincidental, but may also be worth further investigation.)

      That’s an interesting hypothesis. You could test it by finding the data during the period the dollar was first allowed to float after the great depression, and see if a similar decoupling happened. My suspicion is that it has more to do with McCarthy’s witch trials of labor radicals during the JFK era and Nixon’s subsequent war on unions and unionization.

      The Bretton Woods break and the decoupling of wages to productivity are possibly related in the form of the Vietnam war though. It’s difficult to fund an ever escalating war when your monetary supply is constrained (1971); and once a war ends (1973), there’s a shock to wage negotiating power as tens of thousands of former soldiers return to the labor market. The already hollowed-out union movement explains the inability of workers to recover from the shock and the rest of the graph.

      Ranum’s Law

      Wage stagnation is a social problem which requires a social solution: organizing labor. Any technical solution that is not directly supportive of the social project is unlikely to be effective at resolving this specific problem. For example, some governments have done away with political minimum wage struggles by legislating regular recalculations based on inflation data. But this encourages labor complacency and wages in these countries have also not scaled with the vast increases in productivity. As I’ve claimed earlier, the benefit of constraining the money supply for the rich outweighs any benefit it could have for the poor and middle class.

      Hyperinflation Quibble Quibble

      I’ve used arguments based on very simple models, because its easier to use them to illustrate points that remain true when more complex models are applied. Economics as a science is deeply criticized for its lack of predictive power, and part of this is due to the tendency to treat it as the mathematical discipline of the analysis of rational actors. It is germane that the greatest recent advancements in economic theory come from outside the discipline, like Daniel Kahneman in psychology or David Graeber in anthropology.

      Hyperinflation is usually associated with government mismanagement of their currency, but its important to remember the real reason is people’s lack of faith in the government management of their currency. Since currency functions on irrational human trust, any hyperinflation event is a product of both psychology and mathematics. Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic was caused by taking enormous debt meant to be paid by winning a war, and then dramatically losing that war. Overprinting money acerbated the situation, but I believe it was a primitive attempt by government to actively manage the situation using the economic tools as they understood them, rather than self-interested corruption as is often the case. Nothing they could have done in the treasury could change the fact that the war department had very publicly gone all-in on a losing bet. Calling this economic mismanagement ignores that Germany had earlier followed this sequence of events in the previous conflict in which it ended the victor, with predictably positive results for German ledgers. The subprime mortgage crisis, on the other hand, was clearly a result of private self-interest and corruption. It could have lead to much worse results, but I contend that preserving confidence in the government’s willingness and ability to maintain the stability of the market, more than any actual solution the government provided, prevented a larger financial catastrophe. Bitcoin is subject to this vulerability also, for example the price collapse I mentioned earlier that occurred over rumors that Nakamoto was finally going to pull the rug.

      WanderingDuck(x) = y

      Having confidence that the market will never act to stabilize itself is not the same as market confidence. My example using growing population and fixed currency proves a point, but things are obviously more complicated than that, and in ways that make the problem even more intractable than the simple example implies. Looking at stock price history and forex graphs, it is obvious that market trends have so many inputs that the resulting output is impossible to model mathematically. Wars, natural disasters, crop failures, disease outbreaks, economic bubbles, and other large sources of economic uncertainty will not suddenly cease once the last Bitcoin is minted. A worldwide currency of exchange that can’t adapt to market changes will only acerbate the problems caused by the unpredictable.

      Retiring on “My friends owe me money”

      A soldier stationed in Hong Kong during the British mandate learned a fascinating truth about money from Cantonese merchants. Used to writing checks on his account in England, he was shocked to see another patron paying for supplies using a check he had written six months prior to pay a bar tab. It had been covered in Chinese writing indicating dozens of other merchants had endorsed the check, each using it as a medium of exchange in turn. He had accidentally minted his own hard currency.

      It it useful to frame money as a commodity, but it is also possible to frame it as tokens of debt. An IOU from cacheson may be a less attractive source of exchange than a proper US dollar amount, but fortunes change, and an IOU from a trusted friend is more useful than a Dogecoin or a Biafran Pound. According to the credit theory of money, people can just use credit exclusively, because that’s what most people are already doing when they use fiat currency.

      There’s an aspirational and infrapolitical argument against traditional cryptocurrency here: retirement savings are a relatively recent invention. In pre-banking societies, people relied on their community to look after them in their old age. The social debt wasn’t precisely quantified, but the implied communal economy relied just as much on trust. The capitalist system thrives by atomizing individuals and consolidating corporations. Trust between banks is subsidized, and trust between people is undermined. Bitcoin in its idealized form is a tool for a market based on competition rather than collaboration. Its zero-trust architecture mirrors a zero-trust vision of society. I feel the same as you in that I wouldn’t retire with the expectation that gratitude from the people I have helped would meet my needs either, but if society evolved to the point where that was a realistic option, that would be an anarchist achievement.

      • Five@slrpnk.netOPM
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        1 year ago

        What do indeed

        I don’t think criticisms need to be coupled with solutions, but eventually solutions are necessary. I think your question is sincere, but you may be more qualified than I am to answer it. I can only offer you some of my half-baked thoughts on the subject.

        One notion that I don’t totally endorse, but think might be interesting as a point of reference is Duniter. In southwest France a small community built an implementation pronounced “June” and written Ğ1. It still technically operates on Proof-of-Work, but most of the devices minting coins are old laptops and raspberry pis. There’s little incentive to mine besides communal spirit, and its nerf version of mint competition removes the energy escalation usually associated with that consensus mechanism. Instead of awarding newly minted coin to the victor of the algorithmic contest, coin is distributed to every wallet individually in a process similar to a Universal Basic Income scheme that they call “Universal Dividend.”

        It has survived for over five years without a single 51% attack due to the true basis of consensus security, their web of trust. Each new wallet must be authorized by at least two other wallets. Using technology designed for cryptographic email authentication, they are able to enforce personhood of each wallet and prune branches of bad actors. They implemented a craigslist style digital market from the start, and though it seemed more vibrant when I investigated it several years ago, you can still find garage-sale classics like homemade jam, second-hand clothing, and used books on offer.

        Some of my criticisms still apply here. While the minting mechanism is designed to grow with the community, I don’t think any algorithmic function can be complex enough to match the irrational forces that drive serious markets. It has never grown past a digital flea market, and with such low stakes it’s difficult to draw any compelling lessons from its survival. It does seem to have inspired another universal basic income style digital currency started for pedal-powered delivery collectives in Germany called Circles which I know even less about. In addition to my crypto-based concerns, I tend to view UBI schemes as last-ditch efforts by the capitalist class to preserve capitalism, and messages like the following don’t inspire confidence in these solutions to create anarchy.

        Despite my reservations, I’m significantly less concerned about anarchists experimenting with this kind of currency, given its cooperative intentions and community-oriented architecture. Since there’s less incentive to expand, if they had a presence on the Fediverse, I suspect their members would be much more tolerable too.

        • Five@slrpnk.netOPM
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          1 year ago

          Hawala

          I’m impressed you’re familiar with RipplePay in its previous incarnation. It makes sense in a capitalist mode of production that a startup for a trust-based digital token would pivot from trust between individuals to the much more lucrative trust between financial institutions. IIRC, I discovered the concept of hawaladar networks through their white paper. The idea is that any two merchants can act as nodes in a grassroots money wire service, based on their mutual trust. Money can be transferred long distances by simply communicating the sums and recipients, and then paying out of the local cache. Each exchange is kept in a each merchants’ ledger, and since traffic flows both ways, sums often cancel out. Actual transportation of goods or currency is only occasionally required to settle trade imbalances, and could be done without national currency, using their value in marketable products instead. Since networks often involve more than one merchant, reckonings can be handled semi-locally, with long-distance debts balanced as individual remittances ripple through the network.

          An anarchist digital exchange currency could follow similar lines. You would be able to establish mutual lines of credit with friends and associates, and set different credit limits for individuals or different groups of people, possibly scaled by how far separated they are within your web of trust. People who have trouble demonstrating the trustworthiness needed to participate in the network could still use the system for exchange by making a non-digital loan to someone acting as a trusted node on the network. It would be reasonable to grant access for the entire amount of the loan to comrades with poor financial savvy, and charge an access fee to everyone else.

          Software to run it could be based on the ActivityPub protocol, and proven local rings of trust could federate with each other forming regional, national, and global networks of remittance. Bankruptcies could be handled humanely, with people who are close nodes on the network covering the debt and forgiving the debtor, while revising their credit access in accordance with the reason for the default.

          A network with this structure side-steps the problems associated with growing currency algorithmically because currency is created and annihilated according to the needs and limits of people within the network. The money supply can grow to the collective credit limit of the network, and at the same time shrink with degrowth without leaving surplus currency and causing panic. A shock capable of destabilizing the network would have the same effect on a comparable fiat currency system. As added security, node operators could establish individual value caches so the failure of a single node they connect with does not propagate across the network. It’s similar to central banking in the way that nodes federate, trade resources, and insure themselves, but there is not a central institution that sets interest rates, and all loans are interest-free. With enough of the population participating it has emergent democratic qualities.

          Mutual projects could be funded by people giving unilateral IOUs to the organizers. Funds could be transferred swiftly to good causes, in spite of government blockades. In an anarchist mirror of Visa cutting off payment to Wikileaks, the networks could defederate from instances connecting landlords or police, and individuals could refuse to be used as an exit node or remittance path, limiting the total credit available to them.

          While national currency might be convenient to start such a network, denomination of value could just as easily be pegged to some standard unlikely to be manipulated by capitalists. For example, 200 units could be said to be the equivalent of one nice new mid-range bicycle, or about $400 in US currency. A single unit could then be called a centicycle. Fractional units would be milicycles. If you’re Canadian, half a bicycle could be a looncycle. Since the amount is referential, it would not lead to bicycle hoarding, the way the gold standard creates metal scarcity or bitcoin creates energy scarcity. Debts in the system could be paid with whatever cash or physical good anyone on a node in the network is willing to accept as worth some fraction or multiple of a bicycle.

          While it would be possible to accumulate enough of other people’s debt to stop working and retire, the ultimate goal of such a system would be that the structure of the network inspires people to crowd-fund enough mutually beneficial free infrastructure that the need for labor itself would become scarce. People acting as nodes on the network could use the forged mutual bonds of trust as a starting point to form unions and organize coops. People empowered by newly discovered democratic control of their economic lives would find confidence to throw off the shackles of liberal democracy. Those who don’t want or are not able to work would still be able to relax in their fully automated solarpunk luxury communism while those working would need to put in less than a day a week to meet the basic needs of societal maintenance.

          Whoops, I may have gotten a little carried away there. I hope some of that is useful, it seems you may be on track towards a more technically feasible solution of your own. But the takeaway is this: fuck Monero.Town. Defederating might be the first step on a path to solarpunk luxury communism :)

          • cacheson@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            So I’ve read all of your reply, but at this point I feel the need to wrap this up. I need to get back to working on other things besides writing internet essays. XD

            You’ve given me some things to think about. Maybe I’ll bump up the priority on my credit network project. Thank you for the conversation. :)

            • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netM
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              1 year ago

              That was a really fascinating read from you two, thank you both for engaging so thoughtfully with each other on a topic I’m not very familiar with. There’s so many little threads of information sprinkled in there to research and learn more about. Really wonderful stuff.

              Also @Five (let me know if that @ or ping or whatever works, I’ve tried pinging people like that a few other times but they never responded, so I never know if it actually sends the message to your inbox).

              • Five@slrpnk.netOPM
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                1 year ago

                Thanks PF - I’ve received pings from people using @Five in the past, but obviously I don’t know how many I haven’t received. I didn’t see this one until I manually reviewed the comment thread. I wonder if the ping and the reply cancelled each other out.

                • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netM
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                  1 year ago

                  Thanks for letting me know! I think I’m messing something up, since you’re the first response I’ve gotten from pinging.