Again With the Substack
Today I received the first issue of the curiosity newsletter I subscribed to a short time before. The thing was moderately interesting. Yet I unsubscribed instantly after spotting this at the end of it (emphasis mine):
You can help me in keeping it going by forwarding it to someone you like, leaving a testimonial, buying me a coffee ($1 or ₹75), sending me some crypto, visiting my blog or following me on Twitter.
No.
Cryptocurrencies are a disease. The “banking the unbanked” narrative is a transparent lie. In the end, they will have to do all the things regular banking does and be highly regulated – but do everything worse. They are novel for novelty’s sake and work via FOMO. The decentralization argument is already subverted today, as regular people need centralized services to do anything at all in the real world with their “crypto”. NFTs are an entirely logical outgrowth of late-stage capitalism.
In the meantime cryptocurrencies burn energy we don’t have for a goal that doesn’t make sense. They are one of the worst uses of technology today. They work for a tiny percentage of insiders. They don’t offer a useful or even credible solution to any problem. Instead, they are a solution looking for a problem, failing at every stage against boring, proven and established technology. The name was also lifted from cryptography, a proper science.
If you haven’t realized this yet or (even worse) don’t care, you are a fundamentally anti-social ego-centric asshat. If you’re into the “crypto” racket today, you won’t get my attention beyond these lines.