<MoneyLab> Theses from Amir Taaki

Geert Lovink geert at xs4all.nl
Thu Dec 22 08:14:27 CET 2022


When things go bad, simplify your process. Reduce complexity. Playing poker and on a losing streak? Drop down a level. Trades have lost their magic? Go back to simple strategies. Business is experiencing issues? Cut your side projects & retract back to the core mission.

What is crypto's core mission? What is the true value proposition of crypto? "we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years." ~ Satoshi

In 2012, a corporate clique tried to gang up and seize power. Calling themselves "the Bitcoin Foundation", they sought to portray Bitcoin as apolitical pure tech. They used sly tricks and backroom games. They believed in nothing except power.

If only we can wrestle this plaything from the anarchists who created it, then we can get it accepted from the regime of power and gain mass adoption" But why is crypto even useful in the first place?

When I saw http://bitcoin.org <https://t.co/554DgBwSYJ> in 2010, I thought it was a scam. It said: "Bitcoin is a form of p2p money that cannot be controlled by governments or central banks." Bitcoin's origin story lies in the parallel economy. Nobody can ever take that away from us.

Crypto is wildly popular in the developing world. Despite liberal leftists in the US calling it white supremacist capitalism, actual brown people love crypto. For example, in Egypt, USDT trades at a 16% premium on the dollar itself. You are paid for selling USDT!

Banned and illegal political organizations use crypto to seamlessly move money across borders. That's why states seek to make privacy coins illegal. So what is the value proposition of crypto?

The value prop is that it's a parallel economy outside the control of nation states and central banks. Western economies are bogged down in a tarpit of corruption, quickly sinking as parasitic elites suck the remaining value from society and jump ship.

The dangers to freedom, humanity and nature are:
- Surveillance capitalism, a bad business model based on data harvesting. Crypto fixes this.
- Automated weapons and drones which are a mobile surveillance and assassination system.
- Social credit scoring, CBDCs and UBI.

Most investors are pretty basic and dumb. Their only source of profit is getting dealflow from having a brand name. They always jump on the next fashionable trend, but lack any predictive power. Worse they worship false idols and many are short-term oriented nihilists.

Crypto has been burnt now, and those same figureheads who at the peak of the last cycle were pushing already stale memes on twitter now remain silent. Are we destined to repeat the same mistakes this cycle, and again look towards nihilists and charlatans?

The same thing happened to the Linux movement in the 90s. It had great creative power and snowballed a large enthusiastic community of devs dedicated to its mission. But there arose a group who wanted acceptance from power to gain "mass adoption”.

Free software thus rebranded to "Open Source". No longer was freedom the core of the movement. Now it was about lower costs and other such utilitarian arguments. They wanted acceptance from the corporations. Linux then became derivative and lost the desktop wars.

In the movie the Matrix, Morpheus says to Neo when he first enters the simulation that the people there are so indoctrinated by a system that enslaves them, that they will fight to protect it. Being socially shamed, called a conspiracy theorist are means of control.

It's easy to become complacent, and be confident the next cycle is coming. But then you're a shit player who doesn't learn from mistakes to improve their game. So what is our trajectory?

Regulations are inevitably coming, and some even welcome them! While Ross Ulbricht and Alexey Pertsev sit in jail, there are members of our community who actively court and engage the regulators. There's a word for this: treason.

Crypto will split in two. One side will be heavily regulated and toothless: RegFi Using any RegFi products will require KYC, and they will never do anything actually meaningful. Worse yet they will engage with hostile actors to undermine crypto's true purpose.

The other side of crypto will be completely underground, uncensored and uncompromising. It will be anonymous and protect its community. This is DarkFi. Corrupted investors who get free money from the state to buy up crypto projects will never push this narrative.

RegFi is for US citizens. DarkFi is for the entire world. Activities on RegFi: mobile gaming, art & fashion, collectibles, soy trivia. Activities on DarkFi: agorist free markets, anon DAOs, trading and p2p infra.

The state will crack down on RegFi, and it will comply losing all its teeth. While with DarkFi, when crackdowns happen then it thrives. Let there be dark.

—

More here: https://dark.fi/insights/ftx-where-next.html. 







-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/moneylab_listcultures.org/attachments/20221222/a722ca48/attachment.html>


More information about the Moneylab mailing list