i hate that cryptocurrency (and especially proof-of-work cryptocurrency) has been so strongly…

i hate that cryptocurrency (and especially proof-of-work cryptocurrency) has been so strongly affiliated with decentralization in people’s minds.

one of the benefits of decentralization is that it makes payment & metering hard, which disincentivizes commoditization.

metering & charging for access to truly decentralized systems without central gatekeeping is still not a solved problem (in part because cryptocurrencies are all super financialized and are therefore unusable as currencies) but they dominate the conceptual space.

make no mistake: they dominate the conceptual space because they appeal to people for whom “the only thing wrong with money is that i don’t have enough of it”, and such people cannot be trusted to make decisions that affect other people.

there are a lot of these people, more every day, even though periodically the chaos shakes out and strips >90% of them of the basic necessities of life. they are highly motivated, because they foolishly believe they can, through their own actions, avoid being in the bottom 90%.

what’s happening here is a basic ontological flaw in the “ancap” mentality. you want to be free of all systems of coercion — except money, the system of coercion that is already most present in your life — because of the illusion that money can be made to serve you.

in theory, it’s possible. in practice, graduating from the class where money is the means by which you are oppressed to the class where money is the means by which you oppress other people is vanishingly rare. invest in cosmic ray derived floating point errors instead.

money doesn’t have the same explicit infrastructure as aristocracy, so it seems like it could be made to serve anybody. but just as every aristocrat derives his power from a warlord who invented a myth to perpetuate his power, those who get money immediately build an aristocracy.

what, you made a couple million bilking people with cryptocurrencies (or doing futures trading — bilking at a distance)? you still need to bow and grovel at the feet of people who wipe their ass with that much, or they will destroy you on a whim.

decentralization is structurally predisposed to benefit forms of social production that are not easily amenable to things like price or ownership. there are not many strong incentives to work on such systems now, but they will be necessary as we move beyond the need for money.