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Progressive Group Rebukes Democrats for Being 'Fully Complicit' in Industry-Backed Crypto Bill
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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I just believe in good tech. And I invest in emerging technologies. All the politics and bullshit narratives in crypto are exhausting.
I like good tech
I know crypto, like all unregulated currencies, is just a tool for scammers and criminals to make money.
I don't beleive crypto is good tech becauase it has proven to not be.
Understanding the effects of tech should be seperate of your beleif in it, and should dictate your beleifs if you want to live in reality.
Well that is your opinion and you're entitled to it. I don't necessarily think that it's proven to be bad tech whatsoever it's just got bad reputation because a lot of it is abused as he mentioned.
So has every other form of currency and commodity in the history of mankind. but I do think that the leading technology is in the field like Bitcoin and Solana for example have proven to be very useful although perhaps still finding the correct applications to really shine and show off what they can really achieve.. but it is no secret that banking and financial sectors are adopting these technologies to improve their operations and you know States and Nations and individuals are investing in things like Bitcoin 24 hours a day. I mean you can buy Bitcoin ETFs, Bitcoin credit cards, it's all over the place now.
Yeah part of the issue is suckers who can't discern opinions from objective reality. They make the perfect marks.
The difference your refusing to process is unregulated currencies do not add anything to the experience while pretty much just creating loopholes
This is the process idiot people have to go through once they forget why we have to have regulated currencies. Kind of like how we got rid of the laws that forced wealth equality so now shit is falling apart again and we have to set things back to the solution we already figured out 100 years ago.
Which is why the 'blue chip' cryptos out there have been pushing for regulation for over a decade now. And we are starting to see it finally.
A regulated cryptocurremcy then just becomes a fiat currency, a less popular fiat currency than the others because there's no organization or government backing it.
This is what severe denial looks like.
Crypto is a scam, and it will always be a scam.
The moment we regulate it well enough to work as a real viable currency it will have lost all the unique things about it that made it attractive to you in the first place.
Well, again, that's your opinion. And frankly you are wrong. But that's ok.
One day I hope you break the conditioning and learn to process reality despite your ego issues.
My ego has nothing to do with it.
Because that's totally normal response from someone with no ego issues
Completely agreed. Everything is framed from the perspective of who it helps or who it hurts rather than seeing the incredible and liberating potential of new innovations.
When the "innovations" are made by people who claim to see themselves as liberators, but structure and use the technology only as a vehicle for scams, grifts, and other unregulated financial shenanigans, it's kinda hard to see it in any other frame than who it helps and who it hurts. Overwhelmingly, crypto has shoveled money into the hands of those already wealthy.
Also being complicated & convoluted doesn't make it good. It drains massive amounts of electricity for a heavily redundant proof of work system that has simple flaws like not handshaking wallet transactions. (You can just drop something into a wallet without the owner's consent or approval, on ether.)
Also of course there is a political narrative. It's a technology that's trying to embed itself into society, it's inherently political as a core goal. Lmao.
I respectfully disagree. Crypto is a tool. It can be used by oppressed people to protect their money, and it can be used by people like Trump to grift them out of it too. It’s the same energy as a knife—it can perform life saving surgery and it can kill depending on the hands using it. The tool isn’t to blame, the people using it are.
Another interesting phenomenon with crypto is the safety it has brought to the drug trade through online markets. Instead of a dealer being able to sell bunk product to hundreds of unaware customers, now we have anonymous online reviews to assist people in sourcing safer products from an industry that governments have refused to regulate and provide access to.
It’s a double edged sword, but it isn’t crypto’s fault how it gets used, just like it isn’t a dollar bills fault when it buys a child bride. Accountability is for humans, not objects.
Lol. Lmao.
Accountability is for the people that design, build, maintain, use, and moderate the program just like every other program. That's just bullshit for the devs and their backers to weasel out of responsibility. Clearly they're able to fork out transactions they don't want to happen, if it benefits them.
Saying the system has no accountability for the way it allows anonymous actors to commit virtual financial crimes without fear of consequences is again, laughable. It's a program, it should be judged on how it's used. If a website allows people to post child porn, it's just "a tool that's being used and could be used to post art as well" oh well.
It's purpose is what it does. I've never seen an "oppressed person" protect their money with crypto. By what mechanism would that happen? Wishful thinking?
The drug trade issue is soaked in capitalist libertarianism and any more socially libertarian / anarchist effects are purely derivative. Bypassing the capitalists government by going directly into the unregulated market.
Your lol’s and lmao’s aren’t necessary, I’m trying to engage in a good faith discussion with you here. Laughing me off isn’t the same as making a valid point.
Saying that they can fork out transactions they don’t like is clearly a misunderstanding of how most crypto works. There may be some shitcoin out there that has nefarious design qualities that I don’t know about, but the largest coin out there is undoubtedly bitcoin, and speaking to that system, the entire purpose of it is that it is trustless at its core. It is defined by a set of rules that were set out in the white paper, and it does not deviate from that. Transactions are verifiable by each ledger. Satoshi Nakamoto isn’t sitting there with his finger on a switch to screw you. There may be whales who are able to move the needle with huge transactions, but that is literally the same for any currency.
Maybe we will have different definitions of oppression, so I will just say people in general can protect their assets from seizure with crypto. If you have too much cash in your car and get pulled over at a traffic stop, the cops can just take it on the assumption that having a large amount of money on you is suspicious. This has happened multiple times in America when people have been traveling with large amounts of cash to purchase properties, cars, antiques, or a whole variety of other things. No beat cop is going to be smart enough to start hassling you over your USB keychain when you get stopped for going 5 over the limit.
I agree with the first sentence of your second paragraph—if the creators of a coin have included hidden design elements to screw people, they should be held accountable for that, but that is not going to be the case with every crypto coin out there, and they should be judged individually. Going back to my knife example, a knife that is a murder weapon should be seized, a knife that is a cooking utensil should not.
And lastly, to speak to your point about CP, while I’m not an expert on the subject, nearly every system I’ve heard of that is used for that is something that is also used for totally legal purposes including Lemmy! Should Lemmy be illegal because there are some illegal instances out there? Of course not—those individual instance operators should be held accountable, and the other instance operators have nothing to do with it. When you paint with such a broad brush, you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I find them quite necessary. The derision is part of the point. So many people treat cryptocurrency like something to be venerated when it's just a bunch of bullshit.
Bitcoin forked into bitcoin classic, in order to undo a transaction. I'm aware this isn't a trivial process, but it protects those with power and capital and has no function to protect those who do not. The issue is that this is completely ran by capitalists and has no oversite, obviously banks have plenty of ways to fuck you over, that's why they're regulated.
Yes that is an issue. I'm suggesting that "cryptocurrency" as a solution to that issue is just as much of a solution as any other investment vehicle and isn't something crypto is in any way uniquely suited to solve. Civil forfeiture is theft and unconstitutional.
There is no mechanism through which accountability can be held. That is entirely the point. You can "judge" them individually all you want but the ecosystem is uniquely suited for abuse.
I am not venerating cryptocurrency, you are firing your shots at the wrong person. I’m just taking a more balanced stance about it than you are. Frankly, you come off as rude.
There are methods for accountability in the crypto space, just look at where Sam Bankman-Fried is now.
A forked currency is a new currency—you can’t judge the currency it was forked from by the effect of the new one.
You are correct that crypto is an imperfect solution for protecting assets from seizure for a variety of reasons, but seeing as there is absolutely no government appetite for police reform, it’s what we’ve got.
You don’t seem interested in a respectful debate at all, so I’ll just end by saying you have been unpleasant to talk to and I hope we don’t meet again.
You clearly don't know what you're talking about.
Are you going to elaborate on where you disagree, or just "no ur wrong :( :(. Stop bullying my favorite grift"
On the drug trade issue? I'm clearly mostly focusing on all the other ways crypto is fucking stupid bullshit for people that don't understand technology.
But I don't think an entirely unregulated market with "anonymous user reviews" is really the smartest or best way to buy drugs.
Alright on break so it's gonna be shorter but feel free to reply if you want to continue later.
The first aspect of your reply was conflating developers of crypto and especially the initial intent with bad actors who've latched on and USED IT for scams, gifts, etc.. I don't see how that's a crypto specific critique at all, people scam and grift with essentially any form of ownership or commerce, seemingly that's just shitty human nature.
I work in the financial industry (blech but it pays the bills) and you see the same shit happen here even with the huge amounts of regulation that are applied, plus all the regulation came AFTER. Which is what I am assuming will happen with crypto as well as it continues to mature.
It's really not all that complicated to understand/use but it's certainly not as easy currently as just swiping a debit card, with that said though how many people do you know actually understand how their card functionally transmits money? Likely very few because you don't really need to if it works.
The electricity usage argument is partially fair, however I would love to see how much energy is required to run the already existing non-crypto payment methods, I have never once seen a single attempt at a comparison but I would wager it's likely extremely close.
Everything is politics because politics and the policies that come from it dictate our lives, there's nothing more inherently political about crypto though then any other form of payment could be when put under the microscope.
On the point if "accountability is for the people who design build maintain use and moderate a program" I'd ask you to apply that logic to other things in your life.
If you had a glass cup, broke it and used the edge to cut someone, is that the fault of the glass cup designer for not making an indestructible glass cup that couldn't possibly be used as a weapon? No right, because it's not possible to completely control what someone else does with a product, you can build in safety guardrails all you want but someone will find a way to missus it, which is where laws come in.
On the point of forking out transactions they don't like, that's where you lost me entirely, that's simply not how it works and it'd be a huge undertaking to explain why that doesn't make sense.
Then going back to accountability you use CP as an example, do you think the users web browser should prevent them from posting CP? How could that possibly be accomplished? Goes back to my point about enforcement mechanisms outside of the system being our only real option in a ton of already existing technology, but by your logic they're all just vehicles for misuse.
Crypto currencies aren't open vessels which can be used for a vast multitude of things. They're currencies. Defending them on the basis of "what about web browsers". They're not web browsers, which are designed to connect users to the Internet, they don't allow someone to airdrop a photo of your front door into a virtual wallet without you at least consenting to the service used.
They actually are that open, there's nothing forcing it to be used only as a currency that's why NFTs are a thing, it's just code.
It's a bit different when the developers and early adopters are the ones perpetuating the grift. It's a digital money system with aggressive deflation and unregulated trading. Fraud is natural? Not coding to prevent fraud is implicit permission to commit fraud. Crypto didn't spawn out of a vacuum. They didn't somehow not know their virtual fake money was going to be used to grift and scam people.
Regular banking transactions cost fractions of a cent in electricity, as they don't have to do exhaustive amounts of proof of work. Bitcoins value is somewhat tied to the electrical cost of generating a bitcoin.
Hilarious, again to suggest that the creators of fake, unregulated stock markets for fake money are in any way not aware that they can be used for very real scam and fraud and are thus y'know, responsible to regulate it or responsible for the unregulated damage.
A physical object with physical design limitations. A thing that can then physically be broken and abused, not software that can be abused well within the design limitations. Memeable.
Name one of the developers and early adopters of a non-scam crypto like bitcoin (debatable at this point with lightning network being shoehorned in) or ethereum that is a grifter. Scammers making scam coins doesn't mean all crypto or people who are for crypto are scammers.
Crypto didn't spawn out of a vacuum, it came from earlier technologies like hashcash that was intended to prevent spam due to requiring a cost (PoW) in order to send the email. For bitcoin, go read the bitcoin white paper to see what the initial intention was.
Regular banking requires more people to manage those funds, think about how many skyscrapers for banks or other financial institutions you've seen, a lot of those jobs (and all the electricity requirement that goes into doing their jobs in that office) wouldn't be necessary due to how crypto functions. If you were to take away all those jobs at once with a crypto solution, I believe it would be a net negative in energy usage, or at the very least not an increase.
That's entirely speculation but one I don't see many people entertain at all, they just see the energy usage for PoW coins (which ETH isn't anymore BTW) and without any reasonable frame of reference (besides small countries because that's shocking) come to the conclusion that crypto bad because it uses energy.
Bad actors do bad actions, that doesn't mean the technology itself is bad, there's been a lot of real development in this space in the 14 or so years I've been following it that you completely undercut out of ignorance and preconceptions.
There's no fundamental difference, a tool is a tool, and people will find ways to abuse those tools, all we can reasonably do is attempt to prevent that to a reasonable extent (again going back to the glass example, we physically can't yet make a glass that can't be broken) and depend on external enforcement mechanisms like government.
Doesn't help our current govt in the US is coopted by a fascist mafia Don who's actively scamming with his own garbage coin.
Edit: I figure you might latch into my point about financial industry jobs and figured I'd point out my opinion on that concept https://sh.itjust.works/comment/17763409
I am working so I can't right now, but sure later I'll give more specific critiques.