So we now have a technical marvel used for financial speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging regulators... that no longer is also burning the planet. Am I supposed to be impressed by this?
It's easy to worship engineering as some kind of pure endeavor divorced from the real world, and admire cleverness for its own sake. But things that actively make the world worse should not necessarily be praised, no matter how clever they are.
Basically proving their point. We should have been more critical of the ICE too before we built our whole society around it and let it contribute to destroying our environments.
Any tool is a weapon proportional to its power & utility. Beyond that, there's nothing nefarious inherent in weaponry, the DARPA initiatives that birthed the internet were based in defense, against nuclear annihilation. Seems like a win-win, politics non-withstanding.
> Michael Morell, who was previously the CIA’s acting director, said in ‘An Analysis of Bitcoin’s Use in Illicit Finance’ that “blockchain
technology is a powerful but underutilized forensic tool for governments to identify illicit activity and bring criminals to justice.”
> Tracking illicit Bitcoin transactions is therefore easier than tracing illegal funds moved across borders using “traditional banking transactions” and “far easier” than trying to follow cash, according to the report.
> One source in the report was quoted saying that “if all criminals used blockchain, we could wipe out illicit financial activity.”
TL;DR cash is a better tool for crime according to an ex CIA director
Yes, we should focus on surveillance capitalism instead. Perfectly legal.
If you want to talk about actively making the world worse look at most web2 "algorithms" and how the push to the extremes is tolerated by "but numbers go up."
> So we now have a technical marvel used for financial speculation, conducting illicit transactions, and dodging regulators
You're right, it's an impressive piece technology that's been growing through questionable use cases. But that's not the fault of the underlying technology, but of the actors involved.
As long as blockchains are treated as a second class citizen, governments choose to ostracize it, financial oligopolies lobby against it, things won't change.
But imagine what could be accomplished if governments decided to embrace and properly regulate it, and what it could empower in our society in terms of a more open and acessible socio-economic environment.
That sounds like something people say to defend guns, nukes, and crypto. Why wouldn't you blame a technology whose primary use is malignant?
It's not like the crypto hellscape we have now was an accident of its evolution. It was the inevitable and predictable outcome of a decentralized and poorly regulated system built atop complex code that the average person has little chance of properly evaluating.
From all appearances, this is exactly how they were designed and exactly the point, to extract money from fools and funnel it to a select few crypto bankers. That's not a good thing.
Friend, blockchains were designed to circumvent centralized regulation. Fraud is still illegal whether or not you use a funny internet cryptography tool, we don't need to be regulating our tools.
It's easy to worship engineering as some kind of pure endeavor divorced from the real world, and admire cleverness for its own sake. But things that actively make the world worse should not necessarily be praised, no matter how clever they are.