OrlandoHakim

but as v0idzer0 pointed out in a reply to your similar comment above

"it was changed before this piece and before NPR decided to leave. Twitter acknowledged that label was incorrect and changed it. Then NPR had a temper tantrum and left and this piece implied they left over that label. It’s misleading at best"

Happens more often than most are willing to admit, especially lately.

In Canada, protestors had their bank accounts frozen for saying mean things about Trudeau. It's not exactly the same as your example but it does rhyme.

To elaborate, Linear is probably the best business app I have used for software management ever. For engineers it is fast and fluid and simple with outstanding keyboard shortcuts. For managers it is strongly opinionated with an agile methodology that requires no setup and just works. For teams, Linear makes it fun to stay in sync and track progress towards goals.

One of the best features of Linear is that it inspires my team to build better software, not just tick feature boxes.

In other words, taking a board seat would have limited him to holding no more than 14.9% of Twitter shares. Now he can take control if he wants.

I think it’s more likely that Elon wants to keep his options open. As a board member he would have a fiduciary duty’s that would prevent him from doing certain things. Most notably, it would keep him from purchasing more shares and orchestrating a hostile takeover by way of taking a majority stake in Twitter.

I would like to advocate for Linear.app as an outstanding, fast, polished alternative to Jira for teams looking for an alternative.

War crimes committed by democratically elected officials are still war crimes. I don’t see a compelling argument in giving Bush and Blair total control to decide the economic fate of nations who didn’t elect them is justifiable. Crypto is partly about separating money from state so democratically elected governments such as Canada cannot unilaterally delete people from the banking system without due process.

My original argument stands. The author’s primary argument is that crypto is bad for authoritarians/statists as it allows the subverting of state power. He is not wrong on that point, but he is viewing the issue from a one-sided perspective and his arguments are tired.

This is a really bad article. It screams from the hilltops that crypto is bad because it doesn’t support the author’s statist/authoritarian worldview.

For example one of the article’s first points is that crypto is bad because it makes it harder for countries to enforce sanctions while ignoring that sanctions are acts of economic war and without recognizing that they have been horribly abused by governments in the past. (See Madeleine Albright defending her sanctions against Iraq which directly led to the deaths of 1.5 million women and children)

The author goes on to regurgitate every standard criticism against cryptocurrencies but in the shallowest of ways and without bringing anything new to the table.

I’ve seen many far better critiques of crypto. This article falls far short.

The Canadian truckers and their supporters would like to have a word with you.

As would the citizens of Cyprus and Sri Lanka who will have or have had funds from their Bank accounts taken because the powers that be decided that the customers money was better off in the banksters hands.

It is arguable whether or not Bitcoin counts as part of Web3. I would argue it is the original Web3 technology (blockchain) and so it is an essential component of web3. Also, I understand Bitcoin the best so can make a stronger case for it than NFTs or other Web3 concepts.

I would argue that one of the core reasons why Bitcoin was invented was to separate money from state and create a new form of quasi-money quasi-digital gold that could prevent powerful central actors from arbitrarily manipulating it’s supply based on their whims and desires. Bitcoin was born out of the ashes of the great financial crisis.

The Bitcoin genesis block famously contains a quote from the Times of London which reads as follows: “Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks.”

You may not personally see that as a problem, but I do as do many others. Bitcoin does introduce it’s own problems but I would argue that it does an excellent job of fixing the problem of allowing for a money free from government control, with censorship resistant peer-to-peer payments (remember the Canadian truckers?), no counter-party risk, and predictable inflation policy for the next 100 years.

Yes it is slow and inefficient and it uses a lot of energy and it is also volatile, but it also allows for things that were never possible before it existed.

It is hard to advocate for the value of decentralized systems without sounding like a hand-waving conspiracy theorist.

The benefits of decentralization do come at a cost of efficiency and throughput and they are often harder to quantify or justify unless one takes a harder look at the fully loaded cost of centralization.

As an example, consider the fact that MacDonald’s is by far the most prolific restaurant in the world or that GMO crops undoubtedly yield more productivity per acre than heirloom crops. In both cases centralization and standardization of the process has led to huge productivity gains, but at what expense? What have we lost in the process?

I would argue that monoculture and food homogenization engineered to maximize calories out per $ in have come at the cost of diversity.

Diversity of ideas, strategies, goals, ownership and agency all result in a society that, while productive, is less resilient.

Look at the various fungal plagues that have blighted banana production over the years. Monoculture brought huge yields but at the expense of resilience as a single fungus nearly wiped out the original Gros Michel variety and now a new fungus threatens the same for the Cavendish.

Similarly, Bitcoin is an inefficient network for transmitting fiat compared to Visa when measured against the criteria payment networks are usually measured on. Ethereum takes huge resources to run the equivalent of a Raspberry Pi as a global state machine.

Measuring decentralized systems vs centralized purely on efficiency and throughput kind of misses the forest for the trees. Decentralized systems have value that isn’t always obvious to a superficial analysis such as this one. That doesn’t mean they should be ignored. Often the largest paradigm shifts look like toys to start. (See Clayton Christianson and disruptive innovation.)