An honest appraisal of "effective altruism"

The Watercooler
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To me, this is a rather circuitous way of saying there’s a problem of knowledge. Utilitarianism requires omniscience for its logic function properly, which makes it kind of useless as a solution to real world situations. A person can believe that doing x will be more happiness-producing than y, but they can be mistaken. And in many cases, it will never be known by anyone whether it was mistaken or not after the fact, but everyone will have their opinions about it.

In this situation, in real world society, there are people who don’t care about what they should do, they just want to do what’s good for them, or just whatever they want in general. That often involves hurting other people, which ordinarily brings bad consequences. So, the moral problem for this particular set of people (let’s call them “evil people,” the ones with antisocial personality disorder, mainly) is how to convince people that hurting them is okay.

Utilitarianism unfortunately lends itself to rationalizing immorality by arguing that an apparently evil act can be the best choice if we can analyze its consequences as good. How many evil people are going to play loose with auditing “good and bad” consequences in order to support their rationalizations? It’s the perfect way to obfuscate immorality. Many people are easily blinkered by lots of pseudo-logical hand waving, after all.

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I tried to check whether this was actually so, given the rather wide range of metaethical theories, and I think you’re right.

Motive isn’t mentioned on the Wikipedia page:

And in the Stanford essay on moral motivation is talking about something different.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-motivation/

This is about how, if something is good, we are motivated to do it, rather than saying that the goodness is determined by the motivation.

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I don’t think this is quite accurate. Kantian deontology is (famously) all about intention, however it is also all about rationality and therefore unpalatable for other reasons. Even utilitarianism can be turned into something mostly concerned with the intention to do good once you factor in moral luck, although that could be construed as muddying the waters. However mixed theories such as David Ross’ prima facie duties definitely integrates these considerations. Lastly, virtue ethics is about taking the ethical problem from the viewpoint of what an ethical person would be like, and most of these theories would hold that doing the right thing for the right reason is part of what makes a good person good.

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Do you have any links to these? It’d be interesting to compare what they say with the suttas.

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Kant’s theory is exposed in the Critique of Practical reason but the “more popular” account can be found in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, available here: EMT - Immanuel Kant . No need to read the third section, which connects this text to the Critique. Pay special attention to the footnote distinguishing maxim and motive. :slight_smile:

On ‘moral luck’ the locus classicus are papers by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel of the same name.

David Ross’ theory of prima facie duties is described in his “The Right and the Good” and developed (weirdly) in Foundations of Ethics. I’d stick to the first. :wink: So-caleld “rule” utilitarianism seems to be able to pay better attention to moral luck than so-called “act” utilitarianism (the SEP article on utilitarianism would explain the difference between the two) but there’s nothing in principe keeping either from accounting for it.

Most virtue ethics ground themselves in Aristotle, in particular the Nicomachean Ethics (which is somewhat unfortunate, the Eudemian is also very interesting). The relevant parts to this discussion would be mostly book 2 and the beginning of book 3 (and many other little tidbits too numerous to mention.) Of course it could just as well be grounded in stoicism, which bids us (as determinists cannot keep themselves from doing :wink: ) to ensure our intentions are in conformity with Nature and our duties. (If I were to look for textual support, Epicetus’ Discourses would probably be the best place). And all of this goes back to Socrates, who famously holds (at least according to Plato) that nothing should be done to injure one’s soul by committing injustice (cf. Apology). Doing this requires reflection on what moral principles could bring this about and the courage to stick to whatever principles one has found until better ones have been found instead (cf. Crito). The SEP article on virtue ethics gives a pretty good lay of the land of the modern attempts to revitalize Aristotelian ethics. I personally prefer the old stuff.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

Obviously I could go on and on but there is grading to do. Hope this is helpful Bhante @sujato. If you’d like to chat about this later down the line I’d be honoured.

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Oh addendum: a lot of bad history of philosophy about this is premised on the idea that the ancients had no concept of the will, hence cannot have a real concept of intention. The same people will usually attribute the “invention” of the will to Descartes, as if he didn’t get it from Augustine who definitely (!) didn’t get it from Plotinus, etc. etc. Obviously this is historically illiterate and, even if it were true, stupidly assumes that something doesn’t exist and/or cannot be thought about until people have whatever name for it a modern prefers. They did, they had several names for it, and obviously meanings (and people’s conceptions of how psychology works) change over time but I think we can sensibly assume that humans have been able for a long long long time, like before written philosophy long, to wonder about and discuss why they do the things they do.

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It’s also quite likely that he’s not at his best right now. His mental health must have suffered enormously through this, and the views he’s expressing now may not represent his past or present views. We shouldn’t hold him to be permanent.
That’s not to excuse any deception he engaged in.

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bit late here and am currently unable to read the "lesser known " objections, but my problems with utilitarianism are legion;

first, it seems to imply that people with dyscalculia cannot be moral agents, which seems absurd, there must have been very many people throughout history who could not do arithmetic but knew that murder was wrong.

second, as mentioned above, it seems impossible to define a unit measure of suffering that would allow us to compare, for example, the amount of subjective suffering between each of two persons who might be affected by our descision.

third, it seems impossible to define a unit of exchange between happiness and dsuffering, that is exactly how much laughter equals the inverse of the pain casued by that compound fracture?

fourth, even assuming that such a unit measure of suffering and such an exchange value between suffering and happiness could be established, and that those without the capacity for arithmatic could be somehow excused, it would remain the case that for a broad class of ethical problems would thereby become computationally intractable, rendering the right course of action unknowable.

fifth, even if somehow the computational problem where overcome it remains the case that consequences are not time limited, that is, assuming that human actions are possible at all, they continue to have consequences infinitely far into the future, so summing them must be impossible (unless there are limits?)

sixth, even if there where not insurmountable problems with regards to unit, equivalence, computation, and temporality, it would still be the case that an individual simply cannot know even the immediate consequences of their actions in a wide variety of circumstances.

I could go on, and I often do, but I just have to say that I think utilitarianism is fine as a rule of thumb for governments pursuing public policy in fairly narrow bounds, but as a theory of ethics for the individual it is manifest dross.

any theory of morality that could justify the slow torture of a human if only enough youtube viewers eventually find it mildly amusing has clear and insurmountable problems.

Metta.

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With respect Bhante, there is more to the theory of money. For something to be money it needs to have the following characteristics:

  • A store of value
  • A medium of exchange
  • A unit of account

Anything used as money needs to have a characteristic that makes it a store of value - i.e. a characteristic that makes it desirable. One way to do this is to have it guaranteed by a government, but this is not the only way. Gold, for example, has been used for thousands of years and doesn’t produce anything at all. It derives its store of value from being aesthetically pleasing and, more recently, as a useful metal for industrial applications.

What makes Bitcoin a good store of value is its superior properties in a few respects:

  1. It cannot be debased in the way that national currencies can. The value of just about every currency in history has gone to zero.
  2. It allows money to be highly portable and divisible at low cost.
  3. It is able to be secured in a way that neither paper currency nor gold can.

If you track Bitcoin from its first bull market you will see a clear trend of its value increasing. Initially it was just valued as a curiosity. However due to its limited supply, over time this translated to price going up. Eventually it became valued because the price went up. When price ran up too quickly, it crashed and then the next cycle started. At each cycle, its value increased. Then, over time, its value proposition expanded from being a curiosity / vehicle of speculation to one of utility - i.e. security, transferability etc. This expansion is at its beginning stages, but is expected to continue.

Gold followed a similar trajectory. Many thousands of years ago gold had little practical utility. It was too soft to be used in tools and there were no electronic applications. It was merely a pretty curiosity that was limited in supply. But that enabled it to become money in time. The self re-enforcing nature of the changes meant that whole cultures built myths , legends and superstitions around gold making it even more valuable.

The scandals and scams that are rife in crypto these days have little to do with the Bitcoin protocol. The Bitcoin protocol itself has never been hacked or compromised in any way. It’s just that users of exchanges forget the oft said adage not your key, not your coin.

FTX was a regulated company that deliberately hid its paper trail from regulators; similar to some companies in the 2000s and 2008. You could compare them to Lehman’s etc. that had sketchy practices. Collapses of non-BTC cryptos can be attributed to the teams that ran them and their bad intentions or failure to understand basic economics. Terra Luna, for example, offered various high returns to incentivise people to hold their coin without understanding that you can’t generate returns from nowhere. But none of this has any bearing on Bitcoin as a protocol.

Here is a simple thought experiment to illustrate another aspect to money:

There is a country (A) that needs to get goods to country (C), but these need to traverse through country (B). Countries A and C operate in dollars while country B operates in pounds. Further, country B specifies that only goods that are transacted in pounds are allowed to go through their country.

Suppose that country B has a supply of 1000 pounds.

Now, further suppose country A needs to send 1000 dollars worth of goods to country C per transaction on average. If the transaction is made in pounds, this would require each pound to be worth one dollar.

Then suppose that this grows until country A needs to send 2000 dollars worth of goods to country C per transaction. But we still only have 1000 pounds. Therefore this would require each pound to be worth two dollars.

As you can see, the value of the pound has nothing to do with what country B is producing. Rather, it has everything to do with the supply of goods that need to be transacted in pounds. The higher the worth of goods to be transacted in pounds, the more expensive the pound needs to be, if no more pounds are printed.

In this example, country B did not have to produce anything. They simply needed to monopolise their trade route to increase the number of transactions done via the pound. As can be seen, a country’s production is not fundamental to a currency’s value. As long as there are other properties that make a currency appealing as a store of value or medium of exchange, that is enough.

If we translate this to Bitcoin, or to any other properly decentralised cryptocurrency, this means that as long as people are willing to transact in it its value will go up. Note that you don’t even need to buy and hold Bitcoin. All that is required is that a conversion to and from Bitcoin take place at some point in the goods and services lifecycle. Because the number of Bitcoin is limited, a rise in the number of transactions will naturally increase the value of each Bitcoin.

As mentioned earlier, there are also other elements that make Bitcoin a good store of value. Time will tell which element of Bitcoin will be the appealing factor that allows it to continue gaining momentum as a store of value. In the unlikely event that it does not become the store of value or currency of choice, another crypto eventually will due to the inherent properties of a good cryptocurrency protocol.

If crypto is unappealing, it is only because it is a nascent technology that humans haven’t learned to manage well yet. Kind of like cars when they were invented. There were lots of accidents and fatalities as a proportion of car users, because people didn’t understand the risks or have a collective way to govern transport. Yet now, after inventing dividing lines for roads and road rules the danger has been minimised and cars are commonplace.

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It don’t disagree, but in my experience, utilitarianism is more of a rule of thumb, a thought experiment more than a mathematics. Perhaps that simply disallows the whole project.

But take this for example. Consider the suffering incurred by factory farming.

As opposed to the pleasure gained because “I like to eat pork”. I dunno, it seems like a no-brainer.

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I don’t need utilitarianism to find this abhorrent. I know that I wouldn’t want to live like this, this is enough for me so I don’t wish it for others.

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Great video synopsis of the collapse of the FTX crypto exchange and Sam Bankman-Fried’s role in it all:

Why I link this here is that “effective altruism” pops up again and again all the way through, not in a good way. I have some sympathies for the idea and motivations behind effective altruism. However, in this case, it seemed to more function as a PR front and moral sop to help the protagonists sleep better at night. The author Georg Rockall-Schmidt often has these insightful, entertaining and bitingly sarcastic exposés on his YouTube channel.

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“To others as to myself”.
This includes all beings, of course.

The phrase encompasses both “sides” of the Golden Rule – “Do unto others as…” and “Do not do unto others as…”

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Wow. What an absolute horrid thing.

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Sure. The point is that utilitarianism does not always require that we can calculate suffering and happiness in a precise way. Often enough, it’s pretty obvious. This is why I think that the ideas behind utilitarianism are still of value in helping sort out some ethical issues.

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I just watched your video Bhante. There are many factual inaccuracies and logical fallacies in it; too many to address all of them. Below are my comments regarding the points you made in the first 25 minutes of the video. My hope is that others will find this a useful perspective and be encouraged to learn more about it for themselves.

Beginning: Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is inherently evil.

Nothing is inherently evil. People get stabbed with knives all the time, but knives are not inherently evil. It is the purpose towards which a thing is put that makes it evil.

5:00 min: The power, energy and complexity to do anything useful with Bitcoin is prohibitive. Crypto has never been used to build anything useful.

This is simply not true. The power consumed via solving complex problems has a singular purpose, namely to secure the Bitcoin network without counter party risk.

Suppose you put your money in a bank. You trust this bank not to misappropriate your funds, but you have no guarantee that they won’t. In 2008, several banks collapsed and had to be bailed out by the Government using tax payer funds. Without this bailout ordinary people would have lost all of their savings. Even with the bailout, the Government didn’t create terms that were favourable to the tax payer (i.e. their constituents). They literally took money out of peoples’ pockets to plug a hole created by banks gambling away funds that were invested into them. We know now that the people who run banks are susceptible to greed, but are forced to leave our money there anyway because it’s the only option we have.

The Bitcoin network, in contrast, doesn’t require us to trust any institution. Any Bitcoin you hold is stored on a network who’s security is guaranteed by a distributed set of computers. The power these computers use is the price paid to secure the network in this way. If you think that the Bitcoin network uses too much power, you should compare it to the amount of power used by appliances that are left on ‘standby’. The economics of Bitcoin are such that miners will gravitate to the cheapest sources of power. This means that it is able to secure the Bitcoin network using the power that is least in demand. Compare this to the power usage of idle devices. Power that is in high demand (e.g. in peak locations) is consumed for no purpose whatsoever.

7:09 min: Mining gets harder as you go on and require massive server farms to solve these problems.

This is incorrect. Bitcoin mining difficulty doesn’t increase as a function of time. It increases as a function of the number of miners, which is related to price.

Every 10 minutes, the Bitcoin network releases a certain number of Bitcoin that the miners can take. Miners compete for these Bitcoin by trying to solve an algorithmic puzzle. Whoever solves the puzzle first gets the Bitcoin that is released. The miners are then able to sell the Bitcoin they have gained in the open market to make money. The profit they make is the money from the Bitcoin sale minus any costs incurred to run their computers.

The utility of miners is that they engage in a consensus mechanism to secure the network against bad actors. In layman’s terms, they stop other people from stealing your Bitcoin.

The more expensive Bitcoin gets, the more lucrative mining becomes; therefore more miners add their computers to the network to try and gain a share in the profitability. This is a good thing because miners secure the network from bad actors. The more valuable Bitcoin becomes, the more bad actors might try to attack the network to steal Bitcoin. But the more miners that are drawn to the network, the less likely bad actors will be able to succeed.

The reason that power usage has, on average, increased within the Bitcoin network over time is because its price has also, on average, increased.

9:09 Bitcoin has spectacularly failed as a currency because the energetic costs of doing a transaction are ridiculously high.

This is misleading. The reason that the Bitcoin network cannot support a large number of transactions is due to its consensus mechanism used to secure the network. The transaction cost is therefore not arbitrarily high. You are just paying for the privilege of securing your funds against bad actors, specifically in two ways:

  • You don’t have to keep your funds in a bank that might gamble them away.
  • You have minimal worry about someone stealing your Bitcoin from the network (Currently it would cost someone several billion dollars to even trying steal a single Bitcoin, and even then they may not succeed. The cost to steal will only go up as the price of Bitcoin goes up).

There are several mechanisms that are being looked at to resolve high transaction cost. One is lightning network, which looks to extend the capability of Bitcoin. Another is to use Bitcoin as a store of value and using a different crypto for transaction. Things have improved steadily in this area. I would recommend looking into the work that Cardano is doing in the formal verification of protocols and methods.

A note on store of value. As Bitcoin gains traction, it will likely experience more booms and busts. Therefore, it is not currently a good short term store of value. However, if you look at its long term history, it has preserved value well. It is, of course, young compared to alternatives such as gold. But the criticism of new-ness is one that can be leveled at anything novel.

9:44 min: Bitcoin has pivoted to being a store of value, but it is nothing more than a speculative asset. Just pixie dust. You put money into something hoping to get more money out of it.

As mentioned in my previous comment, the value of something is not just rooted in what can be produced with it.

12:38 The problem with crypto is that it aims to create scarcity out of abundance. Nature is abundant. Food, water, air space, light are all abundant. We are born into a world uncannily adjusted for our health and welbeing compared to the rest of the universe. Yet not everything is abundant. The economy exists to deal with the lack of abundance. Digital items can be shared at low cost. Information that was once scarce is now abundant. Crypto generalises this so that everyting is scarce. You no longer try to get income for the work that you have done. You just get income by having some digital thing. This causes selfishness. This is greed. The more that people get money from nothing, the more it will corrupt their soul. Those who earn money and work for it will appreciate it.

Just because something can be distributed for free doesn’t mean that it can be created for free. The cost to distribute physical goods has dropped by orders of magnitude over the decades. Yet we don’t make the argument that you should be able to go to a store and grab what you want. The same applies to information. Good quality information is not free or sometimes even cheap to create. Of course, we should make goods and information as accessible as possible. But creators must have a means of supporting themselves.

We can see what the information age initially did to music and movies. Movies and music were stolen in quantities that started to affect these industries. Now, the industries are by no means poor but that is not the point. The point is that people were able to take what they wanted without compensating the creators for them. It effectively made it easy to break the musavada precept with little consequence.

Fast forward to a few years later and we now have streaming services that many people are happy to pay for instead of stealing movies and music illegally. These streaming services effectively makes music and movies more scarce again. But does that make them evil?

Getting back to crypto. The crypto ethos is not to make everything scarce. It is to make digital tokens that are scarce. These tokens can be used for a variety of things and allow transactions to happen without an intermediary. For example, we currently have to put money into a lawyer’s account when purchasing a house. There have been several instances when a lawyer has vanished with the money leaving the purchaser in distress. The use of crypto and smart contracts allows us to side step the problem by ensuring the lawyer can’t steal funds in escrow.

16:46 min: This causes selfishness. This is greed, a lack of responsibility. The more that people get money from nothing, the more it will corrupt their soul. Those who earn money and work for it will appreciate it. When you build an economy on the idea that you do nothing and get money you corrupt the human soul. Creating scarcity out of abundance.

People try to gain money from nothing in every financial market (e.g. stocks, bonds, ETFs etc). This is not peculiar to crypto. Wherever there is price volatility, there are opportunities to arbitrage or make profits on price movements. Note that even this action is not a useless one. Arbitragers and traders add liquidity to a financial system and help it function.

The unique value proposition of crypto is not that you can create wealth out of nothing. With Bitcoin, in particular, it is so that you can preserve the wealth that you have.

Here is a graph of gold vs USD over the last 100 years:

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100 years ago, gold cost $100 USD per unit. Now, gold costs 1600 USD per unit. This 16 fold increase does not indicate that gold has become 16 times more valuable over time. Rather, it indicates that the US dollar has become 16 times less valuable over time.

How does this happen? Governments print money to maintain a positive inflation rate, that they claim is good for the economy. This reduces the purchasing power of anyone who holds that currency.

A quick example.

Suppose an economy has 100 oranges. It also has a supply of 100 dollars. This means that each orange will cost a dollar. Now suppose the government prints 100 more dollars so that the economy has 200 dollars. This means that each orange will now cost 2 dollars. If you had 20 dollars in your bank account before the government printed money, you would have been able to buy 20 oranges at 1 dollar per orange. But now, after printing, you can only buy 10 oranges at 2 dollars per orange. This is one of the primary sources of inflation where goods get more and more expensive over time.

As governments print money over time, the value of the ordinary person’s savings reduce. No matter how hard they work, a factory worker might only be able to barely eek out a living. Further, the savings will be even less useful to their children as the value is eroded through money printing.

There is also an environmental cost to governments printing money. When governments print money, say at 5% per year, any company in business has to make a profit of 5% a year just to break even. This causes a drive for excess profit that then causes corporations to exploit the environment and workers even more than they might already have incentive to do.

Technology increases the productivity of the world. However, to date much of the benefits of that productivity has been stolen via the printing of money. The distribution of this printed money is unequal, causing the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.

With Bitcoin, there is no danger of the supply of Bitcoin increasing and diluting your savings because the supply of Bitcoin is algorithmically determined. The promise of Bitcoin is that f you work hard and save, the long term purchasing power of your savings is pretty much guaranteed (Note that as it is still a young technology, it is not wise for a person to put all their savings into it. Just enough to ensure that they are well diversified. The rule of thumb I would use is to only put in what can comfortably be left alone for the next decade). Further, if multiple generations save the coin it will appreciate in value as productivity increases due to technology. That means that a poor person who manages to pass even a fraction of Bitcoin to their children will leave their children more wealthy than they would otherwise be.

Contrast this to the current situation of the world. The real GDP of the US has increased 18x in the last 100 years but the value of the dollar has fallen 16x. By rights, 100 USD saved by your great grandparents should be worth 1800 dollars now. Instead, it is still only worth roughly the same 100 dollars. On the other hand, the cost of things like housing or commercial spaces has drastically increased, effectively lowering your purchasing power to less than what it was to 100 years ago. Now a question must be asked - where did the extra 1700+ dollars of purchasing power go? Some of it undoubtedly would have gone to the institutionally rich, who are given preferential treatment by politicians.

Incidentally, this dynamic of wealth erosion is partially responsible for the ridiculously low savings rates of some people. Many people instinctively feel that there is little point in saving for the future. Those who are more astute try and buy scarce assets such as land to ensure that their purchasing power is not eroded away by money printing. This then causes added issues as rich people buy up housing that poor people need.

As can be seen, it is the prevailing system that allows irresponsibility and creates the conditions for greed.

18:03 min: It is solving entirely the wrong problem. The problem is not ‘how do we make an abundant resource scarce’. Why would you do that? Why would you bottle air and sell it? Why would you bottle water and sell it? But this is what the web3 advocates are saying. Everything should be scarce, everything should be locked up.

It is not about making every abundant resource scarce. It is about simulating scarcity in the digital world to:

  • Allow money to be transacted without counter party risk (i.e. without having a bank, lawyer etc. stealing it)
  • Free up real assets for more equitable use. (imagine if people didn’t need to hoard land and property to protect their wealth over generations… if they bought a digital asset instead that was just as scarce, the land and property could be put to better use)

A digital asset cannot be used to lock up just anything. For example, tokenising a car digitally can’t stop it being stolen, and that is a positive use that one might want to use crypto for, if possible. But there are limits to the technology.

A digital asset cannot be used to lock up all information either. If you didn’t create it or didn’t purchase the rights to it you don’t have the power to lock it up. Further, even if you did create it, it doesn’t guarantee that someone won’t copy your information and post it for everyone to download. Anyone who wants to steal information badly enough will likely find some way to do it.

19:04 min: A resource that was formerly scarce is not. The economic equation has changed, therefore we should step outside of economics. If information is almost free to create and distribute, we should not consider it an economic good any more. We should consider it like the air or the water. It will give us a sense of care and responsibility. We should look after our infosphere in the same way that we look after our ecosphere. We currently don’t look after our ecosphere, but just making the point that there is another way of looking at this.

As mentioned before, high quality information is not usually free to create. It requires at least some input of labor and perhaps even a lot of capital. Therefore, it is a good that fits into the current economic model. Now, some people may give information away but that should be their choice. Good Dhamma teachers, for example, don’t sell the Buddha’s teachings; which is as it should be.

20:11 min: Imagine that you’re living in your home and buy a dozen eggs for the week, put them in the fridge and find out a couple of eggs have gone. Your flatmate has taken two of them and you have no more money for more. You friend says that he didn’t know and offers a solution. Let’s buy some egg-sized safes with pass keys on them so that each time a person buys the egg they put it in the safe. So now we live in a world where we can’t even use an egg without a passcode and if you lose the passcode you don’t get to eat your egg. Obviously this is madness and this is the world that blockchain advocates want for us. An alternative approach would be to have compassion and care about each other. Get together as a group and decide to share. If we give and share there will be plenty for everyone. We don’t have to create scarcity out of abundance. It is inherently immoral if it is applied as a general principle.

You might be able to trust your friend and come up with an agreement to share. However, the less someone knows or sees you, the less incentive they have to consider your well-being. A good example comes from wartime. Soldiers on the ground suffered much more trauma from having to kill their adversaries than pilots who bombed people from the skies. The pilots killed more people but suffered less because they couldn’t see the faces of the people they killed.

Ideally yes, everyone should share and everyone should get along. But that is not how human nature tends to work. Banks may speculate with your money, unscrupulous third parties may run away with it.

You are not locking up an egg so that your friend can’t use it. You are protecting your wealth so that people who neither know nor care about you aren’t in a position to steal from you. Even monasteries have locks and keys for important things. This website has site administrators who hold passwords related to the site; the admins don’t just trust anyone to modify the site as they please. This kind of protection is just common sense.

Maybe at some point in the future when everyone has more goodwill, we won’t have the need to protect property in the way we do now. I hope such a day will come, but for now we must work with our present reality.

23:05 min: Cryptocurrency is fuelled by libertarian extremism, where governments are regarded as getting in the way with their regulation. Their view is to create something that is outside the purview of government without rules and regulations. Rules are good.

Some people do see crypto as a means of dodging regulation. However that is not the primary purpose of crypto. The primary purpose of many crypto, in relation to government, is to ensure that the government can’t print away your savings into oblivion.

Regulation is necessary for crypto and without it the industry will not grow. Few to none of the major players in crypto want an unregulated environment.

24:26 min: There should be oversight of financial activities. If you leave financial activities unchecked you end up with booms and busts, inequalities, criminal activities, broken dreams and broken lives.

Agreed; and this is happening more and more. But it should be noted that many people’s broken dreams are currently due to the chain of events caused by the actions of third parties (e.g. governments unscrupulously printing money, banks speculating with people’s savings, other third parties running off with funds, corporations under pressure for profits exploiting the environment or workers etc.)

25:35 min: One of the irrationalities of the crypto world is that the things which crypto is supposed to solve has not been solved. It was supposed to be a currency, that doesn’t work. It was supposed to be unregulatable, that doesn’t work. It was supposed to be security, that doesn’t work. Yet none of that changes people’s commitment to it. Crypto is a cult.

It was supposed to be a currency, that doesn’t work.
Bitcoin has some way to go to bring down transaction cost. However other cryptos have made some good progress in this space. To say it doesn’t work now is premature. This is a growing industry and as such, susceptible to booms and busts. There will come a time when the market balances itself enough to allow decentralised transactions.

It was supposed to be unregulateable, that doesn’t work.
No, it was meant to allow people to save without money printing affecting the value of those savings. It has succeeded in this endavour.

It was supposed to be security, that doesn’t work.
Yes it does, Bitcoin has never been hacked.

Crypto is a cult.
Sure, some people might display cultish behaviour. This is no different than in other places. E.g.

  • Christians burning Harry Potter books
  • Buddhists claiming that there is no self in absolute terms, even though scientifically speaking such a statement is nonsensical; things are not real, but emergent, making them unable to exist or not exist absolutely
  • Scientists failing to investigate various phenomena due to personal prejudice (e.g. in the 1800, scientists refused to wash their hands because they didn’t think that germs were real. There was data to show that hand washing decreased mortality by 50% but they refused to look at it)

The list can go on. Cultish behaviour is part of the human condition and is not peculiar to crypto. The two must be looked at separately.

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I’ll just leave this here.

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By that logic, the following things should also be banned:

  • Telephones - Americans alone lost 9.5 billion in telephone scams
  • Computers - Every major weapons system or ballistic missile now has a computer chip in it. Snipers and drones use computers to assassinate targets to pinpoint accuracy. In fact, modern computer aided sniper rifles can be used by the average person because a computer will guide the bullet to the target.
  • Demolitions explosives - Explosives in general are what cause much of the damage in war.
  • Fiat money - Used by drug and human traffickers because it is untraceable.
  • Clocks - One of the first concerns when clocks were invented was that they could be used by anarchists to coordinate attempts to overthrow the government.

The list can go on. Any technology can be used for good or for ill. The fact that Putin wants to use crypto doesn’t make it bad in the same way that the fact that Xi banned crypto doesn’t make it good. Crypto has a lot of good points. If a technology is worth keeping around, society eventually comes up with ways to reduce the drawbacks.

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Innovation never works in a straight line. Technology is invented and iteratively improved. Business models are invented and iteratively improved. If you believe that all things should “work” from the get-go you don’t know how business works.

I feel for people who were on the wrong end of crypto as their losses are real. But it is a drop compared to the billions of people who’ve been on the wrong end of inflation/money printing and counter-party theft. The reason that people don’t think it’s a big deal is because the theft happens over decades rather than days, and happens via a mechanism that they don’t see or understand.