Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.

Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.

People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.

Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.

Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.

Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions—things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis—while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.

  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    So a project I would like to set up is using a DAO to manage the funding account of and the account of a cloud resource.

    So that the a democratic vote can be held on the public record for how it is configured, as opposed to the standard sys admin model of a single owner and manual adding more people to it with powers to delete other admins.

    In trying to understand the upside of the DAO in that use case:

    • how does a new user first obtain a token to have a vote on your server?
    • Is there an existing problem with trust, or the users of your server not trusting how the server is configured?
    • How does it differ from doing a straw poll for voting democratically?
    • How would it streamline funding, exactly?
    • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      7 months ago

      I’ll start with number 2. For sure there is, for example the Lemmy instance I’m using, I can say it supports Lemmy clients and can talk to other Lemmy instances but I have no way of know what the state of the actual running back end is. It could be compromised, exiflitrating data, puppeting my account, etc whatever it wants to do. If the instance admin wanted to they can configure however they want and my only option is to leave.

      They could do a straw poll but it’s ultimately at their discretion. A straw poll puts the users as counsol too the ones in charge. It does hold anyone accountable.

      The funding streamlining would come from the fact that the DAO can own wallets and make periodic payments based on what was voted on or create multisig wallets for sub teams to manage their own budgets given to them by the DAO. Compare this a traditional a setup where to schedule payments that group agreed upon, where a vote would have to be held, then the decision sent to accounting to then sent to a bank to then sent to the target wallet. Each one of those hand off introducing the possibility of confusion or obfuscation.

      I saved the first one for last because I feel like I know the least on that one. There is docs on how to do it https://ethereum.org/en/dao/ and I know it means that a token becomes associated with a wallet on the chain, but the exact methods that a DAO might actually do that is something I haven’t done and I know it can be done in different ways.

      • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        I can say it supports Lemmy clients and can talk to other Lemmy instances but I have no way of know what the state of the actual running back end is. It could be compromised, exiflitrating data, puppeting my account, etc whatever it wants to do. If the instance admin wanted to they can configure however they want and my only option is to leave.

        I’m no expert on servers, so correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m assuming the blockchain would essentially just list the status of various administrative things on the system, like how the firewall is set up or what ports are open, and users would be able to vote on changing individual settings?

        They could do a straw poll but it’s ultimately at their discretion. A straw poll puts the users as counsol too the ones in charge. It does hold anyone accountable.

        Surely that’s only within certain limitations? Like if your users collectively voted with the DAO to host illegal material, and that was automatically put through, the server owner would ultimately be responsible for continuing to host that material, and presumably would take action to stop it regardless of the DAO.

        So the owner ultimately still has to monitor what the users are doing on the DAO, and intervening if need be.

        The funding streamlining would come from the fact that the DAO can own wallets and make periodic payments based on what was voted on or create multisig wallets for sub teams to manage their own budgets given to them by the DAO.

        So a user would need to be tech-savvy enough to set up an account with an exchange to convert their real money into crypto and send it to the correct wallet (which I suspect is more prone to error than using Librapay).

        Compare this a traditional a setup where to schedule payments that group agreed upon, where a vote would have to be held, then the decision sent to accounting to then sent to a bank to then sent to the target wallet. Each one of those hand off introducing the possibility of confusion or obfuscation.

        I feel like all of those processes happening via crypto would, if anything, increase obfuscation. I guess theoretically, it does remove the steps of the sysadmin needing to move crypto between wallets, but if the end-goal of the vote is to send money somewhere that’s not on the chain, wouldn’t that mean the owner of the managed account would need to manually convert the crypto out of an exchange and into a regular bank account to then be sent to the final destination account?

        With such widespread fraud and history of insecurities in crypto exchanges, I feel like the admin would be trading a minor inconvenience of not needing to do some minor administrative work in exchange for much bigger potential headaches.

        • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          7 months ago

          For the simplest case you just have your system pull down config data from the blockchain as you would any DB and configure its self based on that data (because of costs probably something like which private chain to pull from or which got repo to look for configs from, and from there deploy the system with your standard gitops workflow for configuring cloud infrastructure, os, platform (e.g. k8s), and app configs.)

          You also can use what are called oracle services if hitting API from the smart contracts themselves is seen as useful.

          Google cloud also support ETH payments so that simplifies that some. Other hosting services exist too, but GCP a pretty mature platform.

          It doesn’t NEED to be as complicated of an IT system, just saying it can scale handled to more complicated.

          I would think something like bitpay would be a good choice. Have the DAO controlled wallet put eth via smart contract to a bitpay address that is setup to LLC’s account (or whatever legal entity owns the bank account), and from there do your normal fiat payments (this too could be controlled by something like invoice ninja that’s configuration was defined on-chain).

          All this to say you have to:

          1. set up a DAO in a way you feel is inlign with your goals (hard)
          2. Put root of trust data on chain to establish the root system (data on chain, links to things like IPFS for larger data, smart contracts, etc)
          3. Set up system to pull or utilize an oracle to push configs to APIs to configure payments, deploy systems, etc.
          4. Run services.

          All of this to enable day two ops for things like: increase spend of cloud service vote increases, wallet is sent more funds, cloud setting config changed to support the higher spend, etc

          All automated. With the voting mechanism making it possible to review the financial changes and system changes as a collective in one swoop, and then after that executing potentially without human hand offs.