Monero is an also-ran cryptocurrency, in the same proof-of-work family as Bitcoin and Etherium.
Monero.town is a Lemmy instance whose main communities are: Monero, privacy, Monero Memes, Meta, and Monero Mining.
Enough has been written on the negative ecological effects of proof-of-work based cryptocurrency that I think it’s not controversial to say it is incompatible with the Solarpunk vision.
Pictured inciting incident is a person advertising the crypto-capitalist Lemmy competitor “Nostr” in the anarchism community.
I don’t personally mind a debate about Nostr, but like most of the content from Monero.town, it doesn’t belong here. More sales pitches from a crypto-currency hype instance are going to be tedious, and crowd out the kind of progressive politics and human interactions we’re looking to nurture here. Reddit’s /r/anarchism had to constantly repel assholes trying to pass off their edgy capitalism as anarchist, Lemmy gives us the unique opportunity to send a strong message and nip this in the bud.
Fediverse sites that have already blocked Monero.town –
reject (10): solarpunk.moe, polyglot.city, freethought.online, icosahedron.website, sunbeam.city, vtuber.house, fruef.social, cutie.city, fuckcars.social, karas.social
followers_only (3): toot.cat, orbsafe.masto.host, partyparrot.social
Image Description
[Image description: Screenshot of an exchange between user [email protected] and Five containing the following text
Yea, that’s just not how Nostr works. Take a look here: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips These are implementation possibilities that the protocol enables. Every client must implement NIP-01. All of the other NIPs are optional so every client that you use (an app for example) has decided to implement different NIPs. You decide which client you use and how Nostr should feel like. Almost no client prioritizes content that received bitcoin.
Your “login mechanism” (private cryptographic key) has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. If you want to send btc to people you have to set that up yourself, manually linking a wallet to your key.
Five
I’m confused why you’re downplaying Nostr’s primary selling point - its close integration with Bitcoin. It’s clearly a cryptocurrency capitalist con job.
Almost no client prioritizes content that received bitcoin.
That’s not what I was saying, but I’m fascinated that you’re implying it’s much worse than I anticipated. Which clients have their priority linked to received bitcoin? ]
Isn’t it fair to say that literally all cryptocurrencies in the ‘proof of work’ model are extremely not-solar-punk to the extent that they’re kind of the antithesis of solarpunk?
I say this because under the current model these are hardware systems designed to essentially waste as much energy as possible for no good reason whatsoever
block chain tech could be useful for tracking the status, qualities, dispositions etc of physical or logistical resources in a democratic, anonymous, and decentralized way WITHOUT the equivalent energy expenditure of burning several hectares of old growth forest per hour, but that’s a far cry from what these shitcoins all do.
Yes, that’s more than fair to say.
It’s possible to design a block-chain that works by signing each link with multiple public-key cryptography pairs, for example, and that doesn’t require proof of work. I’ve been careful to specify ‘proof of work’ not only because most criticisms of Monero can be applied to other cryptocurrencies in its family, but the intense hype and popularity of these schemes crowd out the alternative distributed currency systems that exist or are possible.
I think it is solarpunk to be interested in distributed digital currency, and I don’t want to stigmatize curiosity in technology. In the current situation anarchists are using digital currency schemes designed by their enemies to privilege the capitalist class, and I think we should be clear on that. I don’t want to exclude the possibility of digital currency that reduces harm to anarchist and solarpunk goals in comparison to existing schemes.