Why does the left hate crypto so much?

sus

Well-known member
I think you are right though, @suspended, about the binaries around this - true believers vs total opposition.

On the tech front AI and surveillance are the main things I worry about at the moment and not crypto.
Yeah, I think this is super real. It's the over-exaggerated claims, idealism, proselytization of true believers that leads to skeptics getting extreme in their own right. Excess leading to excess, excess whose goal is "balancing out" the other side's excess.
 

sus

Well-known member
1626024116102.png
If the lever's fulcrum, here—the discursive “center”—is the purple triangle on the left-hand side, then we can see how much disproportionate influence the 5kg weight has merely through its positioning far-from-fulcrum. (The force an object exerts downward, on a lever, is proportional to how far it is from fulcrum.) Often, when we take a public stance, I believe that we size up the consensus within our enveloping subculture, or a set of beliefs advocated prominently by a rival outgroup, and then take a situated, strategic stance which we believe will help nudge that consensus “center” in a certain direction. It is not really that we believe Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls is the postmodern masterpiece par excellence—but we do believe it has been unfairly written off, and that our re-evaluation may one day be validated, become its own orthodoxy.
 

sus

Well-known member
or as Bourdieu said,
This explains why writers’ efforts to control the reception of their own works are always partially doomed to failure (one thinks of Marx’s ‘I am not a Marxist’); if only because the very effect of their work may transform the conditions of its reception and because they would not have had to write many of the things they did write and write them as they did—e.g. resorting to rhetorical strategies intended to ‘twist the stick in the other direction”—if they’d been granted from the outset what they are granted retrospectively.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
cryptocurrency is one of the few phenomena that brings the entire ideological spectrum into the same room and is predictably a shit show because of it
 
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linebaugh

Well-known member
For real? Not here.
Pelicoin+ATM.png


To buy Bitcoin, a user feeds cash into the machine, then generates a QR code from their cryptocurrency wallet on their mobile device, which is scanned to receive their purchased Bitcoin. To sell Bitcoin, a user sends Bitcoin from their digital wallet to the QR code provided by the Bitcoin ATM.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
curious as to why though. I imagine its primarily used for selling? out on the town and need to transfer some funds over real quick? Or maybe they're banking on the novelty drawing in those who normally wouldnt. Cant imagine anyone whose already deep in it buying at one of these spots.
 
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linebaugh

Well-known member
Actually I bet the ability to turn cash directly into bitcoin is very attractive for its libertarian adjacent base
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I rob a bank, go over to one of these and turn the haul entirely into bitcoin and then go home and sell the bitcoin back on my computer - what happens?
 

john eden

male pale and stale
curious as to why though. I imagine its primarily used for selling? out on the town and need to transfer some funds over real quick? Or maybe they're banking on the novelty drawing in those who normally wouldnt. Cant imagine anyone whose already deep in it buying at one of these spots.
I think it’s the latter - buying for people who‘ve noticed the hype but are clueless. The lowest level on the pyramid.
 

version

Well-known member
"BritCoin was launched with true British traditional values in mind. Honesty, integrity, accountability and innovation are at the heart of this currency."
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
curious as to why though. I imagine its primarily used for selling? out on the town and need to transfer some funds over real quick? Or maybe they're banking on the novelty drawing in those who normally wouldnt. Cant imagine anyone whose already deep in it buying at one of these spots.
I live in a pretty deprived, majority-black part of the west side of Chicago (i.e., most of the west side) and not only are there those stupid ATMs, there are "buy crypto" ads on the benches @ bus stops. I assumed it's somehow a grift on poor people, like payday loans or whatever, in this case as john says just more grist for the mill, tho who knows. does bring to mind the infamous OneCoin crypto scam, tho that was just a regular MLM pyramid scheme.

I also think you're dead right that the discourse around crypto is a mess bc it brings everyone potentially into the same room, and that john is right that a lot of the left anti-crypto has to do with the odious ppl frequently attached to it rather than opposition to crypto per se. It's not like those left etc folx are big fans of fiat currency either.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
I live in a pretty deprived, majority-black part of the west side of Chicago (i.e., most of the west side) and not only are there those stupid ATMs, there are "buy crypto" ads on the benches @ bus stops. I assumed it's somehow a grift on poor people, like payday loans or whatever, in this case as john says just more grist for the mill, tho who knows. does bring to mind the infamous OneCoin crypto scam, tho that was just a regular MLM pyramid scheme.

I also think you're dead right that the discourse around crypto is a mess bc it brings everyone potentially into the same room, and that john is right that a lot of the left anti-crypto has to do with the odious ppl frequently attached to it rather than opposition to crypto per se. It's not like those left etc folx are big fans of fiat currency either.
Im west side chicago as well. North. Youre right though, I see a majority of them in the gas stations along feeder roads creeping south.
 
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