Petition to Defederate Monero.Town
Petition to Defederate Monero.Town
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? ]
Defederation doesn't make a place disappear from the internet, although exploding-heads is shutting down at the end of the month as apparently they got frustrated with being defederated everywhere (which reveals a lot about the real purpose of that instance).
But what I mean is: do you have any examples of monero.town users causing actual problems here on slrpnk.net or harassing people via DMs?
I remember only one such occasion and when I got in contact with the monero.town admin it was resolved pretty well on their end, so I currently don't really see an urgent need to defederate them here.
Of course there is the option to defederate as a statement of some sort, and I did so for Facebook's Threads, but as much as I think cryptocurrencies are poisoning the well, I think that monero.town is not really comparable to Facebook etc.
Yeah, Monero.Town is small fries in comparison to the damage Threads could do to the culture here. That was a good call.
It is still an evangelist instance; I'd put it in the same category as Hexbear. Their users have a message that they're heavily invested in, and that's all they want to engage other instances about. The post in anarchism is a particularly egregious shoe-horn because of the history of capitalist entryism in anarchist spaces. I've heard Hexbear's admins are cooperative as well, but that doesn't change the nature of the sub.
The tipping point for me was reading the admin's opinion of instances that have defederated already:
My instinct is to express solidarity with anyone a capitalist calls 'small snowflakes,' especially because we're a larger instance. Crypto-currency groups have a toxic culture problem, and maybe slrpnk.net defederation will be a wake-up call; probably not. But in any case, fewer of our people will have to put up with it.
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.
I would probably give them more leeway if their members engaged with SLRPNK content rather than just posting ads for Nostr and WireMin …
We shouldn't defederate. The environmental impact depends on the tech and how you produce power..
Also other than cash, bartering, monero is the only currency that respects privacy.
We need privacy and anonymity in a free society, even a solar punk one.
people need privacy and anonymity – we don’t need currency
Solarpunk's goal is anarco-comunism, there wouldn't be any money nor a need for it, it would follow gift economy.
I’d argue that like most leftist ideologies it’s about both the ends and the means to get there, so we shouldn’t ignore the utility of privacy in transactions as we work towards that future, but I do agree with what you said. We should try to use currency only as necessary. It’s unproductive to hold one currency on a pedestal for its qualities, it should only be seen for its immediate practical utility while also weighing negative environmental and political impact
I agree we need privacy and anonymity in a free society, but the only people making the claim that Monero respects privacy are Monero people.
Block-chain crypto-currency relies on the concept of a public ledger. Without a openly verifiable record of wallets or money, a zero-trust system cannot function. Therefore Bitcoin and Etherium are not private or anonymous, though they were often falsely advertised as such during their inception.
I don't know the precise method Monero uses, but I know that it's mathematically impossible to make a zero-trust block-chain cryptocurrency that is as private as cash transactions; only to make de-anonymizing more computationally expensive. For this reason Monero is worse than Bitcoin and Etherium, which are more widely known to be public records. Since more people currently believe Monero's marketing, they are less likely to take other precautions to protect themselves. When faced with the tools of an adversary with resources like the IRS, the Monero chain is effectively transparent.
I don't feel bad for not deeply understanding the mechanism behind Monero's privacy claims, because it's clear that the Monero people don't understand it either. All the ledger information for Monero for the last three years is now publicly visible, and will continue to be available for public analysis. There is no way to guarantee there are not more bugs of this type still in the complex codebase.
TL;DR- This turned out way longer than I expected. Skepticism of Bitcoin among solarpunks is understandable, but things aren't as bad as they seem.
I'm neutral on the defederation issue here. I am overall mildly hostile to Monero, and also mildly against defederation without a strong reason (such as being EH, grad, or HB). However, I would like to address the idea that Bitcoin (specifically) and proof-of-work are antithetical to the interests of solarpunks.
To lay all my cards on the table:
- I don't really consider myself a solarpunk, so this is a bit of an outsider perspective. I think solarpunk is kind of cool, but it's also new to me.
- I'm here to lurk (and maybe participate) in the anarchism community. I've been an anarchist for a long time (almost 20 years), mostly centered on mutualism. I've also been interested in alternative currencies (digital and otherwise) since before Bitcoin existed.
- I do have a financial stake in Bitcoin, but not any other cryptocurrencies. I sincerely do not believe my commentary in general has any effect on the price of bitcoin, and especially not when addressing such a small audience. I am not looking to convince anyone here to buy anything.
- I have been heavily interested in Bitcoin almost since it's creation, and as a result have a pretty deep level of knowledge about it. I want people to understand Bitcoin both because I enjoy sharing my obsessive interests with others, and because knowledge is power and power should be widely distributed. The latter part goes double for anarchists, because I want anarchists to be well-informed in order to help the anarchist project succeed.
For the purposes of my argument, everything bad that is said about altcoins (non-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies) is true. Some of them can maybe be generously described as "honest experiments that are likely to fail". The rest are varying degrees of scammy, up to and including "intentionally planned as a scam from the start". Monero is probably one of the lesser offenders in this regard.
Also, I'm presuming that at least some people here see some value in the existence of decentralized digital currency. If you think money is inherently bad and that humanity should abolish it completely, then obviously through that ideological lens Bitcoin is all downside with no benefit. The only thing that I can do to change your mind is to convince you to change your lens, and that's outside of the scope of this discussion.
Continued in reply
Energy Consumption
This is admittedly the weakest part of my argument. Even if one accepts that the existence of a decentralized digital currency might be beneficial, the energy consumption of proof-of-work is still a real cost, and the benefit needs to outweigh that cost. I think it will become a clear net benefit in the future, but right now things are more hazy and theoretical, as Bitcoin has not yet been fully adopted, nor is its development "finished".
Why use proof of work anyway? Because it's the only way that we've found so far to make a hard decentralized digital currency. Non-hard currencies involve trusting someone else, and that someone can be leaned on by governments, can be robbed, or can be a scam artist themselves. Trust is a necessary part of being a social animal, but it is also useful to reduce the degree to which you are at the mercy of others, particularly when money is concerned.
Proof-of-stake is not a suitable replacement for proof of work. It compromises the security properties of the system, and it introduces a wealth-concentrating mechanism. Stakers are rewarded in proportion to the amount of currency that they have. This literally bakes capitalism into the system. See the next section for more on this.
Perceptions of Bitcoin's current and future energy consumption tend to be overblown. Yes, it uses more electricity than entire (small) countries. However, that currently amounts to under 0.5% of global energy consumption, and it peaked at under 1% in 2022 (see here and here).
Environmentally-focused skeptics tend to assume that Bitcoin's energy consumption will continue to increase without limit. This is dependent on the "deflationary spiral" idea that the price of bitcoin will also continue to increase without limit. Both are incorrect.
Yes, there is a hard cap on the amount of bitcoins that will be produced, which makes it a deflationary currency. Yes, this will result in more saving ("hoarding") and less borrowing when compared with the inflationary currencies that we use now. Yes, that means there will be less investment due to the lack of cheap credit. However the "spiral" part is nonsensical on its face. Bitcoin is not some economic black hole that we'll throw all of our economic resources into until we starve to death. Besides, from an environmental perspective, less investment should be a good thing.
Without the "line goes up forever" aspect of the deflationary spiral, the argument for runaway energy usage falls apart as well. Bitcoin will use an (eventually) stable, likely small percentage of our global electricity output. If we're generating that electricity from sustainable sources, we'll be fine. If we remain stuck on fossil fuels, we'll choke to death on carbon even without Bitcoin in the mix.
There is a silver lining to this aspect of Bitcoin as well. It's to at least some degree incentivizing renewable energy deployments. There are lots of areas that have "stranded" renewable energy, in that they're a good place to harvest electricity, but there's no one nearby to use that electricity, and no power transmission infrastructure to carry it to populated areas. Previously, smelting operations would be set up in these areas to turn bauxite into aluminum. However, Bitcoin mining has significantly lower overhead. You can set up solar/wind/hydro, ship in Bitcoin miners, and make some money off of it without having to run long-distance power lines right away. Once the lines are built, or once some power consumers set up nearby, the mining rigs can be sent off to some other site.
Continued in reply
More Bitcoin Means less Punk
Yes, there is a hard cap on the amount of bitcoins that will be produced, which makes it a deflationary currency. Yes, this will result in more saving (“hoarding”) and less borrowing when compared with the inflationary currencies that we use now. Yes, that means there will be less investment due to the lack of cheap credit. However the “spiral” part is nonsensical on its face. Bitcoin is not some economic black hole that we’ll throw all of our economic resources into until we starve to death. Besides, from an environmental perspective, less investment should be a good thing.
Less investment should be a good thing when it comes to oil development, but when money is not re-invested in a capitalist society, the result is increased scarcity. In the absence of bitcoin, a middle-class person might chose to spend their surplus money on a bicycle, building a chicken coup, or learning a new skill. Bitcoin hucksters would prefer they spend it on Bitcoin, with the promise that it might make them more money for less effort by sitting in the blockchain doing nothing.
Society advances through infrastructure, and while the Solarpunk project requires different infrastructure than what is currently planned, it still requires resources. If we are going to create a society of abundance, building it on a currency that thrives on scarcity is a non-starter.
Popularity -> Energy -> Scarcity
Without the “line goes up forever” aspect of the deflationary spiral, the argument for runaway energy usage falls apart as well. Bitcoin will use an (eventually) stable, likely small percentage of our global electricity output. If we’re generating that electricity from sustainable sources, we’ll be fine. If we remain stuck on fossil fuels, we’ll choke to death on carbon even without Bitcoin in the mix.
If the Bitcoin system survives until 2040, it will reach a maximum of 21 million coins. Once minting new blocks is no longer rewarded with new coins, continued minting is expected to be funded by transaction fees. That does not mean the energy usage will stop, or even plateau. The energy use of bitcoin is related to the demand for Bitcoin. The more demand, the higher the value in dollars. The higher the dollar value, the greater dollar value return for mining it. The more value for mining, the more mining rigs will come online. The more rigs, the more energy is used.
Currently bitcoin is used for niche markets, and is not widely adopted. If the crypto-bro dreams of mass adoption were realized, like the primary currency of a world-wide solarpunk society, demand would skyrocket and energy use would spiral out of control. Using 1% of the world's energy is a huge number, but is minuscule when compared to the amount needed in that scenario.
Capitalism
Let's be clear. Capitalism is not money. Capitalism is not market exchange. Capitalism is not "line goes up".
Capitalism is a system of state-granted privileges for owners of capital. Some of these privileges were intentionally implemented, and some likely came about by accident, but they all have the effect of transferring wealth from the working class to the owning class. The state primarily does the bidding of the capitalists. Even though much of the world is ostensibly democratic, when there are policy disagreements between the working class and the capitalist class, the capitalists generally get their way.
The capitalist class does not want "anarcho"-capitalism. It does not benefit them. The state already works for them. Without the state, they lose their privileges. Without their privileges, they eventually lose their wealth, as their megacorporations are incredibly inefficient.
This is not a defense of "anarcho"-capitalism. At best, ancaps are confused. If they were to destroy the state, they would allow the capitalist class plenty of opportunity to recreate it. (And of course, the worst of them are outright mask-off fascists.)
Bitcoin is not capitalism, even if ancaps tend to like it. Bitcoin is not issued by any government. It doesn't require the use of the banking system that they control. They cannot use it to manipulate the economy. They cannot freeze anyone's Bitcoin wallet, nor can they seize bitcoins that are properly protected. The degree to which adoption of Bitcoin diminishes the state's abilities is a matter of debate, but it does impose some real constraints. And in constraining the state, it also constrains the capitalist class. Issuing money is also seen as one of the reasons we "need" governments, so the existence and adoption of Bitcoin deals a blow to that as well.
In the previous section, I mentioned that proof-of-stake introduces a wealth-concentrating mechanism. Proof-of-work, on the other hand lacks this. Unlike with PoS currencies, holding bitcoins does not grant you more bitcoins.
If you want to gain bitcoins through mining, you need to purchase specialized equipment to do so. If done properly you can recoup the dollar cost of the miners, but they aren't likely to produce as many bitcoins over their useful lifetime as you would have gotten from just using the dollars to buy bitcoins directly.
Even in terms of dollar return, you can't just keep buying more miners to gain more dollars compound-interest style. The return on Bitcoin mining always approaches the cost of miners + electricity + labor. There is no guaranteed profit margin.
As for people getting rich off of buying bitcoins, I'm not aware of any indications that there's been a particular order in which the various socioeconomic strata have invested. The early adopters were largely not already rich, as far as I know. A fair number of "old money" types have been skeptical of Bitcoin. Of course, one does need to have at least some amount of disposable income to invest in the first place. Some technical inclination also helps. It may just be a case of "the middle class get rich" rather than "the rich get richer".
Also note that as I touched on in the previous section, the line won't go up forever. The price will reach equilibrium once Bitcoin reaches its "final" adoption level, wherever that happens to be.
Continued in reply
I feel like there is really little overlap between the communities on both instances. Atleast I would probably not even notice the defederation.
But since the instance seems to focus on the cryptocurrency Monero I would like to point out reasons why Monero might be relevant for slrpnk.net.
- one of the ways to donate to the Lemmy project / developers is via Monero
- for anarchy2023.org, which was a pretty big anarchist event (3000-4000 participants and 400+ workshops), Monero is one of the 3 ways to donate for covering the costs
- we have [email protected] on slrpnk.net - while probably most people in that community are getting their equipment&seeds in a legal way (and do not sell drugslol), there are also many folks worldwide who have to rely on illegal ways to get those things. buying them online, using crypto like Monero might one way to do that
I hope this does not come over as an endorsement of Monero. I just want to point out the small, but existing connections some folks on slrpnk.net might have with Monero
I knew that about Lemmy, but not about anarchy2023 - thanks for sharing.
My position is not that anarchists shouldn't use Monero ever under any circumstances, but that Monero is about as antithetical to solarpunk and anarchism as the Swiss banking system, which is incidentally another way to send support for anarchy2023.
If there was a Lemmy instance set up as a grassroots marketing initiative for TWINT, I would suggest defederation from them as well.
If Slrpnks are using Monero to avoid government oversight against better advice, using the same Lemmy account to post about growing cannabis and to comment in a Monero help post is pretty terrible security culture. Defederation discourages this privacy mistake.
Kinda wild seeing this thread as a a dude who finds block chain stuff interesting but isn't invested in any coin. I started up a few subs on my local if anyone wants to talk about it but yeah, I also love solar punk stuff so to speak and clean energy, and they are working against each other in current deployments.
Hope you guys come up with something that works for all your users on your lemmy server.
TIL there's a solar community, cool.
I had a look at Nostr and it seemed more like a Twitter competitor, which is why I use Lemmy.
I’m not sure I agree that crypto is fundamentally incompatible with solarpunk but I’m not necessarily an expert. Obviously anything that uses large amounts of fossil energy for non-crucial reasons is problematic but there’s no reason crypto can’t transition to green energy along with the rest of the world economy.
Is this just a single post by one user or is it a pattern? I think a simple message that this type of content is not on topic, and maybe removing the thread is a better approach than defederation in that case. If it becomes a pattern that users are engaging in this despite making it clear that it’s unwelcome, and particularly if admins of the instance are not addressing it, then defederation may be appropriate.
I think it'd take more than a change in power sources to make the current cryptocurrency schemes fit solarpunk ideology. Proof of work systems essentially create currencies backed by waste, tremendous amounts of processor-intensive math done for no other reason than to generate the currency. Math/power/processor time that could be spent tracking weather patterns, identifying patterns in invasive species, climate change, or other potential public goods. I'm not against reconsidering the current billionaire-centric financial systems, but the current crop of cryptos look more like capitalist get rich quick schemes with a lot of hardware and power externalities to me.
If there's a currency that mints coins when your rig discovers an exoplanet or something I'd personally aay there's room for that
Edit: for what it's worth, I'm not sure defederating is necessary yet, but I also wouldn't object to it if that's the way it goes
This is a single post, but a known pattern for the culture of crypto-evangelists.
Removing threads not only removes the offending messages, but also the replies. We don't need censorship to protect us from the concept of proof-of-work cryptocurrency, we just need to reduce moderator and community fatigue. We should be proactive about this.
I'm not sure I'd call Monero an "also-ran" given that it's the only cryptocurrency that's actually regularly used as a currency, rather than just as a speculative asset/Ponzi scheme.
Sure the primary use as a currency is buying drugs, but that's still use, and plenty of people happen to like drugs.
I'm sure plenty of people on this instance happen to like drugs. As I've explained earlier, Monero specifically is a terrible tool for that purpose. Given that we want to protect people from criminalization for their medicinal choices, we should be encouraging more anarchist and solarpunk aligned solutions, like establishing hawaladar networks.
I just read most of that wiki article and I am struggling to see how Monero is different from a digital version of hawala. What am I missing?
Little late to the party but I don't think defederation should be taken so lightly and applied on the basis of "this instance isn't aligned with solarpunk". MOST instances aren't aligned with solarpunk and thats fine IMO. If a user from that instance posted something off topic in the anarchist sub then just ban that person?
IF it becomes a major problem where they are crashing subs and stuff like that then sure lets assess defederating but the whole walled garden thing is not what I came to Lemmy for.
If you don't like crypto, dont follow those subs, if someone posts crypto offtopic on slrpnk then report it and move on.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Thanks CommunityLinkFixerBot, but the link structure is intentional.
I want to provide references for people to verify my statements, but I don't want to encourage users here to brigade Monero.town.