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Well, things have been interesting!
It's been a good week, overall. I had my first counselling session today, and it was surprisingly underwhelming. It wasn't bad; I think it was good overall; but years of TV and movies have prepped me to expect a certain kind of experience, and that's certainly not what I got. The two main practices I'm coming away with are:
1. Daily affirmations
2. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
The affirmations are more positive thinking exercises; looking at the day positively before anything has happened and anticipating interesting problems to solve and adopting a learning and growth mindset. This is all very straight forward after having started reading The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor.
CBT is a new one on me. I've already installed and looked at a few CBT apps on my phone, but I've never practiced it before. I selected FreeCBT because it doesn't require Google Services Framework and it has worked without issue on my phone so far. The interface is also very straightforward.
There's also been progress of a sort at work! Rather than dealing with the source of conflict directly, I'm now only participaing on the devops team. It's a cheat; but it has helped to remove a specific pain point and I am grateful for that. Besides that, I've been reviewing my Clifton Strength's results (something I revisit every couple years) and thinking about how this applies to current work. It's pretty obvious from this lense why I've been very unsatisfied with work lately, so I wrote a long email to my manager with that analysis and we'll discuss how to approach that tomorrow.
What else to write about? I mean, I've had so many things I've wanted to say a little bit about; but I never write it down except in super short blurbs on Mastodon.
There are exactly two cryptocurrencies I am aware of that are not complete and utter trashfires:
Every other cryptocurrency I've seen has fundamental flaws:
- Deflationary
These are essentially all ponzi schemes where the earlier you get in, the more you profit and everyone else after you is bolstering your position.
- Irreversible Transactions
Originally I thought this was a feature, but I've since reversed my opinion and now understand that the financial system benefits from the ability to reverse certain transactions when need be.
- 100% Public and Traceable
It is kind of weird that cryptocurrencies are abused so much by illicit markets since all transactions are public; but the trick is in tying real cash withdrawals to blockchain transactions. You can obfuscate that specific path through laundering, and this is exactly what criminals do. Once you're in fiat-land, then your identity is tied to your transactions; so the goal is to minimize any touchpoints with fiat currency and to obfuscate those when they occur.
In a sense, I'm kind of arguing against myself here, right? Well, sorta. The fiat system is private to the scope of the institutions you are interacting with, and those institutions communicate with the government on an as-needed basis. So to the government and the institutions, your financial dealings are public, but to your neighbors and friends they are private. I highly value privacy, so by default I prefer the fiat system here.
- Devastating Environmental Impact
This is true for cryptocurrencies that "mine" computation; but potentially applies to all cryptocurrencies that "mine" any kind of resource. Right now disk space or memory are not as restricted as compute; but once you deploy a userbase as large as Bitcoin's, then you start to run into new problems.
Bitcoin Has a Surprisingly High Environmental Impact
(Note: I only briefly perused this article; but it appears to sufficiently communicate the issue)
- Independent of Government
This is widely touted as a feature by neoliberals and libertarians - folks who are commonly extremely privileged and rich and don't to be regulated or to have to worry about supporting their communities. Obviously I disagree here. In the hands of a bad regime, yes, government control is bad for anything. You don't resolve this by putting power in the hands of unknown players who may or may not be working toward your best interest. And if you have a government that is operating in the public interest, then they can manipulate the financial system to the betterment of society. If they don't have the public's best interest in mind? You can always change countries or potentially even adopt a different currency without having to change countries, depending on where you live. A nice thing about fiat currencies is that each government has different goals, regulations and policies and they all reflect on each other in a positive feedback loop in a highly entangled international web. So yes, some countries still go off the rails; but the entire tapestry is fairly resilient. If you view cryptocurrencies in the light of being yet an additional currency to play into this tapestry, then sure; knock your socks off. You still have to trust unknown actors to not derail the currency and all the other negatives I've listed, but at least the rest of the financial tapestry will remain resilient.
So my conclusion here is: Fuck cryptocurrencies. Seriously. I know you can make money off of them, but all they are good for right now is funding illicit activity and speculation. I refuse to participate.
On the other hand, there are a couple of examples of how they could work if looked at as a tool for humans and not for increasing the wealth and power of criminals and neoliberals and libertarians.
FairCoin in particular looks like the right path. Naturally, I expect it to go nowhere since we don't deserve things that good. GNU Taler seems like a well-thought out application of cryptocurrency to real problems that real people might actually have.
So that's my cryptocurrency rant. Feel free to disagree or agree with me; I'm fine either way.
Originally I intended to write a lot more here, but it seems I just didn't.
Catch you next time!
Published on June 17, 2021