💾 Archived View for adamthiede.com › log › 2023-01-05.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:25:55. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Been hearing a lot about a "Parallel Polis" or basically an underground society. There's a lot of cryptocurrency (read: bitcoin) shills involved in it. That seems kind of wacky to me.
Cryptocurrency is cool. I have relatives in different nations and financially transacting with these people is very difficult. Cryptocurrencies are transcontinental and non-government-owned, so they solve a lot of problems. But as part of an underground or parallel society? Cryptocurrencies are wholly dependent on the infrastructure provided by modern society. Power and Internet are not trivial things. Cryptocurrencies also can't be transacted with offline and without computers. So that lock a lot of people out, and keeps most people dependent on the very thing they wish to escape.
Cryptocurrency is, like many decentralized technologies, very slow moving and full of re-centralization mechanisms by those in power. So it's going to take a while to make it work well. But currencies as part of a parallel society need to be offline and computer-less first, cool tech toy second.