Reposting a note comparing some aspects of the current crypto space to weed that I made on the other app:
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Ten years ago, to many weed represented freedom, and rebellion against sclerotic old order that denied self-sovereignty over our bodies. Then, weed became legalized, and "official".
On that day, I remember my personal interest in weed dropping by > 2x overnight.
And since then, public discourse is moving toward a balanced view of weed: it is much less harmful than alcohol and smoking, and has valuable medical uses, but it is also far from harmless, especially in its modern corporate hyper-optimized versions.
Crypto finance is similar. In the old order, @GaryGensler created a regime where tokens that give investors clear indication of what their rights are and where their revenue comes from is a "security", but obfuscated "governance tokens" are potentially in the clear.
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This was a perverse distortion of incentives, and a key reason @GaryGensler must never be christened as a hero, even among crypto skeptics. Everything that happened in crypto was in part a response, part compliance part rebellion, to these pressures.
Over the last year, we have been entering a new order. Now, the most powerful people in the world are cheering on the idea of anyone creating tokens for anything, at any scale.
And so now is the time to talk about the difference between sugar-high short-term fun that is unwise to recommend to newbies, and long-term fulfillment and wealth-building. It is not about "fun is bad", it is about the equivalent of modern hyperaddictive cellphone games, versus chess or World of Warcraft.
Now is the time to talk about how large-scale political coins cross a further line: they are not just sources of fun, whose harm is contained to mistakes made by voluntary participants, they are vehicles for unlimited political bribery, including from foreign nation states.
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This is the essence of d/acc: the goal is not to indiscriminately accelerate everything, including superintelligent AI and fentanyl, the goal is to selectively accelerate defense to keep up with offense. Sometimes, defense is a matter of cultivating our own sense of virtue. Sometimes, defense is a matter of creating better alternatives.
In defi, we are already starting to see a return toward honest token-based fundraising that gives users clear understanding of what they are buying, bringing us the best of pre-2020-era ICOs while addressing their downsides. @infinex_app and @Truemarketsorg sales are two examples of this, and I know of other examples soon to come.
There is a bright future of capital allocation mechanisms that can be built. We can act to ensure alignment with community wishes and safeguard important values like privacy, security, open standards and open source, within the incentive structure itself. Acceleration is coming either way; it is our task to choose the brightest possible vector. 3 replies
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