Crypto For Lefties, Part Three

I have been trying to convince Lefties that crypto is a good option for them too. In Part One, I argued that it makes no sense to cling to the banksters’ form of money, e.g. dollars, in a reactionary way, unless you really are a Reactionary.¹ In Part Two, I gave the reader my recommendation of the three best ‘Left-aligned’ cryptocurrencies to use.

I know that most Lefties will have nagging doubts still. Doubts over crypto are reasonable. I will try to deal with some of them.

“Crypto just seems to be a scam. Rich people hype it up, pump the price, and then leave the plebs with the useless currency.”

I agree. Since Satoshi Nakamoto invented cryptocurrency, charlatans have grasped their chance with both hands. It’s just human nature. It’s like honey to ants. It doesn’t mean honey is bad. One needs to look at the fundamentals. Many cryptos are decentralized and avoid Wall Street control. Ultimately, crypto is a piece of tech and it is that which we make it.

“We all need to use the same form of money, otherwise Sovereign Individualists will bring down the state and we will fall into anarchy.”

Who are ‘we’? You must mean a nation-state. People who push loyalty to nation-state stuff are living in the past, and an idealized version too. You are actually just propping up corrupt politicians. Sovereign Individualists can only bring down a building so rotten that it would have fallen anyway. Look all over the World and you will see that forcing citizens to use weak, cheaty money never goes well.

“I am worried that my crypto will fall to zero.”

A wholly reasonable worry!

In the last post, I made the analogy of the power grid and street transformers. Money is a lot like electricity nowadays. One can send it in a second, so certain forms of money are apt for being sent like this. Other forms of money are apt for being stored. It’s not unlike the physical world. When you get paper cash, storing it usually means transforming it to numbers in a database, courtesy of a bank.

Have a bit of faith in crypto. If you’re still really worried, store it as something in which you do have faith. Whatever crypto you get, you can easily trade it within your app. Plus, you will be able to see when a cryptocurrency enters a death-spiral. It doesn’t happen in weeks; it takes a year or three. Watch the price in your crypto app. Most apps allow you to see a 1-year chart.² When things look grim, you will have plenty of time to get out. For example, here is the 1-year chart for ETH; you can see that it’s doing fine.

“Using crypto makes me feel like a criminal.”

You’ve been well propagandized then. As the Pandora Papers showed, laundered property is the choice of elite, white-collar wrong-doers. Crypto is used in a tiny fraction of criminal activities, well behind cash, property, and gold.

“Crypto has no intrinsic value. It’s magic-money tied to nothing.”

The dollar is tied to nothing too. Both fiat money and cryptocurrency are based on trust in a system. One system is opaque, lax, and enforced by violence, and the other system is open, self-disciplined, and voluntary.

There is a form of cryptocurrency tied to real assets: Stablecoin. If you have a problem with bitcoin (BTC) or litecoin (LTC) or ether (ETH) or similar having no intrinsic value, all is not lost— use a stablecoin such as Tether Gold (XAUT).

Tying bitcoin to nothing physical was a design-choice. The sad case of e-gold was schooling in this matter. Assets can be nimmed.³ Warehouses of gold or bank accounts of bonds actually act as a spur to corrupt feds. It’s a big topic, this design-choice, so best to leave it there.

“Setting up chia or vertcoin payments would be a lot of hassle for little reward. The usage would be very low.”

Note that I put in ether (ETH) as the first option, because, yes, chia (XCH) and vertcoin (VTC) are obscure choices. They would indeed take extra work. The situation I had in mind for XCH or VTC was a small organization of 3-100 people, sending money to each other. It could, for example, be a local organic farming community.

At any rate, tools like Trocador⁴ allow your customers to trade whatever they’ve got on the fly. More on this in a future post.

“Crypto is a tool of the Technocrats. How strange it is that you, who writes an anti-technocratic blog, cheer it on.”

Imagine you were in North America, c. 1820. Would you tell the Native Americans not to use guns, because guns were a tool of the Imperialists?

“Being around crypto people just ruins my vibe. They’re annoying.”

A lot of the time, the typical Cryptopians rub me up the wrong way too. It’s easy to feel a sense of tribalism and want to be on the opposing team. Don’t be wrong for the sake of being contrary.

Conclusion

My favorite form of money is silver coin. If you happen to live in a community which pays for stuff with silver, consider yourself blessed. Crypto is more practical at this point in time. I’m not being a cheerleader for crypto. I just want you to try it.

DISCLAIMER:This post deals with crypto as a form of currency. It is not investment advice. If your goal is to invest in crypto, then do your own research, and, preferably, consult a professional.