Just before New Year’s, Mozilla posted a tweet talking about how they’re going to accept cryptocurrency as a donation method, and a lot of people in the replies are very upset about it. Jamie Zawinski, a Mozilla founder, has also directly responded to it.
What’s your thoughts on this?
Wayback Machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220105052253/https://twitter.com/mozilla/status/1476951030638260225
Update: https://lemmy.ml/post/140209
I’d suggest that “natural” and “ideal” are not necessarily the same thing
I agree that it’s natural for capitalism to be unregulated, because it is all-consuming and unsustainable by default, because it is inevitable that the few will centralise wealth, care only about their own interests, and subjugate the many
An ideal setup (for me) in a carefully-balanced capitalism would be to have equal power between the masses, the media, multi-national corporations, the wealthy, and the various levels of government: all would be doing important things in a society, but each is capable of holding the others accountable, none is able to gain control of the others
I believe we are very unbalanced currently, far from that ideal
Imho, technology and hard mathematical algorithms is the only thing that can enforce that balance. Every attempt at putting humans at the helm ends up leading into corruption.
Capitalism is actually being regulated, but by the rich and corrupt. The banks are not doing anyone a favor, and the current judicial and tax systems are designed to favor the rich.
The tricky thing is finding that key algorithm that could allow us to reach that balance… and then getting it adopted. Once we have that then implementing it through p2p systems like blockchains and cryptocurrencies could be a useful tech. Even though it has a reputation of being “untrackable”, that’s actually not necessarily the case… a bitcoin address can be tracked in the public p2p ledger. A well designed cryptocurrency can actually open the door to full disclosure and transparency in the transactions of public funds so that they are publicly auditable with no way for any records to be lost “by mistake”, for example.
Well, the currency monopoly and the traceability of everything strengthens the state and corporations too much. This harms peripheral communities more than the rich…
There is no such thing as balanced capitalism. It is not possible for the masses to have the same power as corporations, magnates and the capitalist state. This is all utopian or cynical.
When we overcome this economic model and its old institutions and classes, then yes, a State will be born that has collectivity, communities and progress as its basic principle.