The issue is that those good intentions were suffused with the Silicon Valley brand of libertarian ideology, which takes the already naïve utopianism (and blindness to dynamics of power) of libertarianism and mixes in a heavy dose of privilege (both racial, geographic and socioeconomic) and an explicit denial that this privileged perspective might not be universally superior, a particularly naïve technooptimism, and a die-hard, "all progress is good progress" mode of thinking. There are massive flaws all the way down to the very philosophical core of crypto, let alone NFTs, most notably the idea that "nodoby can be trusted, thus we distribute trust naïvely while ignoring the potential that this distributed trust can be accumulated". This is a mode of thinking so full of easily exploitable loopholes that it will never, ever be functional in any real way. And the grand irony of it all is that this - as we see in the crypto and NFT world today - results is more centralization, as there are no regulatory mechanisms put into place to avoid the accumulation of power and wealth - after all, the system is built on nobody having the power to do such regulation in the first place. There is no world in which this would not be exploited, and there never will be.
I like your reflections on this, though as I said above I have zero belief in crypto or NFTs coming back in some beneficial way. The evangelists have had more than a decade to demonstrate an actually useful implementation of this tech that isn't already performed better by existing mechanisms, or that couldn't be implemented in less actively harmful ways. I think you're right about the role of different approaches in developing tech, and I agree that we overall benefit from having a diversity of motivations and interests in what gets developed and how. But we're seeing the real-world global scale consequences of unchecked capitalism play out in real time through boths societal and environmental harms, and it's clear to me that the approach of "let's just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" of innovation when combined with profit-first neoliberal capitalism is just not sustainable in any way, shape or form. If anything, this is an argument for closer ties between the people you mention - the ethically minded ones and the tinkerers, as they can benefit from exchanging views and knowledge and provide perspective that they can't get from themselves.
Put it this way: if the bubble that allows you the freedom to study and work is so insular that it lets you ignore the real-world consequences of your actions, and is large enough that those consequences are massively global in scale, then that bubble needs popping. Nobody is owed the privilege of being insulated from the world in that way, and humanity does not need nor benefit from this thoughtless sprint forward, where innovation at any cost is seen as a good. We need to slow down, and start thinking more. If that means that these bubbled-up people will be less free to study and work? Honestly, that's not even a blip on the overall cost-benefit analysis of this. Slightly checking the privilege of a group of massively privileged people running the world into the ground because "we're not doing any harm, we're just innovating" is a benefit, not a loss.
But ... do you think the people causing said governmental corruption would somehow not corrupt a system that entirely lacks regulatory mechanisms? The net result of things being decentralized in the way crypto is, is that whoever has the means to exert power can do so however they like, and they are free to work towards accumulating more wealth and power as no mechanisms exist to resist this.
I mean, crypto today is massively centralized. A handful of privately held exchanges control the vast majority of all transactions. Most blockchains are maintained by a handful of nodes, the owners of which are not accountable to anyone whatsoever. Heck, the history of cryptocurrencies forking due to bad actors gaming this system is conclusive evidence that such a system does not work.
How so? I'd really like to hear you expand on that thought.
The issue with this - and with proof of stake in general - is that this just entrenches the power of the wealthy few who can afford to be staked in a PoS cryptocurrency, which of course entirely undermines any semblance of this being a liberating technology. Not that it ever has been, but if the groundbreaking technology that is supposed to liberate people will only liberate people who can afford to stow away $100000+ somewhere and not care too much if they lose it? Yeah, sorry, that's not liberating, that is just another mechanism for the wealthy and powerful to entrench their power and wealth.
Ugh, I throw up in my mouth a bit every time I see someone use that term in that way. Just ... no. I mean, it's explicit incel(-adjacent) rhetoric aimed purely at dehumanization and alienation - and for that purpose, it unfortunately works really well, as you can typically tell that the people using the words in that way are really not thinking of the group of people they're describing as humans at all. It's this fascinating pastiche of the nonsensical "we're rational and scientifically minded" attitude often expressed in the manosphere with an attempt at analyzing society, which ... well, that's rather hard to do when you refuse to engage with society as consisting of people. Of course this is likely at least in part a hackneyed response to feminist discourse around gender as societally determined and performative - they really want it all to be purely biological - but one that doesn't actually refer to actual biology, but rather mythological, pseudoscientific ideas based on refuted/retracted science (that wolf-pack "alpha" and "beta" thing, among others). And of course it actively comes into conflict with the massive and growing evidence of sex and gender complexity and even social determination of "gender" in animals. But that's going off on a bit of a tangent.
I don't think it's pedantic at all - rather, criticizing this as pedantic is one of the main ways this type of harmful rhetoric gets disseminated, as it's an easy bad-faith attack that shuts down debate. The words we use have a massive effect on how we think about the world we live in, which in turn shapes how we relate to and operate within that world. Heck, do that for long enough and it even shapes the neural pathways of your brain. This type of "pedantry" is of massive importance, as is the only way to combat the entrance of dehumanizing and harmful words into everyday discourse. And there are plenty of historical examples that demonstrate that once a population starts talking about another group as not or less than human, violence and attempts at subjugation or eradication follow close behind.
I definitely toyed with the idea of trying my hand at cryptomining at some point, though I never reached a point where I actually cared enough to do it. In part, I was lucky as well, as my living conditions during the early days of crypto were not at all conducive to that kind of activity - so I never got the opportunity to really try it out even if I had mustered the resolve to do so, and thus never entered into the cycle of being materially invested in something and thus invested in its continued success. I had my reservations from early on (the whole idea of "have your GPU burn tons of energy to print free money" always seemed a bit too good to be true, and I've always been put off by libertarianism), but it definitely took a while before I gained a sufficient understanding to arrive at my current views - and I have absolutely no way of knowing how things would have played out if things had been different back then. I'd like to think that I would still hold to the values I do now, but ... nobody's perfect, and we are all warped and twisted by the stuff we go through in our lives in ways we have little hope of controlling. If anything, I find it admirable that you've been through that process and haven't gotten stuck in the 'gung-ho proponent' stage that many people seem to do. I never underestimate the mental holding power of being financially/materially invested into something, no matter how directly harmful it may be to that person. Not that I have that much to base this impression on, but that at least seems to indicate someone genuinely curious and interested in their place in and effect on the world and willing to put in some legwork in questioning things, rather than just looking for whatever way they can dig themselves out of the muck. And that's an admirable combination of traits.
