Tag: Crypto
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A Better Future
One of the risks in demanding a “better” media — smarter, fairer, more truthful — is that you might get exactly that. Or rather, you might get something that looks exactly like that: a more intelligent system, but also a more evasive, more adaptive one. Harder to dismiss, because it now knows how to perform…
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Crypto: A Password Manager at a House Fire
I’m starting to feel like crypto is a solution designed for a different era—specifically the post-9/11, pre-Occupy moment when fear of institutional collapse and distrust in centralized systems reached a kind of fever pitch. The trauma of the 2008 financial crisis birthed a thousand libertarian dreams of algorithmic salvation. But here we are, over a…
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Crypto Strategic Reserve: A Chronicle of Hybrid Collapse
Act I:The Golden Mirage The U.S. Empire, armored in Fordist steel and atomic swagger, once anchored the global economy to a sacred lie: the dollar as gold’s Siamese twin. Bretton Woods was less a financial system than a state religion—fixed rates, convertible faith, the handshake of empires. But by 1971, Nixon, that grandmaster of realpolitik,…
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Make Communism Great Again
The pearl-clutching over Vitalik’s comment seems to imply that all those crying foul are the ones who’d be out of moves and scrambling for a new hassle if crypto ever manages to design democracy as a self-executing machine. After all, if the system runs itself, transparent and fair, with smart contracts automating policies like universal…
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How Crypto Lost to DraftKings
There was a time when men gambled like savages. They staked their fortunes on dice and horses, whiskey-stained cards in desert casinos run by men with deep voices and dead eyes. But those were better days. Now, we have apps. We have algorithms. We have blockchain. Or so I thought. For the past month, I…
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A New Way of Smelting
Bribery is a relic of a bygone era—a Bronze Age mindset, if you will. It’s a tool of self-preservation for those clinging to ill-gotten gains, a desperate attempt to maintain power and control within a system on the verge of collapse. But as history teaches us, no amount of bribery can stop a system from…
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Casino Nation: The Havana Doctrine
It’s my long-but barely held together theory that the descendants of the Diaspora—no, not a Diaspora, but the Diaspora—are hellbent on remaking America in the image of 1957 Fulgencio Batista’s Havana. Think about it: a glossy, neon-lit illusion of freedom where vice reigns supreme, the rich ride roughshod over the poor, and every two-bit hustler…
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Extras
Ah, cryptography! It’s like Andy Millman in Extras, no? At first, it presents itself as this pure, untouchable ideal—a bastion of privacy and individuality in a world determined to collapse all boundaries. It says, “No! I will not compromise!” But what happens? Reality intrudes. And what is reality if not the persistent erosion of the…
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Faking it Forward
The Gamification of Truth Metrics The brutal irony of the cryptosphere: as we fight to identify signal amidst the noise, every innovation we cling to as a “truth metric” inevitably collapses under the weight of its own gamification. The early metrics were simple: active wallets, social engagement, total value locked. But anyone who’s spent more…
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Crypto Repurposed
What you really need in crypto is anarchists. Not the market-driven, “freedom for profit” types who have hijacked the term—you need true highly disagreeable anarchists. People who aren’t here to play the same game with new tools. The blockchain wasn’t meant to be a new way to prop up the old system—it was meant to…