In some ways this is kinda encouraging, because it means that even in cases where society collapses and the government disappears, there are really only two fundamental technologies needed to reboot everything: money and contracts.
The incentives lead us toward the classic "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." scenario.
https://www.insidehook.com/culture/story-tom-toro-new-yorker...
Cryptocurrencies have the advantage that they can be spent worldwide, instantaneously, with little friction, while most commodities require that you be physically present to exchange them. They're also significantly easier to store and more resistant to garden-variety theft, as long as they're secured by passphrases. But they exist in the uncanny valley of requiring electricity and Internet. It is fairly unlikely that the government collapses and yet you still retain always-on electricity and Internet. What will you use to pay the electric company, and how do you enforce the contract that they keep providing you power?
There's perhaps an interesting role for a digital cryptocurrency that does not require always-on connectivity, eg. something that can be carried over SneakerNet for local transactions, and then automatically syncs up with the global system when the community regains Internet connectivity. In actual conflict zones today, people seem to get intermittent electrical & Internet connectivity, eg. the electricity will come on for an hour a day with rolling blackouts, and then you try to get everything charged in that one hour. And there are enough solar installations out there that several communities are likely to retain significant power even in the event of a societal collapse. But current crypto's consensus mechanisms aren't built for intermittent connectivity: you'd need to build and design something that is eventually consistent, where a weeks-long fork does not result in two competing cryptocurrencies.
Are cigarettes really currency in this case? Aren't they more like one of many possible barter units? Can't you also price things in ramen packs in prison?
Similarly, I thought the sea shells thing had been sort of debunked. In that scale of society you don't need currency, you know the guy. David Graeber summarizes this rather intuitively. Why would you need to give a guy a sea shell in a "hunter gatherer group"? You're gonna see him every day of your life and everyone is gonna know/remember he owes you one. It would be like giving your sibling a sea shell because you did them a little favor or something. It doesn't actually happen that way because it would be a complete waste of time, just actually return the favor next time. I believe the sea shell thing is more like a gift, rather than a currency. Like you might give someone a flower to tell them you think they're swell. Presumably you think that because they helped you at some point. That doesn't make it currency. People just liked giving each other shells.
I think on most modern theories, currency really comes about from conquest. The idea is as you expand these informal IOUs are not enough. You don't want to have to lug around ramen packs or cigarettes. So at the point of a sword or w/e you say hey take this coin and give us food and then you honor the coin enough and people trust it, not because it's "fungible, tradable, generally-durable commodity that the bulk of society decides to accept as being worthwhile" but because if you don't accept it the government will kill you. And if you do accept it then not only will they not kill you but they'll give things back to you later, which you will end up being a positive incentive for everyone. Now instead of a presiding over a killing field you've created a market. But without the threat of the state, it is not coherent. That's what government is.
That's basically what it says on American money. "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". So sure a business can refuse you service, that's a separate issue. But if you have a debt in the United States and you try to give them US dollars and they refuse and say, no thanks actually we demand cigarettes - well now they are breaking the law, aka inviting the wrath of the state. So everyone uses dollars because the last thing anyone wants is to be in debt and think a pack of ramen is gonna work and they just get to say no thanks cigarettes for me please.
And of course, you also don't want to get impaled on a spike by a dude who looks suspiciously like that guy on the coin you probably should have taken.
The point is that they weren’t just used within a single group where everyone had access to more for the cost of only labor.
You actually see this on a small scale today in the functioning of many small communities, eg. you don't actually exchange currency to pay the host of a party, but you are expected to reciprocate and host sometimes yourself if you want to keep getting invited. There's a surprisingly large amount of these unpaid micro-transactions that happen, eg. my wife has gotten free childcare, free advice, free (used) furniture, free baby clothes, etc, all in the heart of Silicon Valley, because she reciprocates and also gives away her old furniture, baby toys, baby clothes, advice, introductions, childcare, etc. But when we have to pay the contractor for work on our house, we need dollars. When we buy a computer, we need dollars. When we buy all those goods that we give away new, we need dollars. That again reinforces the "credit is for people you know, currency is for people you don't" distinction.
Barter is used when a previous currency system collapses. The currency is no longer guaranteed to be accepted, so people want hard goods that they know they can use. But barter is an unstable equilibrium: as you mentioned, currency is just barter where one particular good becomes so widely accepted that people will take it not because they want it, but because it can be traded for other things that they want. There are reports of the Bosnian War [2] that described how alcohol and ammo quickly became pseudo-currencies because they were universally accepted and could easily be traded for what you actually needed.
Graeber isn't wrong, but as an anthropologist he over-indexes on the within-group interactions. There are lots of documented examples of currency emerging spontaneously from trade between groups where the groups all mutually decided that one type of object had value.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708431
[2] https://www.scribd.com/document/664716931/How-I-survived-a-y...
I'm not sure your in group/out group thing really holds up. I think of your credit/wife examples as not "credit" but something like basic reciprocity, closer to barter.
I think it's just a bit of blurring of terms. In my mind, bullets and ammo are just not currency in the same way a coin is. You can call it a "pseudo-currency" but the pseudo is kind of cheating.
I'm also not sure "There are lots of documented examples of currency emerging spontaneously from trade between groups where the groups all mutually decided that one type of object had value" disproves the point about violence/government. Can't I do the "pseudo" move back at you? What is the mechanism of the "mutual decision"? Would it be unlike the ones that lead to states? It sounds like everyone agrees something has value so we can have a dispute resolution mechanism. The implication being if you don't agree the other choice is violence? What if I say this "spontaneous collective of groups" is a "pseudo-government"?
Where would that leave us?
Kind of like how the local church might traditionally manage birth/death/land records, but that doesn't mean the documents are sacred or a religious observance.
Well I mean technically they are always for credit purposes, even if they are the "default/convenient payment method"? That's part of the advantage, but it's still credit. You get to spend and pay later. It wouldn't be a very good evaluation for credit purposes if it didn't work like credit? Or am I misunderstanding you?
It's just to say that "credit" isn't just about an in vs out group anymore than debt is. Or anymore than "currency" is? I'm not sure how the distinction you make helps clarify that question. The point is why would credit be for people you know, and currency for people you don't? Isn't credit just a particular agreement around said currency?
You don't need a government backed paper currency, you need a mint making precious metal coins. History has several examples like the mints at the Potosí silver mines or those by the East India Company that enabled trade without effective governments to back them up by just providing reliable coinage that spread to many other polities.
As long as there isn't some crazy inflationary force like colonizers arriving with an unlimited supply, we can use something as simple as beads or seashells for currency quite fine. It just means more labor overhead to create that currency in the first place.
Somalia operated on paper money valued at the cost of producing it
How something comes to be is distinct from how it is used.
I was just thinking about click fraud, and how I'll bet that a significant number of clicks on sites are now being driven by simple (they don't need to be too complicated) LLMs.
[0] https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Cut-Me-Own-Throat_Dibbler
Also, to the power of modern-day cryptography that rubber-hose and evil maid (backdoors) are the only viable (even if expensive) alternatives.
> the government disappears, there are really only two fundamental technologies needed to reboot everything: money and contracts
Both of which require "governance", but post-collapse, it may be of form that may not benefit the collective.
It doesn't prove the hardness assumption, if it did we could trot forward any toddler and ask if it knows the factors to some RSA product, and "prove" hardness assumption for factoring integers...
Don't give out your account numbers, there will be a lot of hassle should an evil person get it. However you have a reasonable change of getting your money back in a couple years. (this is also why you get warning about some countries - a few will not cooperate with traces and so the money is lost)
The same attack on every desktop and laptop would be... significantly harder.
--------------
From: Vincenzo lozzo
Sent: Monday, July 2, 2018 8:04 AM
To: jeevacation@gmail.com
Subject: Ledger wallet warning
Attachments: image1jpeg; Untitled attachment 00284.txt
In case you hold any coins in it, please don't spread this as they h=ven't released any of the information yet.
As for what is worth, the other wallets seem just as bad
--------------
Links:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02501...
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02507...
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA008603...
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02505...
ewww
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x46gnh/a_fake_cry...
I always thought it is stupid to HODL using a hardware wallet. For HODLing, just get a random computer (no mailorder) and run debian13 with electrum (it is in the official repo, not an external package hence protected by standard debian safeties). Once you generated you keys, back them up and either wipe the machine, or at least airgap it.
Extra bonus: Raspberry pi 5 runs debian 13 out of the box.
Is it? The theory and even the implementation is literally a gas station credit card skimmer for crypto. I do agree that anyone dismissing attacks on Ledger was foolish, but mostly because Ledger is an obviously low-quality product on even a cursory inspection, not because we need to become even more paranoid conspiracy theorists.
Back in the day, RSA SecurID hardware tokens were completely physically sealed, with no room for a backdoor. Tampering with them in any ways destroys them or makes it physically obvious. That's a physically secure design. This Ledger thing looks more like a consumer toy.
It's predictable: The ROI of attacking cryptocurrencies in this manner is high enough to make expensive attacks worthwhile. It doesn't make other expensive attacks on typical end-users worthwhile, and they remain far-fetched.
> Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
Huh? Nothing here is theoretical or far-fetched. Hardware attacks of this sort have been documented for decades and basically part-and-parcel for most intelligence agencies, from the US govt installing backdoors in Cisco hardware to the exploding pagers for Hamas. This is not even the first hardware wallet attack documented on the internet (although it might be the largest-scale one).
It's just that hardware attacks are complicated, expensive, and risky, so they're usually done in a targeted manner. The only news here is that the crypto community painted a gigantic target on their backs by inventing a currency that can be taken from them with zero recourse, broadcasting it to the world that they own a lot of it, and then buying cheap hardware from overseas retailers to "protect" their assets. So all of sudden, it was profitable and relatively low-risk to cast a wider net.
It's fascinating in the sense that we're discovering from first principles why the financial system works the way it does. The damage caused by cryptocurrencies has been really pretty staggering, for little real benefit.
As long as the cost of sucha single-target attack isn't substantially below its potential upside, you should be safe.
Otoh, it's only meaningful if you have more than just toy assets in there.
There should be a range between those two though that would contain lots of folks comfortably.
Also known as buying a laptop, removing the WiFi card, and putting stock Ubuntu on it.
Yeah, the problem with "crypto hardware wallets" is the same as the problem with "secure phones for drug dealers" - they are an extremely juicy targets, you KNOW that any user of them is your target.
This reminds me of the 2020 case where a union organizer thought there was a spy camera inside a utility pole outside his house. It was in a conspiracy subreddit, so it seemed like the deranged ramblings of a ravingly-paranoid stranger. But they found the addresses of the IP cams and had plenty of evidence to corroborate it.
Now, Flock cameras are just normal.
I think the 2020s will be defined by this trend. "Things which only existed in the minds of a paranoid person" becoming normal parts of daily life.
Here are two sources on the matter:
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy_commons/comments/gin79z/...
https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/activists-find-camera-insi...
In August 2020, this was unbelievable, and it would have been considered reasonable (if wrong) to dismiss OP as paranoid, especially for the subreddit they posted in.