I attended my first academic event about blockchains/crypto. Quick takeaways:
🔨 Blockchains continue to be a solution in search of a problem.
🔺 Open cynicism in the crypto community about its Ponzi-ness.
⚖️ DAOs are effective but resemble primitive democracies from the 1800s.
🦹♀️ Financialization of everything is a magnet for bad actors.
✂️ Smart contracts are hard. Even a simple rock-paper-scissors game is hard to program because it exposes the other player's answer.
🧵 1/2
Areas where blockchain is helpful:
💸 Crypto as a better-than-nothing alternative in places with hyperinflation and weak rule of law.
🏦 Transactions among central banks with private blockchains because they don't trust each other enough to share a centralized DB.
🎰 Gambling without intermediaries with smart contracts.
🪧 Funding for activities at the margin of society, including activists and sex work.
Finally:
🔭 Research opp. to understand crypto in Vietnam, Venezuela, El Salvador.
2/2
@andresmh I am not totally sure about this, but I increasingly thinking the "what are blockchains good for?" is not the most important question (though it is important in certain contexts).
It presumes the goal is to create products for the world as is, rather than shift the underlying infrastructure.
Increasingly I think of them in terms of Kelty's "recursive publics"—self-referential in the ways that BBS and FLOSS culture were before they took over the world.
Amy Winecoff
Andrés Monroy-Hernández
mauro
Nathan Schneider
Michel Maksimova
pablo suárez-serrato