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RE: The Politics and Culture of Cryptocurrencies
i have to disagree with your characterization of scarcity and value.
what do you make of public goods, such as security or the environment or (ideally) the internet? more people having access to these things most certainly does not make their value zero, as you said.
I think that both the military and environmentalists will agree that security and environment are limited resources and need to be conserved effectively for us to make the most use of it.
We certainly do pay a LOT for our military, and if we assume that the environment is an infinite resource we end up destroying the ecosystem in one way or another. (I think the latter is a good metaphor of what happened to the music industry in recent years.)
The idea that anything can be free I think can often be dangerous in itself because it encourages us to take things for granted and not give them their proper respect. Crypto has the ability to change this, though the transition won't be easy because we've just gotten used to things being a certain way for so long.
see, this is precisely why i think public goods and their value break your model!
yes, we pay a lot for our military, but military ≠ security-- in fact, one could argue our immense investment in the war on terror has made our country and many others around the world LESS secure.
this is a classic example of the security dilemma-- sure, i may just be buying guns and ammo to protect myself, but if you're my neighbor and you see me buying guns and ammo, but don't have any of your own, my attempts to increase my own security directly threaten your security.
in the case of the environment, my point was not that it's an infinite resource, but instead that it's a shared public good. i don't benefit from destroying the environment, and either do you. now, SOME people do, and that's why they continue to destroy the environment. this isn't an issue of you or i not valuing the environment enough, it's instead an issue of us not being able to stop the assholes who value something else more than they value the environment, so that their harm to it is offset by their gains.
i never said these things were free, just that there are other ways of valuing them than thru private ownership :3
Ah, I think I see your point a little better now. (Wasn't sure where you were coming from in the first response.)
The public-private thing is a tricky one that I don't think we'd be able to solve here, but I do think that there's some interesting projects that can come out of government and non-profit sectors using blockchain technology in the near future. (Musicoin is actually a non-profit who didn't bother with an ICO.)
Unfortunately I don't think we're going to see any progress in that area with this current administration. I'm actually a little worried that China or Russia might surpass the US in that regard.