Comment by Ambolia
5 hours ago
All the crypto stuff already felt like it was doing a big push to move computing power away from general consumers, though may have been unintended.
Another thing is the general impoverishment and decline of productive power that can be papered over by centralizing the output of that production to hide the general decline. I don't think anybody is buying that we are richer than 20 years ago anymore.
Monero is the opposite. Everyone can mine on their CPU and just like most cryptocurrencies, it makes you your own bank.
Yeah but their strategy on that seems kinda dumb to me because it either does nothing or has a negative effect on the ecosystem. If someone wants to mine bitcoin on their own CPU they can, and if my PC has enough hash power to find a coin on a blockchain then let me tell you, that chain has real problems and is not a serious player. That amount of computing power doesn't justify paying any interesting amount of money.
It isn't the biggest technical concern and at least they have principles, but I expect something that looks like Monero + easy to mine will eventually appear and turn out to have an advantage in the real world. Although it is hard to predict because it isn't completely clear what (if any) impact the algorithm difficulty has in practice. But if there are big datacentre mining a cryptocurrency with dedicated hardware then that means there are people with skin in the game who want it to succeed. Seems like a better equilibrium than whatever the Monero people are aiming for.