I woke up this morning with two news that pointed in contradictory directions.
I'll start with the bad news so that we can end on a (very) positive note.
The Bad News
On one hand Forbes reported that "Japan's Financial Regulator Is Pushing Crypto Exchanges To Drop 'Altcoins' Favored By Criminals". The 'altcoins' favored by criminals included Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC) and Dash (DASH). This is particularly relevant because Japan's authorities have historically been among the most "crypto-friendly" in the Western world.
With Japan taking an adversarial position, I believe the "privacy-oriented" cryptocurrencies are in an unenviable position of not having any official ally anymore.
I'm not shying away from a bit of hyperbole: the "extreme privacy" altcoins are now in a comparable situation to the gruesome Islamic State in 2014 - 2015. At the top of its power, it had established its domination over a large area and population. But it had no allies whatsoever and had managed to unite everybody against them. No one can win or even survive under such conditions.
While that doesn't necessarily mean XMR, ZEC, DASH will be wiped out, it is hard to see how they can "moon" now. I didn't dither, went straight to Polo and liquidated the little XMR and DASH I was holding. I'd rather get more STEEM instead.
The (Extremely) Good News.
Ok, some of you might not realize how big this is straight away but the more I think about it, more positive ramifications I see.
Here is the news: "UNICEF Is Mining Crypto to Raise Funds for Children" that led me to the above website.
My hesitation had lasted only a few seconds. This was definitely too intriguing. I browsed to The Hope Page and this is what I've seen: UNICEF (the Australian branch to be more precise) has set up a page that invites you to donate by ... mining crypto in the browser!
It might not look like much, but you have to realize that the set of people who donate to UNICEF is almost completely disjoint from the set of people who believe in the transformative power of cryptocurrencies. Moreover, the former set usually tends to hold a very dim view of crypto. Yet here we have a brand, that those people know and trust, and which acts as ... a gateway to the cryptoworld!
UNICEF is an extremely strong brand. And here it is, demonstrating that cryptocurrencies can DO GOOD. Cryptocurrencies, those evil, impenetrable, mysterious, overcomplicated things that criminals use to buy drugs online ... suddenly they become the embodiement of an extraordinary social leap: donating money not from your bank account but from ... the electricity burned by your computer!
There is an easy to understand, three step explanation of how it works.
Cryptomining is here implicitly proposed as an inoffensive trick to .. turn the ad hoc the pair formed by your electricity supplier on one end, and a crypto exchange on the other end, into ... a surrogate of a bank!
The crypto part is hidden from the view and appears completely tamed and non menacing. Once people start getting accustomed to it, the psychological effects cannot be overstated! What to many people had been presented by the media and some authorities as a tiger who had escaped from its cage, UNICEF here is introducing as a ... cat purring with the sound of their computers' fans !...
source
How that happened? "Feel good by doing good" white magic: some extremely powerful emotional messages that "enchant the cryptobeast"
And for those who might be skeptical and harder to be bound by the spell, there is a magistral-in-its-simplicity slider bar to adjust the power consumption of your PC to your tastes from 30%
to 80%
Han Solo
And "The Hope Page" is the closest thing to the Millenium Falcon that I've seen till now!
source
Other posts on cryptocurrencies and society
- The future of society
- The Church of Bitcoin
- Blockchain and the End of the Western Civilization
- Toward a pan-EU blockchain infrastructure
- Small worlds
- Steemit and the Fractal Society
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