AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

Fair enough, though I do think this can still help with any broader approach to changing their overall mentality.

A moment of consensus on its own might not be enough to sway someone, but if they hear someone try and contradict what they had recently agreed on, it can then make them feel more cognitive dissonance, and potentially make them at the bare minimum just stop and think for a second.

If someone else is later trying to sway them in some way, it’s going to be easier when that person says something, and they can think “I remember saying something similar” rather than “this is the opposite of what I already believe.”

Plus, there’s also just the sort of “exposure therapy” factor to it, as well. A lot of people are radicalized to believe that the “opposing side” is pure, limitless evil, and that they hate you and want you dead, so just interacting with them can be enough to help slowly deradicalize them.

For example, this Pew Research article states, regarding the likelihood of people to support trans people’s existence:

“Though Republicans who know a trans person are more likely than Republicans who don’t to say gender can be different from sex assigned at birth, more than eight-in-ten in both groups (83% and 88%, respectively) say gender is determined by sex at birth. Meanwhile, there are large differences between Democrats who do and do not know a transgender person. A majority of Democrats who do know a trans person (72%) say someone can be a man or a woman even if that differs from their sex assigned at birth, while those who don’t know anyone who is transgender are about evenly split (48% say gender is determined by sex assigned at birth while 51% say it can be different).”

But of course, that isn’t just limited to acceptance of people by gender. It also applies to race, social and economic status, recipients and non-recipients of welfare programs, people working in different industries, etc.

Again, not saying it’s at all some magic universal way to change someone’s mind, or that on its own it’s necessarily a factor that can override their overarching condition, (hell, that quote from before shows that it had a much smaller impact on republicans than democrats even given the same exposure) but the more and more this happens, the stronger and stronger an effect it has overall, and I’d say that alone makes it worth doing.

I’ve seen this type of tactic really well displayed in this video by SquidTips.

This man talked to a fucking Proud Boy wearing a rainbow shirt that said in large letters “GAY” on it with a button that had the hammer and sickle in trans colors, mentioned his partner was trans, and got the guy to agree with him on the fact that he should be focusing on the class war rather than the culture war.

Even Proud Boys and people on the far, far right still think that what they’re doing is good for society. You don’t have to convince them to “stop being evil, switch to being good” you just have to convince them that “this is a more effective method at making society better than what you currently believe is the best.”

Will it work for everyone? Of course not. Some people are just going to be too far gone for you to reach, but there’s a lot more people than you might think that could be swayed, despite what the flood of media coverage of the extremes of society can make you believe.

Relevant xkcd:

Most places will only accept metal items if they’re a certain size, which most allen keys almost certainly won’t meet.

For example, it looks like Seattle, (which has some of the best recycling system rates and practices in America) will only accept metal tools or scrap metal larger than 3 inches. Anything smaller than that can damage the machines they use for recycling, get diverted into the landfill stream because it can’t be sorted out, and/or slow down or stop the recycling process for other materials because it needs to be filtered out before it can make its way into the machinery that can’t handle small parts.

However, they do have drop-off options, which can take scrap of any size. So the choice is either throw it in the recycling bin and potentially damage or slow down the recycling machinery, or stash them away until you have enough to justify going to a drop-off.

Every accusation is a confession.

Doesn’t protect against:

• Social engineering
• Contract code vulnerabilities
• Untrustworthy/Compromised controlling stakes in that escrow, whether they be people or autonomous systems
• False reversal claims made against the escrow

It has the same possible issues for your financial sovereignty as a regular, centralized financial institution, plus technical issues with the way the underlying infrastructure is built.

Technically true, but chains nowadays aren’t really vulnerable to that same kind of attack just due to their sheer scale and diversification of controlling stakes compared to what they used to be, so I wouldn’t consider it a particularly relevant issue today.

As someone who used to be (but no longer is) into crypto: These statements are all technically accurate to some degree, but are missing extremely important nuance.

The stablecoins part is accurate. Most purchases made in crypto are with stablecoins.

What’s missing here is the fact that these stablecoins are issued and controlled by private companies, or would be influenced by them otherwise. For example, Circle issues USDC, one of the most popular dollar stablecoins. (as well as EURC for Euros)

Circle holds real dollars in real bank accounts to back USDC. Circle can also freeze your balance and blacklist addresses, because they don’t want their banks to stop working with them. That’s it. They can unilaterally stop you from using your USDC.

Other mechanisms for keeping a stablecoin at $1, such as algorithmic pegs, failed spectacularly many times, the most famous of which being the Terra disaster.

Some other stablecoins use centralized coins as backing to then issue new coins. (e.g. 1 STABLECOIN is backed by 1 USDC, and can be exchanged freely) These coins could then be in trouble if they’re used enough for fraud, and Circle just blocks the coin itself from exchanging between itself and USDC to maintain the peg, making it worthless. This is an inherent risk. You either use a centralized platform less accountable than card companies, or you use a third party backed by that centralized asset that could face peg issues.

As for the inefficiency, it’s actually true that PoW is being phased out by most chains other than Bitcoin for PoS, which is incredibly energy efficient by comparison. Truly, it’s actually just pretty energy efficient. This isn’t missing much nuance, though you could argue that the financial mechanisms used by the systems running on top of a PoS consensus mechanisms are still complex in their own right.

For the fraud part, this is only half accurate. Fraud in crypto has been on the rise, and while it’s maintained itself at a level lower than credit card fraud, this is also because of the limited scope in which crypto operates. If crypto were to be used in more situations like credit cards are, then there would be more opportunities to be defrauded in the first place.

The majority of activity in crypto operates within speculative markets, protocols offering yield farming and staking, liquidity pooling, vote bribing, and an untold number of other mechanisms that exist. As such, scammers are mostly limited to tricking people in the field of investments.

If crypto was also used to pay your bills, for your purchases at the store, for every rideshare and food delivery app, and to pay friends back for dinner, then the scope of fraud becomes much larger.

Crypto does not have less fraud because it is fundamentally better at preventing it, crypto has less fraud because it’s used in less circumstances.

(There is also an argument to be made that many investments in crypto that don’t work out because of rugpulls, failed promises, unaccountable DAO leaders, etc, aren’t counted in fraud statistics, and that the number should be much higher)

Now, finally, as for regulation, it’s true that crypto has seen much more regulation than it used to have, but it’s only getting a bit stronger, and is nowhere near the sheer quantity of regulations that financial corporations have to follow, though some are technically not necessary for crypto as most crypto is already transparent via the blockchain’s very structure, and thus doesn’t require some of the transparency regulations corporations often follow.

Crypto still lags far behind, and there’s a degree to which it physically can’t be regulated in the first place. For example, you can’t regulate how the Uniswap exchange handles user funds, because the code for Uniswap has already been immutably deployed to its respective chains.

If a system is built on rejecting authority, there will always be a degree to which justifiable authority that could protect people becomes impossible by its very nature.

I’m not wholly against any possible use of crypto. If someone being, say, censored by payment processors is able to use crypto to send money home to their family, or pay for a thing the corporations currently deem to not be nice for their brand image, that’s all well and fine.

But as a whole, crypto is nowhere near being more beneficial than harmful.

I used to be one of the people firmly on the “someone can decide legitimate interactions are harmful, thus they should not ever exist” side of the argument, and I think this is certainly a good way of putting it.

For a lot of people heavily into crypto, they see the drawbacks of the existing system, but instead of pushing for reform and legal changes, they try technological abolition of the entire mechanism altogether, without then realizing the tradeoffs that brings (e.g. how a lot of people will go “it’s instant! Sellers don’t have to worry about chargebacks! Nobody can take away your money from you!” yet don’t think about how that also means a scammer taking your money is a permanent loss you can never reverse. (or if they do think about it, will argue that risk can be reduced to a point it is less harmful than the alternative, centralized companies)

I don’t deny crypto can be useful sometimes, or even be more beneficial when the centralized companies do eventually do something bad and people need an alternative payment mechanism, but I think a lot of people into crypto overestimate how beneficial it truly is compared to the tradeoffs.

sellers are not going to lower prices based on payment method

Mullvad actually does this for their VPN service, which I think is great. For a VPN company that doesn’t want to store identifiers about you, taking crypto makes sense because that also doesn’t necessarily have identifiers about you attached that they could read or be required to store, unlike a card that requires your name, address, and card number.

Other than that though, no larger companies are going to do anything of the sort, let alone be likely to even implement it as a payment method to begin with. Tons of additional technical complexity for little to no benefit.

It’s also a heck of a lot quicker to process, (effectively instant) and works even on holidays.

And of course, banks like Bank of America, Capital One, and tons of other financial institutions simply refuse to use it, because that would mean spending money on changing their infrastructure, and making it more convenient for people to also use accounts outside of theirs.

Seriously, it’s been ages, and they’ve refused to use it at all, even though it’s purely a financial and technical upside for every user once it’s implemented.

Thank you for providing an actually high quality and accurate summary. I hate the way these headlines always obscure things or make them sound like they’re some magic new thing that we just found out too, so it’s nice to just hear it straight.