Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/14/google-bans-cryptocurrency-ads.html
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Meanwhile, Meetup is swarming with new cryptocurrency / blockchain groups which totally aren’t really sales presentations to sell you an amazing opportunity.
It’d be fun to bone up a little, and then be that guy in the back of the room, but nobody would pay me for my time.
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Yes, when I heard Cash Call recommending that I take equity out of my house to “pay bills, take a vacation, or just buy the BitCoin dip” I knew it had all gone too far. A bit like Joseph Kennedy who pulled out of the market when his shoeshine boy was handing out stock tips.
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There goes my exciting campaign for Math Beanie Babies.
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A must watch
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Might also be worth mentioning that not all cryptocurrencies are scams, @beschizza. Many are new technologies competing with Google’s services, such as BAT (competing with Google Ads), and Filecoin (competing with Google cloud).
It would be easy to bunch all blockchain technology in together as scams, but some of it could actually solve problems with our old way of doing things, such as the issues with net neutrality on a centralized web.
Drat. I was about to unveil my own BoundeCoin. The secret is, each member gets their own unique prime number, starting with 2 and going up. Nobody can get into your wallet unless they can first factor 47!
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Definitely worth giving this Feb 2018 BBC podcast a listen @beschizza. It features @doctorow, Ed Snowden and various other experts in security as they explain why moving towards a decentralized web is a good idea.
So many of these blockchain technologies will help with decentralizing the web. Such a thing can’t exist in a comparable form to our current web without compensation for use of storage, content, displaying ads, and computational power. Your malaise towards this tech is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. People have also been scammed out of regular old fiat currency, but it still has its uses.
Another side to this story is that Google, one of the giants of a centralized web, is making it more difficult for new technology in the decentralized web to be noticed.
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Why would that be worth mentioning?
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Blockchain Tulips is a different media phenomenon to blockchain as a technology.
You say " Your malaise towards this tech is throwing the baby out with the bathwater" but I’m just telling grandpa not to drink baby water.
I am not en expert in the tech but useful implementations of blockchain or similar technology will occur at a level that few need to understand, let alone put personal money into. You won’t need to get involved in blockchain to make (eventual) consumer use of IPFS, for example, any more than anyone needs to care about file allocation tables or journaling or whatnot to format a hard drive.
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IPFS is a good example. You don’t need to put money into it, but it also isn’t permanent storage. Like bittorrent, files are lost if no one accesses them or seeds. In order to have permanent storage, there needs to be a decentralized incentive to keep the files, even if no one is accessing them.
The same organization that created IPFS has a cryptocurrency called FileCoin. This will allow users to pay for permanent storage. This technology also had an ICO where they raised money for R&D, marketing, etc. It will be a less costly competitor to services like Google cloud storage.
Amongst others, Basic attention token, Steem, and Substratum also have legitimate uses outside of being speculative investments, and also directly compete with services offered by Facebook and Google.
In fairness, it’s not that you yourself are saying “all crypto is bad”, it’s that Google and Facebook are taking a shotgun approach to ads for incentivizing decentralized technology. This technology can’t compete with services like Google and Facebook without incentives, which are raised through ICOs, and they know that. I just think that side of the story is noteworthy.
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That many people (especially non-techies) are unable to make that distinction is probably a major reason why Google banned the cryptocurrency ads*. That sort of confusion creates a ripe crop of suckers for con men selling get-rich-quick schemes.
[* it doesn’t look like they’re banning ads for other applications of blockchain]
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If we stigmatize blockchain technology, it makes it more difficult to fund and develop a decentralized web. Some of these technologies are highly innovative, but require a decentralized incentive (cryptocurrency) because they compete with services offered by Google and Facebook. If these services depend on financial institutions like PayPal, they will not be truly decentralized.
Drinking baby water - new health fad on Goop in 3… 2… 1…
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It’s already a problem because of the cryptocurrency speculators. Trying to find anything about blockchain technology that isn’t about Dunning-Krugerrands is getting harder and harder every day.
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How do we sell it to the Infowars crowd?
“Makes you strong for shirtlessness like Vlad or Alex!”
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