knightly the Sneptaur

“Or doesn’t have to”. So you admit it?

Proof of stake is a centralized system. If access to your ledger is going to remain centralized then there’s no need for it to be a blockchain. You can just have a regular distributed database.

Solarpunk is an anti-capitalist aesthetic, not a coherent political ideology.

You should put more thought into this, because without a proof method that relies directly on the amount of power produced then you’re just hoping that people aren’t minting tokens for free.

The blockchain isn’t “new” at this point either. It’s been around for 15 years.

A “database with appropriate access control” is a completely different use case, not appropriate at all for communal and open, transparent use. You

It’s precisely the same use case, you’re just talking about using a blockchain as your access-controlled database and merely pretending that a centralized DB can’t be communal, transparent, and open.

You need to have admins, you probably need some management organization altogether, admins can change stuff and it’s difficult to prove they didn’t, and a lot more issues.

You need all that for a distributed database too. In fact, you’d need more management, admins, and paper trails because there would be more copies of the ledger to maintain, and you’d have the same lack of accountability to deal with since you’d be relying on every node to prove their own work.

At the core: no authority in control, complete transparency, unchangeable, decentralized (just like a renewable energy grid should be), everyone can participate.

Again, why is a blockchain needed to achieve these goals? You can get all this more reliably with a neighborhood electric co-op.

A good idea does not need to convince, so if these arguments don’t answer the question, either it needs better explaining or it is not that good.

Please do explain, then. I’m still waiting to find out why you think the blockchain is more useful for your stated goals than other kinds of ledgers.

Communal, local infrastructure. Not a grid spanning vast areas, although it could.

Then why does it need a global management system? If it’s all local, why not use a local database and save the expense of distributing it?

Look, this might totally not be the way to do it, but essentially to achieve independence we need to break up those monopolies.

Independence from what?

If you’re talking about independence from having to share electricity services with other people then you can just go off the grid, no blockchain necessary.

If you’re talking about independence from utility providers then you’ve crafted a tautology, as the only way to achieve independence is to be independent.

If you’re talking about independence from for-profit grid service utilities, then making every home an independent participant in the real-time electricity market will only compound the problem.

Otherwise we will always be enslaved to the powers that I thought we wanted to replace.

Those powers would still exist. Replacing the utility-scale grid operators with a local electric homeowners’ association doesn’t solve the problem, it just moves it closer to home. You still have to deal with the cost of building and maintaining the grid, as well as constant negotiation with all providers and consumers to ensure that the grid will remain stable.

Energy and food independence as well as communal land management I think are fundamental requirements for that - whatever the means, I subscribe.

Adding blockchain makes those goals more complicated to achieve for no benefit.

If you want energy and food independence, you can just do that.

Blockchains (if used correctly) are good at breaking up such monopolies. But it’s just tech. People need to want and do it. So whatever people say :)

False. Blockchains, as a feature of Capitalism, create monopolies. If they broke them up, then the tech bros would have already replaced the banking system with them. What actually happened is that the existing banking system started using crypto too, so now most blockchain-based value is held by an extremely small number of obscenely wealthy folks.

If openness is your concern, then distributed ledgers have already been a thing for decades.

The questions are: What problem are you trying to solve with the blockchain and why wouldn’t a non-blockchain distributed database or a regular database with appropriate access controls be a better solution?

Crypto is just capitalism with fewer safety nets. No FDIC insurance on deposits and no SEC to prevent scams and fraud.

What do you mean, “alternatives”? This sounds like a distinction without a difference.

How is it an improvement?

Also, “Proof of stake” would just mean that the owners of the ledger are unaccountable random rich guys instead of the shareholders of the utility company. That’s a distinction with absolutely zero difference.

But why would we need a blockchain for that?

It’s not an open market though. It’s gated and you are at the mercy of the local authorities, which often are very restrictive and difficult.

Utility services are natural monopolies.

Are you proposing that people build a totally independent electrical grid that somehow isn’t regulated by local authorities?

If you aren’t using a proof-of-work blockchain algorithm then why not just use a regular database instead?

Blockchain currencies are also status quo, they’re just issued by unregulated banks.

I’m failing to understand what problem the blockchain would solve that isn’t already solved more efficiently by a regular database…

There’s application in responding to requests for information quickly, in a mesh network, perhaps in presence of malactors. For example the medical records of injured US soldiers are stored in and delivered using a block chain solution.

Online databases already exist and have been handling requests for information quickly for longer than there has been an internet, and always in the presence of bad actors. What problem is there, specifically, that the blockchain would solve?

There’s application in a hypothetical currency free from the corruption of governance. For example, an orange President couldn’t print gobs of money during a pandemic, devaluing your currency, then hand that money to corporations.

No there isn’t. Unregulated currencies are still subject to corrupt governance, the only difference being that the governance isn’t accountable yo the electorate.

I don’t know that I’d define it that way - how can a vote be defined by somerthing subsequent to it?

Subsequent and prior, because the elected person doesn’t just pop into existence on election day and subsequent activity can entirely recontextualize the meaning of the vote.

That’s like an act is good or bad depending on what happens - that’s not a thing.

Outcomes-based morality is entirely a thing. “No harm, no foul”, etc. You’re saying that we can’t judge the people who let Chernobyl melt down because we can’t say if skipping maintenance is good or bad based on the disaster that resulted.

But the naked criminality you attribute to the “system” or both major parties or whatever, is relatively recent. I would say it stems from the TEA Party created by Fox News and billionaires to fulfill their mission of supporting a Nixonian Imperial Presidency which they’ve done.

A long list of avoidable tragedies, intentional harm, and blatant corruption are evidence against this being a “recent” development. Our government has been criminal since before you and I were born, to the point of being actively genocidal against queers like me since long before the AIDS crisis.

Prior to that, politicians were able to be reigned in any number of ways which we still see today - their own party, the courts, the media, (or if you want to go old school, “the press”), sometimes their families. It’s relatively recent. So don’t use it as an “it’s always been this way” because that’s not true. You can make analogies to earlier times but they don’t hold up that well.

Bush still got to be president when the courts overturned the 2000 election. Nixon only resigned with the promise of a pardon for his crimes, and the media has been abetting the State since it was founded. There’s no utility in pretending like America was ever anything but a sanctioned criminal enterprise.

Yes, there are two major political parties. Primaries are usually held to determine which candidates those parties support - voters vote for that too, although that’s not as popular.

By the time primaries are happening, the parties have already narrowed the field of available candidates to only those politicians which the parties find acceptable. Third-parties are only ever spoilers for the main parties because our electoral system is designed to limit choice.

It’s current incarnation is also deeply troubled by contemporary issues, I’m with you on that, but that doesn’t mean voters have no vote. They do! It’s theirs to say “here’s the direction we should go”.

“Just because North Korea is a one-party state doesn’t mean the voters have no vote.” That’s what you sound like when you pretend that having two capitalist parties to vote between is the same thing as having actual agency.

This is about the responsibility the voter has. It is, “To Vote”. To make their voice heard in the system that was conceived to hear their voice.

Again, our government was not “conceived to hear their voice”. Democracy in America is a sham, deliberately designed to offer the illusion of choice while ensuring that the oligarchs who have always owned and operated this country are not divested of their political power. This isn’t controversial or new, scholars have been pointing out that the legislature responds to the needs of the rich and not to the rest of us for years: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

You cannot be serious. Really? First of all, that’s a different discussion from “are people responsible for voting”. Secondly it’s a lot more nuanced. And thirdly - c’mon. Really? One reason they lost is some people didn’t vote, and thereby allowed the “bad” candidate to win. Is that not clear?

Of course I’m serious. If Harris wasn’t a bad candidate then why did she pull a Hillary and throw the election? A good candidate would have turned out more people to vote and wouldn’t have lost to a grifter like Trump. The fact that people are still not allowed to discuss the faults and weaknesses of the Dem campaign without being accused of treason to the party is yet more evidence for my argument that our government is working as intended:

Not sure how you get to that declaration but I think it might be a confusion of who wins the vote with what is good? I think? Not sure.

Precisely. You’re acting like our democratic process is actually democratic, but then refusing to accept that this implies that the result of the election must be a good reflection of the desires of the people.

If Trump is bad and president, then our democracy which elected him can’t be good.

As far as the ‘“Democratic”’ process being fundamentally broken - that’s a valid question. Also irrelevant as to whether someone is responsible for the act of voting, and so is not covered here.

Your argument is shifting to an admittance that our electoral system might not actually be democratic, but you’re still incoherently clinging to the assertion that voters are responsible for the outcome regardless.

Again, you can’t have it both ways. If you admit that our government isn’t actually democratic, you can’t also insist that voters are responsible for their votes. By definition, a non-democratic government does not reflect the desires of the people, so your argument boils down to blaming those without agency rather than the parties which do have agency.

For my two cents on the latter, yeah the Electoral College, first-past-the-post, and other considerations including party direciton and leadership are all problematic at the best of times. They should be addressed. Because enough people didn’t vote, we will not do so and thus the system still requires work. It takes a very, very long time.

This is a Catch-22. You cannot reform a state that is designed to prevent reform without first reforming the state.

Saying it “should be addressed” and suggesting that our political parties would eliminate their own structural advantages over third parties if we just voted harder is some serious doublethink. Republicans aren’t the only ones engaging in self-delusion here.

With the environment in the precarious state it’s in, and the economic disparity of the world that time is running short.

Time ran out for legal interventions before we were born. The future is a dystopian wasteland and there was never anything we could have done to avert it without working outside the system. Luigi Mangioni did more to support the environmental movement and resist economic disparity with three bullets than has been accomplished in the last three decades, including Occupy.

This election was so critical for that reason.

They say that at every election.

And still a bunch of people who are able to read, write, perform relatively advanced arithmetic, operate powerful motor vehicles and fire powerful weapons, write heartbreakingly beautiful poetry and take care of others - didn’t vote. So we’re fucked. that’s what’s broken. The reasons why are a different conversation.

Even if Harris had won we’d still be fucked. She was never going to end fracking, much less support the kind of radical transformation our society needs to avoid ecological catastrophe and systemic collapse.

The voter is responsible for their vote.

Votes themselves are meaningless without context, and their context is defined by the actions the elected person makes. You can try to ascribe responsibility by claiming that those actions are taken with the assumed blessing of the voting public, but only if you decide that the person taking those actions isn’t fully responsible for them.

The elected leader should be held accountable by law, by society, and by the voters. All three failed here.

At the risk of sounding cliche, you’re using the word “should” to paper over the entire reality of the American political system.

It’d be nice if we had real government accountability, but you have to be clear-eyed and admit that the only people our politicians can be reigned-in by are billionaires, their lobbyists, and their media. The law doesn’t constrain them, “society” already elevated them to their unaccountable position, and the voters are trapped in a two-party system that limits the available choices to only those politicians who are already part of this system.

A voter chooses. That’s the entirety of the argument.

You’re ignoring a key aspect of voting in America, a voter can only choose between the two candidates they are offered. We don’t even have “none of the above” as an option.

Therefore, the choice made by the voter isn’t really a choice at all. One either supports the system as it currently exists in the hope that the government will wear their preferred face for the next 4 years, or doesn’t. The real choices; who gets to represent the party, what policies should they support, which issues get focused on and which get ignored, are all made by party leadership long before the primaries.

it’s not holding the voter to account for what the elected leader does. It’s holding them to account for giving the leader the vote. It’s entirely different.

I’m unclear as to the functional difference between these two perspectives. Blaming voters for the decisions made on their behalf and blaming them for enabling the person who made those decisions are the same thing.

One of them was a good candidate.

If they were a good candidate, why did they lose?

They were defeated by a minority of racist “christians” and a ton of pithed idiots who refused to vote on “principle”.

Then you should either admit that what is “good” in America is defined by racists and idiots (and therefore that our Democracy is working as intended), or admit that the “Democratic” process is fundamentally broken (and therefore blaming the voters for the outcome of the election is about as useful as blaming water for being wet).