A Comprehensive Synthesis of the Technological, Ecological and Political Critique of Blockchainism

It’s all about the externalities

Cory Doctorow
Marker
Published in
8 min readFeb 14, 2022

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A mountain of garbage beneath a sky of flames and smoke. Atop the garbage is a ‘do not litter’ icon of a human figure putting waste in a trashcan. The waste has been replaced by a glittering gold Bitcoin logo. Image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwshq/8598791096/ CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

I’ve just read one of the most lucid, wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary critiques of cryptocurrency and blockchain I’ve yet to encounter. It comes from David “DSHR” Rosenthal, a distinguished technologist whose past achievements include helping…

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Cory Doctorow
Marker

Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list; Mastodon: @pluralistic@mamot.fr