Blockchain’s appeal is escaping intermediaries, states, and cloud rents
Evidence
You can see the lure of crypto: in contrast to the madness that begins the moment you pay for anything using a bank-issued card, the blockchain-based transaction seems like democracy-in-action. No one takes a cut. No bank or corporation is involved. No state monitors your transaction. No cloudalist retains a record of what you bought, when and from whom. No crazy path is taken via dozens of intermediaries, contributing at each stage to the accumulation of capital among financiers. Moreover, no one owns the network of machines that helped complete your transaction and, therefore, no investors are watching, checking that the pie is growing and their cut of the cloud rents along with it, ready to pull their support the moment confidence in the enterprise begins to wane – not least because this cloud-based network generates no cloud rents. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 684
Categorization
- DEFINE: Contrast diagram of what a blockchain transaction lacks vs. a fiat payment - clarifies the definitional core of rent-free exchange.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 684
- XREF: connects to: Bitcoin achieves consensus through anonymous nodes voting with CPU power — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 1007; Hate speech is intrinsic to cloud capital’s rent extraction — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 661; Blockchain innovation gets co-opted by the very finance institutions it aimed to replace. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 689
Broader Connections
- Blockchain innovation gets co-opted by the very finance institutions it aimed to replace.
#qualifies(0.85) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 689