Technical Analysis is Just Horoscopes for Chart People feat. Andrew Ancheta
This week I interviewed Andrew Ancheta (@TrampAbroad1), a freelance journalist who previously wrote for crypto publications, but most recently wrote an article in the leftwing journal Current Affairs called The Crypto Casino. It's a great article, and I don't say that just because I'm featured in it :). The article is in the currently most recent issue of Current Affairs (Issue 27, September-October 2020) so be sure to check it out. You can purchase the issue here. During the interview...
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Transcript
Hello again. You're listening to the Blockchain Socials podcast, and today I have an interview guest. His name is Andrew Anchetta. He's a freelance journalist, and his most recent publication was in Current Affairs. It's called The Crypto Casino. And, obviously, you can tell that this is a pretty interesting piece to come out recently because it is a piece that is specifically about looking into cryptocurrency, and it was published in prominent left wing, journal, Current Affairs. So, hey, Andrew. How you doing? I'm alright.
How are you?
Good. So maybe one of the reasons why I might like this, particular article is because I was featured in it. But I don't think that's the only reason. I think it was also a really good article, and, I think you really gave a pretty interesting perspective, partially because you already were have been working or have worked in the crypto media space, previously. And now you're a freelance journalist that is writing for place for pieces like the current affairs. But I wanted to maybe back up a bit and try to figure out what really got you started in writing about crypto and what got you interested in that space because as probably we all know, it's a bit of a strange space for, for left wingers.
It certainly is. Well, I got involved in Bitcoin back in 2015 or so, and I didn't really understand it. I just, needed a way to move some money around, and it turns out, Bitcoin was the easiest way to do that. So I had Bitcoin. I didn't really think about it for very long. I just, left it in a hardware wallet and didn't research anything about it until 2017 happened. And, you know, when 2017 happened, I figured, hey. Maybe it's time to learn a little bit about this.
And By by 2017 happening, it was the the rocket in price, I guess. Yeah. When Bitcoin
went up by a factor of 15 or so. And it turns out I wasn't the only person in Bitcoin who had no idea how it worked. So I started researching and learning about it. And since there was also all this money going around, there were also a lot of new crypto publications. And I started writing for different ones of those, and I got pretty good at it. Yeah. So so what was it like,
working at these crypto publications, during that time?
So what I think people I think it wouldn't be much of a surprise to for most people to learn that there's kind of an inherent bias in the crypto media in favor of bullish news. And that doesn't mean that your boss knocks on your door and says, hey. We need to say something good about Bitcoin. But as a journalist, you know that your writing will reach more readers if you are in a set if you are a bit more optimistic about where things are going. And so that doesn't mean you don't do you can't don't or you can't do thoughtful, well researched pieces, But if you do, it'll probably be outpaced by the article that says XRP is gonna go to $10 next week. And so even though it's not a conscious bias, the inter the interest, I think, of most crypto publications are aligned in a way that, kind of encourage people to be subconsciously, less critical of crypto than they should be.
Right. I mean, I I guess this it's sort of like, yeah, nobody wants to read about losing money in a sense. Everyone wants to read about how they're going to make more money. Yeah. Like, a very good example of that is technical analysis,
which is basically like horoscopes for chart people. And, you know, people will write technical analysis pieces that say Bitcoin's going up to 20,000. They'll write some that say it's gonna go down to 15,000. Both of them can get published, but one of those will get about 10 times more social media engagement than the others. Yeah. Sort of like naturally it will. Yeah. Just because, like, no one wants to share the piece on Twitter or Facebook or whatever about how Bitcoin is going to go down. So even if you're a no coiner, you do have a kind of alignment of interests in seeing the cryptocurrency space do well.
It it's it's that was one of the things that particularly I noticed when I first started getting into crypto was, like, the amounts of articles about price predictions, about future price predictions that were always very very positive, you know, Ether is going to reach 10,000 by x date or like Bitcoin is going to be a million dollars and you know a year or two there was the famous like John McAfee prediction that he was gonna he's gonna cut off his dick if Bitcoin doesn't reach a million dollars by the end of the year or something like that. It's something that's it's very eye grabbing just like like, oh, I can win. I can make, you know, all this money just by holding this, cryptocurrency. I'm in. It gives that impression.
And it's still happening today. Like, the CIO of BlackRock goes on TV and says, oh, yeah. Bitcoin could replace gold to some extent. I think that was more or less what he said. And then the space is flooded with all these articles that say, you hear that? Bitcoin could go up to 300,000
or whatever it was. It it seems almost like there's, like, a magical, like, force sort of trying to make these most grandiose predictions become reality in some, like, weird fucked up way, and then I mean, at least so far, none of those have been, of course, have been correct.
Yeah. Well, I've been wrong before, and I guess, we'll see Never know. If I'll be wrong again. Yeah.
And then and then, yeah, the the the whole, technical analysis, that was I remember, like, on YouTube, there'd just be so many different accounts on, like, how to do technical analysis, like, how to do trading and, like because if you if you just follow these, like, very simple technical analysis, trading tricks, then you'll, on average, make money over time. They're pretty, pretty crazy.
And people charge money to teach technical analysis, which is a bit like gonna like, I I'm a little disdainful of technical analysis as you can probably tell.
Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's based off of some pretty shady, mathematical principles, I'd say.
There's a like, you in in a regular stock market with millions of buyers and millions of sellers, you could kind of make an argument that it's really a study of herd dynamics or the way large groups of people operate. But crypto markets are so manipulated that I don't see how much value that can really have.
So I guess since you've left, I guess you've already answered it, but I guess the the state of crypto media really hasn't changed much since, since when you were still working in in that space more.
It does it does seem to be at least marginally more responsible. Like, I don't I don't remember when I was working in crypto media for a publication like Cointelegraph, to raise the problem of Tether, which is one of the things I've been on about for a while. So I guess, like, they are, some of the publications have learned at least a few lessons from 2017, and they're trying to be a bit more critical.
I guess I guess that's coming at a point whenever like, it's going to affect a lot of investors who are who are using Tether actively. I imagine that a huge chunk of, of these traders use Tether, obviously, to, to hedge against crypto, ironically.
Yeah. And it is the biggest stable coin. Yeah.
But so I'm really curious to talk about this piece that you wrote, crypto the crypto casino in current affairs, but I'm really curious, like, what was the reaction like when you were proposing writing such a piece, especially in a publication like Current Affairs?
So if you if you bring up cryptocurrency or blockchain to people who don't really know about cryptocurrency. They're often they're like, they're usually interested in hearing about the really ridiculous stuff. Like people faking their own deaths, exchange hacks for hundreds of millions of dollars. And that's all very entertaining. But I think, I think the real meat is in the questions which cryptocurrency raises about the way markets and people operate when there are things like profits, to involve when there are things like profits to be had. Because the crypto market isn't that much unlike the stock market, which Yeah. Keeps reaching new highs in spite of the fact that everyone is locked down in fear of this terrifying disease, and no one no one can go eat at restaurants or anything like that. Yeah. That's true. It it it does force you to,
to come, I I guess, a little bit to touch with the issue of, like, you know, how money works, I guess, normal money works in in our everyday lives and, you know, question why are people valuing something like cryptocurrency when you think it is backed by no value. But, I mean, still, there is, I think, the legitimate counterargument that, like, well, the US dollar is not backed by anything except for, I mean, really, American imperialism.
Yeah. And when you think about the big questions that, you have to deal with in the blockchains or space when you're designing virtual networks, you have to find a way to get a bunch of people who don't know each other or who don't trust each other to agree on a way to make decisions, allocate resources, agree on development priorities, which are the same kinds of problems that society has.
Mhmm. Yeah. That's fair. But so then, you know, what was the reaction of someone I mean, I don't know if you spoke to him, like Nathan Robinson at Current Affairs or, like, you know, I imagine a socialist publication would at first be like, what? You know?
Well well, they seem to like it. Yeah. Yeah. My main editor published it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My main editor was Lyda Gold. She's absolutely fantastic, and she was very encouraging. I think the biggest questions weren't, weren't so much what the hell are what the hell are you talking about about, but more about explaining the more technical aspects in a way that a non Bitcoin reader could understand. Like explaining mining in a way that doesn't take two or three paragraphs to explain.
Mhmm.
Explaining how a DAO what a DAO run company would look like. Like. Mhmm. So, yeah, those were the main questions I had to deal with.
Did you have to give them, like, examples of, like, I guess, a use case using Blockchain that was maybe more sympathetic towards the left, I guess?
It it was more about explaining it more clearly because, like, when you think about it, a DAO is a explaining a DAO is a very complicated thing to explain. But if you explain, oh, it's imagine a virtual company where the shareholders just vote directly on something, which is somewhat like the way the Ethereum DAO works, you know, that's that's something that's something you don't need to understand the technology to understand.
Right. You explain it in a way that it's just, like, talking about the benefits or, like, the what you are doing, in a very literal sense.
Yeah. I think mining was another example because a lot of noncoin people don't really understand how mining works. I didn't really wanna get into SHA two fifty six and The longest chain rule, so I said, it's a computationally intensive process of adding transaction to the blockchain. Yeah. Which which I think makes it a bit easier to understand.
And so because I I would think if you are a, a left leaning journalist, you don't know much about crypto, and the only thing you've really heard are largely fairly negative things, you would want some sort of, you know, they would want to know, like, what you're up to and, like, what what how you plan to go about this, this article. So was it originally, like, already set up as, I I want to look at blockchain and see what, you know, people who are more left leaning are doing with it? Or was that the original intent of the article and that's how
Yeah. I I did originally suggest it as a left ish, take on a story which has already been told many times, which is the story of blockchain and cryptocurrency told from the perspective of someone who is interested in seeing kind of leftish or socialist like applications. And that that doesn't necessarily mean blockchain cooperatives.
Yeah. Yeah. And you, you also interviewed Everco op in that, in that article, which is pretty interesting. Yeah. I did. But so what have the reactions been, since its publication?
So among my crypto friends, they were all very, impressed with it, which I was quite proud of. They all seem to like it. Nice. Yep. Actually, I was most impressed by the reaction by people I consider to be more crypto skeptics. Like David Gerard, who I quote in the article would probably laugh at the idea that crypto could be used for anything useful. But I think it does align on it does align on some useful ways you could use a blockchain for, for kind of collective enterprises, and I didn't hear anything negative
about that. Okay. Nice. Did you did you did you have any, any comrades reaching out and saying, alright. I'm in?
None who weren't already in. Okay. Yeah. So I've mostly shared it with people who are already into crypto. So, no surprises. They, they liked it.
So I guess in the in the process of writing this article, have your own opinions or thoughts about crypto or blockchain changed much at all? Or did it did you what type of new things did you learn maybe?
You know, I go back and forth between thinking, crypto's the useless thing ever, and thinking, oh, with with the right tweaks, I think this could really be very impressive. Mhmm. And as usual usually happens in the process of researching and writing a subject, you learn quite a bit more and your perceptions change. One thing I realized after writing it is that something like Facebook or Libra is probably a lot less of a threat than we think it is. But something like PayPal or something like PayPal or maybe even Grayscale could be a bigger threat to the crypto space than most people give them credit for.
How how come?
So, this this happened after the article was written, but as you know, PayPal integrated cryptocurrency payments. But when you use PayPal to buy crypto, you're not actually using cryptocurrency. You are giving them money, and then they buy Bitcoin or whatever it is. And they add it to their stockpile, and they say and they say, oh, don't worry. We'll just hold on to this for you. So really what you're doing is you're just getting back to the central custodian problem. Can can you actually withdraw from
PayPal, your crypto? I don't I'm actually not sure. No. You can't withdraw?
You can't it it doesn't even really have a wallet, but it's got, like, confetti that shows up on the screen. It feels like a roulette wheel.
Okay. Interesting.
I haven't actually done it, but I've seen the GIFs on Twitter. Reportedly, they do plan on finding a way to have, like, built in crypto payments, but it would still be kind of a BitPay model. Like, you send your crypto to PayPal, the merchants, and it just ends up with PayPal having a bigger pile of cryptocurrency.
So it's it's more like they are subsidizing their own purchases of cryptocurrency through their customers. Yeah. I guess so. So I guess in the process of writing this article, you already came in with a fairly half positive, half negative view, I guess, as a lot of left wingers in the crypto space have and and came out of it with the same.
Yeah. I would say so. And, you know, I'm not a perfectly rational actor either. So when I see Bitcoin edging up to 19,000, I say, oh, wow. Bitcoin, that Satoshi guy is really onto something.
Yeah. Yeah. The higher the prices, sometimes I think clouds people's thoughts on it for sure.
It's really best not to have any, horses in the race if you can avoid it. So were there any, like, interesting things that didn't make it into the article? Oh, yeah. There there is a lot. Because the pro one of the things with cryptocurrency is that there are so many rabbit holes to go down, and each one leads to an infinite number of more rabbit holes. And they're all very interesting, but there's no way you could cover all of them in, like, a 3,000 word article. Yeah. For example, there was a fairly lengthy digression about, Tether, which didn't make it into the article. And, you know, it is it is a very roundabout thing to include, so I understand why it didn't make it in. And there was also another one on the DAO, the Ethereum DAO, which, is also a story which has been told before, so it's not necessarily something the world needed me to report on. But those are, I think, both fairly illustrative things to be talking about.
Hey, everyone. If you're enjoying this episode so far and wanna be sure that more content like this can be created, you can donate to my efforts through Patreon. So if you go to patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist you can donate $3 a month or more to help me out and join the two newest patrons Jason and Jason. So kind of rare double Jason there. But so at the moment I've spent more on this project than I've ever earned from it due to hosting costs, so any amount really helps. And I've already released the first short episode of the Patreon exclusive Q and A series where I give my view on the question, is there a socialist blockchain? And of course, I'll still be making free content like this this interview to help spread the message that blockchain does not need to be used to further change capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. And so if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. If you can't help out financially, no worries. One thing you can do is to make sure that you subscribe to the podcast on your preferred platform. So it's on platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Podcast Addict, and even on YouTube. And leave a positive rating and share the episode with any comrades you think would be interested in the topic. You can also join our active communities on the rcrypto leftist subreddits as well as the crypto leftist discord group in which if you're a patron you get exclusive access to one of the channels. Also I can highly recommend picking up the latest issue of Current Affairs with the article written by Andrew and Chetic called the Crypto Casino. The issue is number 27 and it has a very cool piece of art with a breastfeeding mushroom lady on the front of it. But it's a great magazine and it's a great article so be sure to pick pick it up. There'll be a link on purchasing that issue in the show notes. But that's it from me. Let's get back to the interview. Were there any, like, any, like, funny stuff that didn't make it in or is too,
consider the fact with the Ethereum DAO that, you know, a bunch of libertarians set up their own virtual marketplace, and they create this thing called the DAO. It's gonna be a venture capital sort of fund, but on the blockchain. And it runs into problems, and they end up voting to roll back the blockchain. And in the real world, that is called a corporate bailout. So, basically, we went through all that and lost a few $100,000,000 to reinvent something that the financial world already has. And I would suspect that that isn't the only thing. Like, I think if you took a bunch of libertarians and you dropped them on an island somewhere, within about a generation, they would be giving each other subsidies and establishing corporate welfare and corporate bailouts and all the things we hate from the February.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a that's a that's a funny point. I guess a lot of what has become of, I guess the use cases of crypto are sort of, it's the reproduction of, like, already currently existing practices. And, yeah, I I have never thought about the DAO as, like, a corporate bailout, but that is that is an interesting way to think about it. There is maybe one argument about, like, well, they at least voted to to, to turn back the blockchain a bit, but I think in the actual like, what actually happened is they were given, you know, there was, like, a day of voting, and then they're gonna do it anyways, basically.
On the tech side, it's more complicated than that. I don't remember the details. There was, like, a specific kind of fork, and because of the conditions in the DAO contract, they could do that without actually rolling back the Blockchain. But the bottom line is that, as I mentioned before, the Blockchain problems are really governance problems. So they had a bunch of people who were in danger of losing a bunch of money. The community got together and decided in a very haphazard way to rescue those people, I guess, at the expense of the idea of immutable code.
Having this experience in the crypto media and then, you know, now, publishing this article in in in current affairs, I'm curious then what you think about, things like DeFi and, like, the current trends in in in crypto with DeFi and, like, how the crypto media has been reporting on it around. Alright. So
DeFi DeFi is a kind of an interesting thing because I it's supposedly I mean, it is it is peer to peer, sort of peer to peer replacement for banking, which I do think is kind of cool. But it ends up feeling very much like I don't I don't wanna throw around any accusations, but it feels like a sort of accidental Ponzi scheme. Robert Shiller, who I think was who I think won the Nobel Prize, described bubbles as being an accidental Ponzi scheme where you see your friends get rich and you say, oh, I wanna put my money into that too. And it feels very much like that's what's going on in DeFi because you can have, like, 100 plus yield interest rates, which is absolutely insane. But at the end, there's only so much fiat currency in the system to support those gigantic interest rates. And if it weren't losing all its money from, flash loans, as we've seen in some cases, it probably would be exit scams or hacks or other kinds of things.
It's sort of like this DeFi, it seems to be, like, one the newest thing in crypto capitalism, I guess. It's I'm so I'm curious. Where where do you see crypto capitalism heading into the future?
So with DeFi, it does feel a lot like 2008. Actually, I'm quite proud of the way I phrased it. How did I phrase it in the article? Alright. The latest fad is DeFi or decentralized finance, a system of automated lending facilities which could have been dreamed up at the Lehman Brothers subprime mortgage desk. Call call me smug, but I do like, I do like reading my own work. Yeah. Eventually, I think it has to end in the same way because there's there can only there's only so many so much money to be taken out of the system, and I think eventually someone's gonna get burned. Yeah. And people have been continually burned as we've seen with, these flash loans. And, the increasing prices lately are impressive. I don't really I don't really have any illusion that Bitcoin's gonna keep going going up and up and up and up. At least at least not this time around. What do you think the difference is this time versus last time? So last time, there was a lot more retail enthusiasm. I had so I had I overheard people at the gym talking about different cryptocurrencies. I'd be at Starbucks wearing, like, a crypto t shirt and people would start up conversations with me. Now none of that seems to hap seems to be happening, and there is like a sort of marginal uptick in online interest, but it does seem like this price rise is either in some sense, at least partially manipulated, but it could also be large volume investors who don't necessarily need to learn about crypto by going through a Google search.
Mhmm. And they're not the kind of people you'd run into at the gym. Yeah. I I imagine a lot of it has to do with, like, the PayPal, now that they're that they're, using cryptocurrency. And then I've heard as well, potentially, that a lot of big purchases are being made by extremely wealthy people, especially extremely wealthy people who were maybe Trump supporters, who are conservative and are, you know, worried about inflation or, like, worried about, basically any marginal amount of economic stimulus that Joe Biden would, you know, theoretically implement, if if he were to, become president and there would be a a transition.
I could believe that. Steve Bannon was apparently a big Bitcoin guy before he, before he worked with Trump. So, you know, Bitcoin is already kind of popular on the right wing side of things. I could I could believe, people are stockpiling a few sats alongside their ammo cartridges.
Yeah. Which is it's like kind of funny and also kind of scary to think about, I guess. So maybe I wanted to get into your thoughts about Tether as well because I know that Tether is a really interesting, well, project that exists now. Maybe could you explain a bit what what Tether is actually for people who don't know and what what exactly the the controversy is about that?
Alright. So Tether is either the first or one of the first stable coins. I think it launched in 2014. And the the basic idea is that it's supposed to be worth a dollar. It's a dollar you can move on the Blockchain. And if you want a Tether, you send your fiat cash to Tether, and they store it in their bank account, and then they print out Tethers and they send it to you, and you can spend that on an exchange. According to their white paper, they were supposed to have monthly audits where they would get professional auditors to come in, look at the books, and say, yep. Every tether is one to one backed by a dollar. That never happened. When I was in crypto, they would they would actually kinda do stuff that they would try to pass off as an audit. Like, they would do a software audit and say, here's our audit, guys. Or they would have their law firm come in and just write a quick affidavit about their balance, and they would say, here's our audit. But that never happened. And so the conspiracy theory that started floating around after they got hacked in, I think it was 2016. The conspiracies theory was that Bitfinex, which had been hacked, was using unbacked Tethers to buy up Bitcoin and raise the price of Bitcoin. And then they could sell that and get more money back and eventually cover their losses. There was no real evidence for that until, I guess, a year or two ago when, the New York attorney general dragged them in front of a court, and Tether's lawyers admitted that they only had enough cash reserves to cover about 74% of their obligations.
This is I think I feel like Tether's a great another example of the recreation of already currently existing. It's like, it sounds almost like fractional reserves banking in a way. Yeah. It's somewhere in between fractional reserves
and, hyperinflation. Like the price of Bitcoin at this point seems to depend on something which could be based on the same monetary policies as like the Bank of Zimbabwe. Yeah. And so since I started writing that article, the supply of Tether, I think, has quadrupled, which is also the same amount that the price of Bitcoin has increased since about March.
How peculiar.
Yeah. So as Bitcoin crosses 19,000, it's kinda inching towards 20,000, we are also at at least 18,000,000,000 Tethers, most of the most of which have been printed this year. So, you know, while there's a legitimate worry about the Fed and inflation and the amount of money which is being cover printed to cover the, CARES Act, which is a good thing to worry about, the supply of Tether has basically quadrupled. Yeah. And it is the main way to move dollars between exchanges and between wallets.
You know, there there's plenty I think we can it's easy to criticize, you know, the the crypto space and the blockchain space as it is. They're sort of, like, the mainstream things that are happening with things like Tether, things just like DeFi. But I'm curious to hear from you, you know, having written this article in Current Affairs, what are the things that you are actually,
looking forward to in the crypto space and the blockchain space? So I think one of the most interesting things is the ability to use the Blockchain to create governance structures that can kinda solve those basic allocation and decision making problems without necessarily having to trust the other people in the network. And one one example is, things like DAOs where people can get together and vote on what direction they want to go in as a group. So the cautionary the one that we all kind of know about is the DAO, which was that venture capital fund that basically demonstrated some of the shortsighted problems in Ethereum. But there are other DAOs which are much better structured
and are actually functional. And to be fair, I think people's knowledge on DAOs and, like, how to implement DAOs and work and create DAOs has improved quite a bit since then. So one example which I kind of glance on in the article
is the way Amari Sache was trying to get people in Bitcoin Cash to establish a minor tax that would fund development. I I I'm not gonna say whether that is a good idea or not, but it is kind of a problem for blockchain systems if there if it's if there are no clear incentives for people to contribute and they're just doing so on a on a kind of voluntary basis. Mhmm. Like, you're gonna have some problems if you have a trillion dollar currency, but you don't have millions and millions and billions of dollars to fund development for it. And for a system like Bitcoin, which where people either donate or sponsor developers or otherwise only only contribute out of their self interest, I think could raise problems for Bitcoin further on.
It seems like that's, the libertarian principles that a lot of the people who get into crypto thinking that crypto is, like, this perfect libertarian paradise and is, like, the example of why libertarian policies are are, like, superior in whatever way. Doesn't really, like, hold up if you take like, if you take a close look at it, it doesn't really hold up, essentially.
Like like I said earlier, if you dropped them on an island, and you told them to sort things out, well, eventually, they would have to figure out a way to get their roads paved and a way to, you know, establish environmental regulations or whatever. And the way to do that is through governance and taxes and all the things that they hate. And just like we talked about before with the crypto space reinventing all the bad things that happen in the legacy market, You have Bitcoin. It has a sort a very informal governance structure, but if you have enough money, if you employ enough programmers who make contributions to the Bitcoin core code, you suddenly have a lot of sway in the direction that Bitcoin development goes in.
I think it's really funny how, crypto people sort of call like, they're really mad about whales or, like, people who can, you know, effectively manipulate markets because they have a lot of capital. But this is, you know, the exact this is basically, like, the working class being mad at capitalists almost in a certain sense, you know, they're able to manipulate all that capital because they were allowed to accumulate that much capital and this is you know partially due to these libertarian nature of cryptocurrencies in a certain sense.
Yeah. As a as a counterexample to that, like, when when when we speak of DAOs, most people do think of that first DAO, the Ethereum DAO, but it's not actually the oldest one, because the Dash DAO was established, like, a few months before that one. It functions reasonably well. And as a as a network, they own multiple companies, they vote on investments, they direct grants to the areas of infrastructure, to the areas that they want to see explored, and it hasn't yet had that kind of problem and seems to function reasonably well. So Dash is sort of like the a separate cryptocurrency
that I think was originally like a fork of Bitcoin, but they made it a lot faster or something like that. And basically, they I mean, they basically have a governance structure of the entire cryptocurrency network, the entire Dash network, which is interesting because I know a lot of libertarians that are into Dash, but they also like Dash because of these governance things. Yeah.
And when you think about it, it is a way to solve to provide a sort of government without putting, like, a gun to someone's head. So, like, the the way it works is, you know, the people who owns the who own the nodes get together every month and they vote on where they want to allocate resources and what to do with it. I wouldn't call it a socialist project because there are people who have hundreds of nodes and there are people with one node, but it's not quite the same kind of corporate capitalism that we're used to. And so as a result, if you want to change something about blockchain about, like, the block size or the block speed or discuss some kind of scaling solution, you can do that in a more civil way than you would in Bitcoin where you argue and DDoS each other and then have a contentious fork.
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. They're a bit more,
civil about it. I mean, they've they've also had forks too, but their forks have been minimal.
Yeah. That that's it for me. The article is called the crypto casino. It's published in current affairs in the latest, version. So definitely pick it up. But, where can people keep up with your work, in general?
I guess you could follow me on Twitter. It's at tramp abroad one. I could always use some followers, and anything new I publish will certainly get mentioned there. Current Affairs, fantastic magazine. Pick up a copy. Get a subscription.
Alright. Cool. Well, thanks a lot for, taking the time, and hopefully, we'll be seeing some more, socialist cryptocurrency
blockchain articles from you soon. Oh, thank you. I hope to produce many of them. Thanks for taking the time to talk again.