This is huge. I mean, people don't realize how significant this is. How another big announcement from Blockchains

acres and what the company CEO says will be a series of projects to highlight the power of the public blockchain.

A futuristic city rising out of the desert. That's where Blockchains LLC sees the future. The way content is created,

The blockchain technology is really a second level or reinvention of the Internet. And so that technology needs years, in fact, decades probably of development. It will change everything. And part of that vision is more high paying jobs for the region. The average wage of the companies we brought in about three years ago were about $38,000 a year. This year, we're averaging almost $60,000 a year for the companies we work with. That's a dramatic increase in average wage, which is important because the companies we bring in here, we want them to be able to afford housing and rent and everything else, which has gone up as well. It's a long term project, so economic experts are stressing the importance of workforce development and building infrastructure. Obviously, you're not going to develop 68,000 acres overnight. This is not something that's gonna happen even in the next few years. You're talking about a decade or so. We bring in the right kinds of people, the right kinds of jobs. We increase our housing market here in the Reno Sparks area because it'll be a long time before that project gets to the point where it has, self sustaining, all its own housing, and everything else.

Now a conservative estimate puts the job creation number for this project at about 20,000 over the next decade, and some are saying a lot of these next generation jobs based on blockchain technology don't even exist yet. Covering the story live in the newsroom, Chris Buckley, two news.

Wow. I love that clip, at the very end. Hi again, this is the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. You're listening in and today I have a slightly different type of episode again. It was just me this time. I didn't have any interview planned. I had a couple of things that I really wanted to talk about. So would you just listen to her? This news segment is about a, basically this company called Blockchains LLC, very creative, which has been buying up quite a few different Blockchain startups. But they have this base the CEO really, I think, has this big idea about creating a Blockchain smart city from scratch. So they've bought, as you heard, a bunch of land near Reno, Nevada, and they are, about to well, I think they have already begun, constructing their city. And this company is gonna come back later in the episode, because they bought a particular company that I think is really interesting, and is related to the latest article that I published about, housing for all using blockchain as a housing for all type of facilitator and solution. And, so I'll get that I'll get to that in a minute, but I have a couple of things I wanna talk about. One being the Mel Magazine article that was published, back a couple months ago. So I don't know if you guys saw but there is an article called, The Socialists Trying to Reclaim Cryptocurrency. So this was published, in Mel Magazine, it's a magazine based in Los Angeles as far as I understand, and, they like to talk a lot about sex. It's pretty funny. If you go through their website, there's, like, half of the articles is something related to, like, porn or sex. But I guess they also have a space to discuss technology and, blockchain and socialism, so that was also pretty cool. I was contacted by the guy who wrote it to give some, I guess to discuss a bit of what I'm doing, and what others are doing in the, Blockchain space that sort of, align with a more left wing vision, more socialist vision, and he wrote up this article. And so I wanted to go through some of the bits that he talked about, try to, expand a bit on what he published and what, what I gave to him, and, clarify some of the stuff that's around this that he talks about. So in this article, it's by, Andrew Fuzzy. So he says so I I like the subtitle. Blockchain technology has long been recognized as a libertarian agenda, but it doesn't have to be and indeed shouldn't. So that's, I think pretty closely, aligns with sort of the mantra that I have for this podcast and for, all the different articles that I write and basically this entire project, is a recognition that, yes, there is a huge libertarian agenda and libertarian influence in the space, but it doesn't have to be that way and, yeah, it really shouldn't because that's, kind of dystopian type of future we're looking at depending on, where you, I guess, lie on the, wealth scale. If you're wealthier, then Blockchain Libertarianism will probably be a lot better for you, versus if you are maybe a working class person or, I mean, just don't care to be super rich, like they do. But even then, who knows if wealth can even protect you from the type of dystopian future that some of them, some of the anarcho capitalist types like to profess. But so, in the article, he starts off talking about the, the thing that happened in Puerto Rico where a bunch of libertarians, went to Puerto Rico trying to start their own, like, libertarian commune using cryptocurrency, and it was this whole thing, an ordeal where I think at the end, everyone started to realize actually they're just replaying imperialism just using cryptocurrency. And so it's largely been considered a failure. I don't really know what the status of their their whole thing is at the moment. I haven't heard much about it since in the past, like, couple years. So I don't think it's, probably going too well. So he talks about that, and then he talks, he starts to introduce, actually, me, and some of the the stuff, like, some of the stuff that I've been working on. He talks about as well, some of the people that I've actually interviewed. So he spoke with Mark Alazar, who I interviewed, not too long ago, and as well as, Elisa Howitz, who works at Trustlines. And Mark Alazar, he is the author of the book Crypto Communism. But so he sort of spoke to the three of us and, another guy named Victor Wallace. So we could talk about blockchain and what it means in a more sort of left wing context. So it's pretty interesting thing to read. I would suggest you do if you're interested in this podcast then, I would suggest you checking out the article. I'll link it into the descriptions. But so I'll read a couple of different snippets, from the article and, talk about, you know, the things that I want to talk about, actually. So in the article, after he talks about he gives a, you know, a synopsis about the Puerto Rico thing and then a little bit of an explanation of what Blockchain is. Then he says and then he starts here. He says, up to now, Blockchain has gained its reputation as a technological backbone for an emerging decentralized monetary system. One that while innovative still falls prey to the ills of Capitalism generating wealth for the few at the expense of the many. Very true. But what if Blockchain in its purest sense wasn't just another capitalist exploit? What if, for example, the highly transparent and decentralized nature of Blockchain system for recording information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat could be leveraged as a way to provide housing as a human right. That's one proposal set forth by Adrian, the founder of the podcast Blockchain Socialists. Just to clarify, I gave a pseudonym. Adrian isn't my actual name. So, yeah. So let's say we're in Mushroom Kingdom, he says, referring to the fictional setting from the Mario franchise. In this version, Mario is a single dad with a kid and Luigi is a single guy, says Adrian. Under the socialized world, everyone gets access to housing represented by a housing token on the blockchain. This token gives you access to a certain amount of square feet in a home, he explains. Mario's token gives him access to a slightly bigger double apartment because he has a kid, so he's entitled to more square feet of space because that agreement, which is democratically decided upon, is coded into the Blockchain. In other words, a Blockchain isn't just an algorithm managing units of information like a normal database, but rather it's being used to encode and even define how that information is executed with real life implications. So, yes, this is actually a conversation that I had with him, just some of the quotes that I gave, and it's I I took a lot from the Blockchain one zero one livestream that we did, a few months ago as well, more towards sort of the the beginning of, of all the lockdown stuff. And I gave this example about Mario and Luigi just because I thought it was funny and, like, used the Mushroom Kingdom, so it's already this, like, you know, community that sort of exists and is imaginary and, you know, don't things. But so, yes, this is one thing that I think how we have to think about Blockchain is doesn't have to include, the markets essentially. I mean, capitalist markets for sure. Basically, what I'm saying here is that you can use a Blockchain as a way to sort of standardize rights and like the distribution of those rights. And I think housing is a really good example of doing that because, I mean, one, it's something that is still a huge issue that, I mean, is a problem almost everywhere around the world. I mean, it's very easy to explain to people, I think, that housing or the lack of housing, having homeless people is really a political decision. It's not it's very, very rarely ever an issue of, like, not having enough houses, considering when you distribute housing in a market, you're basically saying that you are allowed housing up to the point that which you cannot afford housing, right? So if you can afford more than one house, then you are allowed to do so and it is perfectly legal and okay for you to do so and not really have to care about what the, issues of that would be. So in a market, if you're Jeff Bezos, you can buy probably like a 100 different homes. You can I mean, you can create a business, a property management business to own, several units in which people have to rent and they cannot buy, the places in which they live? So they don't they don't really own what where they're living in in a practical sense and they can't build wealth off of that. And so that is one decision you can make, right? And that's people who are maybe pro capitalist will say, yes, but this is allowed because it gives choice to people and actually, you know, Socialism doesn't give any choice. It gives everyone the same apartment or whatever like that. But I think what I'm trying to get at, at least in this, small tidbits and in the article that I most recently published that goes into more detail about this use case, is that you can still have choice within a system where property, instead of being held as private property I mean, housing held as private property, you and having housing instead owned as common property, you can still have choice, right? You in the market example, you have, you have the side effect of homelessness because wealth accumulates more wealth, right? If you have a lot of money, it's very easy for you to make a whole lot more money. If you have a little bit of money, then it's a lot more difficult because you have to pay for your basic necessities and you're, like, barely getting by and, you know, you can't, invest as much money into the stock market to make, percentage amounts of, of of gains. And so, you know, if you're making 15% on a $100 versus 15% on a million dollars, the second option is probably going to make a whole lot more money. So, that's sort of the the issue with the market based sort of housing distribution system that is sort of the norm at the moment. Moment. I mean, yes, you have social housing to a certain extent but usually it's very difficult to get into, in recent decades. It a lot of the different programs haven't expanded very much, etcetera, etcetera. So in a situation, like in this fictional Mushroom Kingdom, all the housing is held in common by the entire Mushroom Kingdom and, everybody essentially owns, a share in the entirety of the housing. And so you can choose democratically as if you're, like, you know, a giant, cooperative that owns, all this housing, you can decide democratically how are you going to distribute that housing. So you can say, well, as a society, we want to make sure that those who have children are able to provide for their children, the necessary amount of space that kids need to play and, like, have their own room and do whatever. And therefore, we when we distribute this right of housing as a token on the blockchain simply as a way to keep track of all these things, we want to make sure that those with kids can have that extra bit of space because they need it. And so that's why Mario is entitled to a little bit more space than maybe Luigi has. And I I gave this example of, like, you know, square feet or, you know, the amount of children they have as two I mean, just like examples of data points that you can use. But this isn't the this is not the way I'm saying of doing this. It's simply an example to express how this could theoretically, be achieved, and it's something that isn't so complicated. I mean, of course, if you are, you know, imagining your utopia and you want, like, other types of information about the people to matter, in how they get their housing or, like, you know, instead of doing it by square feet, I don't know, you just keep it simple and you just do number of bedrooms, and like number of bathrooms. The two main things that you usually see when you're looking at like, you know, looking to find a home to live in or rent out. So they're just examples. Don't stick to them very religiously or anything like that. It's just just the beginning. I think what I am not trying to do is tell you exactly how you should design this sort of housing, solution. The point is to give you a framework for understanding how to rethink, I mean, one, Blockchain and two, housing, and how those things can be combined to effectively, make steps at the very least towards, having a different system. Of course, implementing something like this is going to look different in every in every place in the world, obviously. You know, we still have to acknowledge that at the moment, private property is the dominant system and like distribution mechanism of, housing. So, like, how you go about that is going to be, really determined by, like, what the market already looks like. I mean, if you are like Mao or something and you've seized all of the all of the housing in your country, then obviously you can implement this at a national level like the Mushroom Kingdom, assuming this is a nation or something like that. I don't know what the governance structure of the Mushroom Kingdom is. I assume it's feudalism in most Mario games because there's a princess. But yeah. So it continues in the article. Adrian was working a really low paying job, in quotations because that's what I said, when he first learned about cryptocurrencies. I needed to figure out a way to also pay for my student loans and was learning more about stocks and investments, so I took a closer look at crypto. He says, in the beginning, Adrian tells me that if you wanted to look up the most basic information about Blockchain, 70% of it would be very right wing and conservative discourse about why Bit Bitcoin has value. The emphasis, he says, was on the scarcity of Bitcoin and its similarities in that way to the gold standard. Bitcoin has never appealed to me but Ethereum, another, digital currency did because of smart contracts. So then in basically, that is actually correct. What I this is how I spoke to him. I was working a really shitty job when I first graduated university and I was barely making it buy and so I was, you know, looking at like maybe I should just invest in stocks. Maybe I can then make money, you know, it was sort of the, when you're in like such a position, at least for me, I was like trying to find extra income. I was working, you know, I had my full time job and then I would also drive, like for Uber and like things like that so I can make extra income because I was barely making my rent and all my other payments, and being able to pay for my student loans. So I was looking for ways to make money, at the time and trying to, like, get a little bit more. And I thought, you know, investing in stocks isn't actual work if you're good at it, so why don't I just go for it, even though I, like, hated the concept of it. So that's why I was sort of looking into cryptocurrency, a little bit more closely than I was in the beginning. Or I guess when I was, the very first time that I had heard about it. When I heard about Bitcoin, I was like, what is the point? I mean, I don't need this I don't need to, like, use cryptocurrency to buy drugs. Wasn't my thing, so I mean, like, you know, I didn't really see the point in it at the moment the first time I had heard about it. But it was Ethereum and the this idea of smart contracts and being able to, basically force the movement of money or at least cryptocurrency on preset conditions. So basically being able to of course, those preset conditions can can be a wide ranging amount of things. The thing that I was most interested, of course, was in, like, democratic consensus for the movements of of money. So I I found I was, like, really interested in the implications of things for, like, cooperatives, and things like that because I was thinking, wow, you can just basically remove a lot of the middlemen in under capitalism and, like, under in the corporation, largely, like, higher management positions whose sole purpose really is to, like, to to to approve financial transactions in a certain sense. So that was sort of my, like, what what what was, like, the light bulb moment for me. So that's true. And so I wanted to continue a bit further down. I won't go through the whole article because it's, it's a really good one, in terms of, like, just having this type of exposure in the media is really nice to have, like, journalists speak about Blockchain in a left wing sort of context because obviously when you look up almost any news article about blockchain related stuff, you're gonna get the price of Bitcoin or whatever cryptocurrency or you're gonna get, largely more corporate, use cases that are being worked on at the moment. So this is something that's pretty new and pretty novel to see, being published. This one in the article, they go through, you know, what some of the quotes that Mark Alizard gave and Aliza Howard gave. But so if I go more towards, the bottom of it, I wanted to read this part because I think Aliza actually gave a really good quote here. As noted, though despite how its close knit group of friends that are all involved in similarly progressive Blockchain projects, the cryptocurrency community is still largely dominated by libertarian ideology. The Reddit community rcrypto leftists founded in 2018, which is actually true. It was founded in 2018, but, the full story is that I started it in 2018 and then for like a year I was mulling over this idea of whether or not I should go through with it and like, advertise it, at least in this community because, to be honest, for, like, a year I was, like, pretty afraid to do it, and it took me a year to really get the courage to to go for it. And obviously now I'm glad that I did and it's, been a really rewarding experience. So just to clarify, the Reddit community rcryptoleft was founded in 2018, still only has 1,300 members. It now has 1,500 members. It's growing. But so she says what I don't like is that a lot of basic information is hidden behind technical jargon and also financial jargon. How it says as to one reason why these more altruistic Blockchain projects have yet to take off. A lot of the most innovative projects are obscured by questions about what's the token price. This subsequently makes it unappealing to the left writ large, but Howest insists that the important stuff isn't how much the price of ether is right now. Instead, she's interested in what people are building on the platform Ethereum. So I really like that. Right? On average, whenever you're talking about a project, people are going to ask you about the token price. They're always wondering how because everything is considered like an investment in blockchain world and cryptocurrency world. It's it's and because we speak of these things purely in technical and financial jargon, like she says, like, all we want to know is the ROI. I mean, like, all that people at large, like, systemically want to know is what is the price of your token now and what is the price likely going to go to? And that sort of makes it really annoying if you're left wing and you don't really care about these type of things because, obviously, the motivations of why you're interested in the space is not largely, like, get rich quick. It's more about thinking how can we use technology in more progressive ways, and we're doing it now. And so I think in this question about, like, why the left hasn't really, cared about this stuff, by and large, I think is rightly what she's saying is that it's really unappealing how this space is being projected in general. You know, it's when you're constantly talking about token price and all these things, I mean, obviously, leftists don't really give a shit about that. Like, why why would you care that, Bitcoin is at $10,000 now versus $9,000 before? I mean, it doesn't tell you how you're going to make a more progressive world just because a token went up. And of course, there will be, you know, coiners who say like, Yeah, well, if we give Bitcoin to the working people and like not to rich people, then they're gonna become rich because the price will go up. But like that's not what's really happening at the moment. If you look, I mean, a lot of the Bitcoin is concentrated actually in just a few hands and is, you know, it a lot of billionaires are into Bitcoin, to be honest, and they are getting rich or off of what's going on in in in the price of Bitcoin at the moment. And, like, the price going down doesn't really affect them as much whereas for, maybe someone who's working class, investing in these type of cryptocurrencies can be really difficult because if they're in a tough spot, like they lost their job in the pandemic, for example, and they need to take and they've run out of money and they need to take out their money from their exchange, from an exchange to transfer their Bitcoin back into dollars or whatever Fiat currency that they use on the regular to pay rent and to pay all these different bills, then it's not really accomplishing the thing that that certain Bitcoiners will maybe say that it's meant to achieve as if it's some sort of equalizer. Right? So I think that has rightfully, I think, made it unappealing to the Left. Really, the people who, who would be interested or who recognize the appeal of blockchain for a left wing context, it tends to be people who have maybe used it for themselves because they were looking for some sort of solution, I don't know, for, like, moving their money, if they were, like, moving to different countries or I mean, they were interested in it from a technological point of view in the beginning, and they weren't and they were just, like, ignoring all the financial stuff. So, I mean, I guess you get you have to you have to ignore some of the bullshit when you're on the left and trying to look up stuff about this. And I understand it could be really difficult for people to, to do that because it's such it's so prevalent in mainstream crypto discourse. Hey everyone, if you're enjoying this episode so far and want to 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 starting at $3 per month and help me out by joining other patrons like Andrew, Sam, Paul, Matthew, Kendra, JB, Howard, and the newest two patrons, Alice and Dorel. 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 in the near future, I'll be releasing some shorter Patreon exclusive episodes, so you can look forward to that if you're a patron. And, of course, I'll still be making content to help spread the message that Blockchain does not need to be used to further entrench capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. If you can't help out financially, I understand. One thing that you can do instead is to just press the subscribe button to flip podcast on whatever platform you prefer using or even as well you can subscribe to the Blockchain Socialist YouTube channel if you prefer listening there. Also leaving a positive rating and sharing the episode with someone you think would be interested in the topic. But that's it from me. Let's get back to the episode. So I'll talk about these two, things specifically in the article because, it brings up the next couple of things I wanted to bring up. One was, related to the second article that Anju published after, this one we just spoke about. So in the conversations that I had with him, I was talking about this housing for all solution, and I was citing the sort of creation of smart locks, on the blockchain, as something to be very worried about and as something that the left should, have some sort of response to. And so, he he was interested that in that, and we spoke a little bit more about smart locks. And I gave him some some some sources to look up and to, like, do some research, about it. So he published this article, I think, right after, titled Smart Locks Could Make It Even Easier for Landlords to Adject Their Tenants. And the subtitle is, if the tech industry has its way, a computer program will be locking you out of your apartment because you are five minutes late on your rent payment. So this is very closely related to the news, segment that I played in the very beginning of the episode. Because this company, Blockchains LLC, actually purchased a different startup based in Germany, called Slockit or Slock dot it, that was specifically working on smart lock technology in combination with Blockchain. And the argument that I was giving was that this is very frightening because you can imagine a world where, you know, tenants are forced to pay their landlords, by cryptocurrency, and that which will allow the smart lock connected to their front door to open or not because, you know, then the, the landlord will be able to not allow their tenants in and, like, you know, incentivize in a really shitty way their tenants to pay their rent, by a specific date. But so let me read just, a couple of paragraphs from from this one. So to give a little bit of the the context of this news, segment that I played in the beginning as well. The article starts like this. In 2018, CEO, lawyer, and cryptocurrency millionaire, Jeffrey Burns, purchased a 68,000 acre piece of land in Nevada, where he plans to build a city size innovation park based around blockchain, the digital ledger technology that allows a secure transfer of data between parties. It will be a high-tech, High Security Park, an r and d facility that will incubate four life changing technologies together. Smart Cities World reported Burns as saying the basis of the smart city, he said, was to be doing things that have never been done before. Wow. Part of Bern's approach includes the implementation of smart lock technology, which is why in June, he acquired German firm, Slockit, a company that since 2015 has been working on the development of smart locks connected to the Ethereum blockchain. One of the many decentralized platforms that utilizes a blockchain technology that would use smart contracts to handle access control permissions. In a recent article I wrote about the socialist trying to reclaim cryptocurrency, I noted that what distinguishes a smart contract from a regular digital contract is that it's self enforcing. It's not the sort of computer program that makes a recommendation to a person about how they should control a digital asset, but rather a program that controls a digital digital asset itself. According to a medium blog post from CoreLedger, a Blockchain company, the critical advantage of a Blockchain enabled smart lock is that there are no instructions sent between the user and the lock directly. The lock will read the state of its smart contract for the medium post. It will know whether the user paid or not and will open accordingly. In other words, the lock uses its own coded discretion in deciding when and for whom to unlock. So, wow. I think, if you're listening to this, I hope you found what this was saying a little bit uncomfortable, because it is a bit. I mean, having a millionaire fund, this type of project, this blockchain smart city thing, and also purchasing this smart lock company, I mean, you can easily put two and two together. I mean, he's really trying to make a almost ancap, anarcho capitalist society, using technology as its basis for handling different types of disputes. I mean, he's basically trying to create the world that NCAPs want without having some sort of violence or in their eyes what they think is violence. Even though I would argue that not allowing your tenant to sleep in their own home, even if they're a day late on rent, is violence itself. But of course, they don't see it that way. This type of, like, this type of research that I was doing a while back is really what, inspired me a bit to come up with a sort of socialist answer, which is what the housing for all token idea was meant to be. It's meant to be a counternarrative with this narrative that, you know, all these crypto libertarians are pushing and extremely wealthy people are pushing, so they have a lot more resources, than I do. But in this world by, by Jeffrey Burns, the city that he wants to create, I mean, it's something that we should be Obviously people are going to be a little bit skeptical, but I think they should be a little bit, angry about. I mean, you heard in the news segments all of these government officials actually like, these, like, economic development, government official, like, local government people in Northern Nevada talking about how great this is that this millionaire dude is coming to go and just, like, create a city in the middle of our land and, like, he's going to do something great. You know, it it is just this, like, this continuation of neoliberal, hegemony that has, I mean, strongly permeated, governments, including local governments even in places around The US especially. But so I think it's easy to foresee what those problems are going to be in the future. I mean, if they make the city, like, only rich people can live in, then, I don't know, maybe then everything will go fine. Everyone will always pay their rent on time and no one will be locked out. Everyone, the smart locks won't have any use. But the reason you have those smart locks is for a use. Like, it is for the specific reason that someone will one day not be able to pay their rent on time and you need to have a way to incentivize that person to keep paying you at the expense of whatever other things that they may need to pay for at that moment. So, basically, this is sort of the world that Jeffrey Burns is explaining is sort of the extremes of techno capitalism that is going to cause, I mean, some serious issues for people in the future, I mean, particularly poor and working class people, specifically not because it's using Blockchain. That really has nothing to do, with the entire thing. I mean, yes. It does in the sense that blockchain is the sort of, like, mechanism in which it's able to function in this way, but it is not blockchain is not the logic that is behind the, technological design of this whole thing. The the the logic is capitalism. Right? The the the economic logic is capitalism, and capitalism already exists. It is already dominant mode of production, and it is already causing, or it has been causing violence towards working class people for a very long time now. My, thinking is that, I mean, one, you can either be, a sort of anti technology type of person. I don't really know if there's, like, an appropriate word for someone who is anti technology, maybe a primitivist. I don't know. And just sort of, like, brush it to the side in a sense and be like, no. We'll, like, you know, in the future, we're going to, physically seize the means of production, so it doesn't really matter, blow it off in that type of way, which I I don't think is very realistic. Or you can instead take the trends that are already happening within technology and start rewriting those narratives or start writing counternarratives to the one that are very closely linked to the logic of capitalism. So I just wanted to use this article as sort of like an explanation for, the inspiration for the housing for all idea, which is essentially taking the same technology but applying a different logic. So in reality, these are two different socio technical systems, I guess you would call, and that are not you know, trying to prove that the technology itself at a very, very basic level is not necessarily contained by the economic logic in which it's being created. It is heavily influenced, no doubt, but it is not completely restricted to that. And just to clarify maybe one thing as well, the use case that I give on the housing for all, token on the blockchain as an alternative to the sort of hyper capitalist techno dystopia we're sort of heading towards, this use case doesn't rely on a market. It doesn't rely on the token needing to be bought and sold at a profit. It's not meant to be a speculation, and it's not what would be considered like a cryptocurrency. But this is still a a currency which holds value in a sense and that currency being the right to housing. So for people who maybe it wasn't clear because I've had a couple of questions on that, you can't scam people off of a token which you are not buying and selling. Right? The the the scam part of a scam is essentially being able to sell something and, like, not keeping your promise about some sort of trade that you were expecting. The example of the use case that I'm giving is more a it is a collective sort of decision to implement a system in which you don't need to buy and sell, housing and that you are instead given to it as a right by your community. So just wanted to clarify that in case that wasn't clear. And so that's it for those two articles. The last thing I wanted to bring up because I'm we were talking previously about, how, you know, the left generally, it's sort of is not very, the left isn't very positive about, cryptocurrency and blockchain a lot, for some good reasons, and some for not so good reasons, in my opinion. So I wanted to, talk about a couple of the criticisms that I've received before from other, socialists and sort of dig into maybe why they're thinking that or just, like, kinda point out how kinda silly it is, I think. But so when I started the r slash crypto leftists community, the only semi related community on Reddit that I found was one called r slash socialist programmers. Of course, our community isn't about programming in general. Ours is, of course, specifically about, cryptocurrency and blockchain, but there's a lot of overlap because there are a lot of programmers in this space and a lot of people interested in technology. And occasionally, I would share some of the content that I made on that subreddit because I thought people would be similarly interested in it. So I started doing that for a bit and not having really any issues with it until, I don't know, some random month, the moderator, of that and some of the people in that subreddit were getting very angry, telling me to stop in their quotes, in their words, stop sharing coin spam. I hope if you've been paying attention to this episode that I'm not someone who is trying to sell anyone any cryptocurrency. That's not, I didn't make any cryptocurrency. I'm not selling you, like, I'm not starting some sort of ICO, to sell people and then, like, disappear as what was common, a couple of years ago. I've never done anything like that. I've never told anyone to buy cryptocurrency, that they have to buy cryptocurrency, that Bitcoin is going to the moon. I've never made any price predictions ever in anything that I've written, in anything that I've said, in any interviews that I've done, never ever ever because that's not the focus of of what I'm doing and, like, what this project is about. And so, it was a very interesting criticism that I got about coin spam Whenever I would ask them about, like, what coin am I selling them, I would never really get a response. So there was, you know, super petty shit about about this and it is I I don't wanna go into, like, stupid Internet drama because it's one of the dumbest things in the world. But I was banned from this community, at sort of random. I had never really posted on this community for, like, a month because I didn't like, I was getting shit so many times that I, like, just sort of stopped, and then I just, like, got a random message saying, like, you've been banned, and the message from the moderator was something like, how many times do you have to tell you, young man? And I was like, okay, I don't know what I did. So it was very strange. But, so, one of the reasons that I sort of stopped was because there was a post by the mod, this big post saying, I mean, it says just enough with the coin spam. I don't know exactly if he was referring to me specifically or several people. I really have no idea. It was not very clear in the post. If you read it, he doesn't tag anyone. So I never actually read this post until, like, months after it had been posted. So it's a very strange, type of interaction. But so, I don't really know exactly where this specific, criticism about coin spam comes from, but I think it can be easily attributed to, like, the less general disgust, or, like, avoidance of cryptocurrency and blockchain, just because like I mentioned before and like Alisa Howard mentions in that article, every time you try to read something, it's always a very right wing sort of bent to it and, like, bias. And, you know, whenever you you look up, like, I don't know, you wanna read a book about cryptocurrency and you look for, like, book recommendations, half of them are gonna be by, like, an anarcho capitalist or, like, some form of libertarian. People are gonna tell you to go read Hayek or Murray Rothbard. And so it it if you are already like a politically knowledgeable left winger and you see these things, you're like, what the fuck? I don't this is this place is crazy, you know? Or if you go to different spaces, I mean, on, like, different Reddit communities, I mean, you'll just see, like, people fucking, like, you know, Ethereum to the moon, Bitcoin to the moon, I'm predicting price because of this, and I'm doing technical analysis, and you see, like, a graph with a bunch of lines on it, and it means that, like, everyone's gonna be a millionaire if they buy it now. And that can be really obviously, it's really stupid. Like, it's not, predicated in any real understanding of of reality. I mean, it's insane. I think the issue here is not so much that I'm like, what I'm doing specifically or, like, the, you know, the quality of my arguments or, like, what I'm proposing but more to do with just sort of a knee jerk reaction, towards technology and this is sort of getting to as well the the choice that we have, that I spoke about previously. We can either choose to be primitivists in the sense that we're just sort of like anti technology and very, disgusted with technology constantly and for a lot of good reasons I think we are and that's because, you know, capitalism, its logic sort of is permeated throughout Silicon Valley and, like, the main creators or, like, introducers of new technology in our world are these huge technology corporations that, like, don't pay taxes and, like, you know, they do work for the government and, like, the military and, like, they do a bunch of, like, really shitty things and they make a boatload of money off of it and so it leaves a bad taste in leftist mouths and we're sort of associating all technology and like all mentions of technology with that. What really I'm hoping is that if you paid attention to what I'm what I've been saying at least this past episode and if you paid attention to previous episodes that I do not advocate for any purchase of any specific crypto currency. I think you should do whatever you want. If you don't want to buy crypto currency, then don't. I don't give a shit. If you want to buy cryptocurrency and you want to play with it just to see what it's like, then go for it. I also don't care. It's your own personal choice and me telling even like 50 to a 100 people or convincing them to like buy cryptocurrency is not going to change the price of cryptocurrency all that much. Like, it's I can't even feasibly profit off of something like that. It's like to say that I'm doing coin spam in order to, like, pump the price of some coin, like, is so absurd. I don't I I don't I don't really get it. It's not something that I ever done. So I think I have to attribute this more to a knee jerk reaction and distaste and sort of like, I think a general feeling amongst the left to, be very skeptical. And I think that's mostly a good thing to be skeptical. I mean, you should be skeptical and be skeptical of things that I say, sure. But I don't think that we should completely disregard, an entire segment of economic life or of, like, growing economic life in the terms of cryptocurrency just because we don't like, particular aspects of it. And so I think what we as leftists, I think, maybe need to start thinking about is going beyond analysis because there are, I mean, there are academics all over the world constantly analyzing the effects of capitalism and how shitty it is, but we're not doing so much of the, the alternative proposals of compared to what capitalism is giving to us now. I mean, if you are a, disaffected, like, young person who is watching the world crumble before their eyes and you don't see any particular, a very clear and thought out alternative to Capitalism as they live in it now, then they're going to look for other alternatives. And one of those alternatives is Cryptocurrency. There are a lot of young people who are really interested in Cryptocurrency because they see it as an alternative to the world as we see it today. Of course, you can say that they're understanding and they're like, you know, logic behind wanting to get behind cryptocurrency as like the answer to the problems of capitalism is extremely flawed. Of course, you can say that, but you cannot simply criticize all of these things that maybe they're interested in that they like and then expect them to be on your side. What you should instead be doing is taking the things that they like, particularly, I mean, in this case, being technology and, like, being cryptocurrencies and Blockchain and the idea of, you know, decentralizing power in a certain sense, taking that and providing the alternative, the one that is rooted in an anti capitalist framework, one that is rooted in some type of socialism. So, yeah, I think that's what I have to say about that. I think it's a losing game for us to simply to be doomers. You know, I think at a certain point, we need to be bloomers, you know? Like, we gotta do something and articulate something that peep the same people are able to get behind and they're able to find the things that they're familiar with while also helping them understand what socialism is and what the problems with capitalism are because I think everybody understands more or less, in certain aspects what are the problems with capitalism, or at least they recognize particular problems of capitalism and it's like up to us to like to say it literally what the problem is and to propose a different solution. So I think we got a lot of work to do. I think I'm going to keep continuing, my projects. I'm going to keep interviewing people that I find interesting, that are working in Blockchain, that are, have a left wing vision for it, who or maybe that are working on projects that the left would be should be interested in or could be interested in, I think. And we're gonna keep moving forward and we're gonna keep looking for new solutions, and alternatives. I think that's it from me for now. I hope you enjoyed Thanks for listening. This was my second time ever doing a podcast episode just by myself. So definitely reach out and let me know how I did. And, thanks a lot.