Listening to a recent episode of the Solarpunk Presents podcast reminded me the importance of consistently calling out cryptocurrency as a wasteful scam. The podcast hosts fail to do that, and because bad actors will continue to try to push crypto, we must condemn it with equal persistence.
Solarpunks must be skeptical of anyone saying it’s important to buy something, like a Tesla, or buy in, with cryptocurrency. Capitalists want nothing more than to co-opt radical movements, neutralizing them, to sell products.
People shilling crypto will tell you it decentralizes power. So that’s a lie, but solarpunks who believe it may be fooled into investing in this Ponzi scheme that burns more energy than some countries. Crypto will centralize power in billionaires, increasing their wealth and decreasing their accountability. That’s why Space Karen Elon Musk pushes crypto. The freer the market, the faster it devolves to monopoly. Rather than decentralizing anything, crypto would steer us toward a Bladerunner dystopia with its all-powerful Tyrell corporation.
Promoting crypto on a solarpunk podcast would be unforgivable. That’s not quite what happens on S5E1 “Let’s Talk Tech.” The hosts seem to understand crypto has no part in a solarpunk future or its prefigurative present. But they don’t come out and say that, adopting a tone of impartiality. At best, I would call this disingenuous. And it reeks of the both-sides-ism that corporate media used to paralyze climate action discourse for decades.
Crypto is not “appropriate tech,” and discussing it without any clarity is inappropriate.
Update for episode 5.3: In a case of hyper hypocrisy, they caution against accepting superficial solutions—things that appear utopian but really reinforce inequality and accelerate the climate crisis—while doing exactly that by talking up cryptocurrency.
For the simplest case you just have your system pull down config data from the blockchain as you would any DB and configure its self based on that data (because of costs probably something like which private chain to pull from or which got repo to look for configs from, and from there deploy the system with your standard gitops workflow for configuring cloud infrastructure, os, platform (e.g. k8s), and app configs.)
You also can use what are called oracle services if hitting API from the smart contracts themselves is seen as useful.
Google cloud also support ETH payments so that simplifies that some. Other hosting services exist too, but GCP a pretty mature platform.
It doesn’t NEED to be as complicated of an IT system, just saying it can scale handled to more complicated.
I would think something like bitpay would be a good choice. Have the DAO controlled wallet put eth via smart contract to a bitpay address that is setup to LLC’s account (or whatever legal entity owns the bank account), and from there do your normal fiat payments (this too could be controlled by something like invoice ninja that’s configuration was defined on-chain).
All this to say you have to:
All of this to enable day two ops for things like: increase spend of cloud service vote increases, wallet is sent more funds, cloud setting config changed to support the higher spend, etc
All automated. With the voting mechanism making it possible to review the financial changes and system changes as a collective in one swoop, and then after that executing potentially without human hand offs.