You Need to Read This Essay About a Cryptocurrency Cruise

I’m tossing in an extra must-read longread today because this is SO GOOD: Laurie Penny’s Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche, for Breaker.

A sample:

On this half-empty passenger ship with its swirling ’80s carpets right out of The Shining, there is very little sober talk of blockchain’s obstacles or limitations. Nobody mentions how wildly ecologically unsound the whole project is—some estimates have bitcoin burning as much energy as the entire nation of Ireland for a relatively small pool of users. Instead, the core and only existential question is which of the various coins and ICOs (initial coin offerings) will make you the richest the fastest before dawn.

Freedom here means freedom of money, and only freedom of money—and what freedom of money means is the freedom to amass great stocks of it without being taxed or traced.

Read the whole thing.

Photo by Peter Hansen on Unsplash.

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