Excuse Me, Do You Have a Moment to Talk About Freedom?

No, it's not yet another Bitcoin fork called Freedom, but you are right, it's a clickbait title because I want your attention on something that some "journalists" get wrong about cryptocurrency space.

Whoring for word count

Couple days ago, I noticed a long article called "Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche" by Laurie Penny (5th December 2018) on my Facebook feed. I didn't know who Laurie Penny was, but it took me only a couple of paragraphs before I started to think: "Hmm, probably feminist". I read the article until the end and then Googled her name, turns out that she has written 2 books about feminism and has been written about feminism over 10 years now.

Above article is about CoinsBank Blockchain Cruise. I wasn't there, but the article gives a detailed look through her eyes. It starts like this:

Two months ago, an editor from BREAKER called and asked if I wanted to go on a four-day Mediterranean cruise with hundreds of crypto-crazed investors and evangelists. We’ll cover the travel, he said. Write something long about whatever you find, he said.

When I started to read it, there was no indicator like on Busy.org (referral link) blog post, which shows how long reading material that article would be, so it took me more time than I initially expected to invest in it, but after finishing it, I can say that she nailed it in a sense that it's long indeed (over 7000 words). Don't worry, this blog post will be only around 2000 words.

If you send a feminist to a conference and ask her to write a long piece then what can you expect? You get the long feminist piece. A long story doesn't make it a good story, just like a long movie doesn't make it a good movie, it just makes it look more epic if it's well done, but it can still be a horrible mess.

Freedom of money cult

The reason why I gave my post "Excuse Me, Do You Have a Moment to Talk About Freedom?" title is that she also claims to be fighting for the freedom and against the diluted definition of freedom and brings out how cryptocurrency is like a cult. You would think that if you put her on the same boat (pun intended) with cryptocurrency enthusiasts, she would find some common ground with them on freedom topic. Apparently not, this is what she found:

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.

I figured that she just ended up speaking with wrong people so far because anybody long enough in this space knows that Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous, so I continued to read. Finally, she met Roger Ver, who doesn't call himself so much as a libertarian, but more as "voluntaryist". I can see that she found somebody with common interests and somebody to talk about feminism (apparently that's what she went there for), but this doesn't last long until I get to this:

My editor tells me Ver is a notorious hulking ego-monster, but my first impression of him is that he is actually very shy. I don’t see him on the dance floors or partying in the poker room. Correlation does not equal causation, and for all I know the guy has been hip-deep in Ukrainian models somewhere offstage the whole time, but I suspect not. I suspect he has been doing what he normally does: having arguments on the internet.

It's not the first time she mentions these Eastern European models in that article. Surveys show that only 5% of cryptocurrency enthusiasts are women, so apparently the organizer of the event invited/hired women from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus to be on the cruise, so it would not become a sausage fest. I guess it's fair to say that they probably just tried to equalize the number of members from both genders. :P

You might think - where could they find 150 female attendees? The answer is ... probably from the adult entertainment industry. The reason is simple, many women don't mind about getting on a free cruise (just like the author of the article), they say that they don't get paid for having sex (even if that's how far some will go), they say that they get paid for the time they spend with the clients.

Victims of government money

I have been recently in all of those 3 countries mentioned above and my experience is that these countries are in a difficult economic situation for various reasons (mainly government, war and hyperinflation). Women are the backbone of these countries because there is a shortage of good men (non-alcoholics with a permanent job that pays well) and they are the ones who have to provide for parents and grand-parents (usually a role for men). There are many single-mothers with kids all over Eastern Europe, but NOT all adult workers are victims like Laurie Penny thinks about these women:

Hence the half-naked models, who are all working a lot harder than any of the guys in shirtsleeves.

How often do you see an article written by a feminist who doesn't portrait women in the adult industry as victims? Not that often because in their mind, they think that women are always doing this against their will like some man has forced them to do it.

Nude art photography is my hobby, so I have spoken with many models like that and what I have found out is that their job can be hard sometimes, but they are very independent women for their age who doesn't need men because they have far greater goals in life (most of them want to travel the world and buy their own apartment). Women over 30 years dream about starting a family, but there are far less of them in the adult industry, but for some reason, retired adult workers are usually the main interview targets for feminist journalists. Many strippers and nude models that I have met in these 3 countries earned more money than I even that I work as a software developer in Eastern Europe too.

It’s nobody’s specific fault that we’re trapped on a floating live-action walkthrough of how un-trammelled free-market capitalism can be bad for women, given that money and power are things women tend to have less of.

At this moment I realize that Laurie Penny is delusional about what a free-market capitalism is. We have capitalism, but we certainly don't have the true free-markets, but she is so fixed in the idea that men are the enemy, she doesn't even realize she has common enemies with libertarians - capitalism is not the problem, the problem is the government who controls the money (interest rate and supply) and prices (with import/export tax), and banks who control who can use that money.

Stigmatized by feminists

It gets worse - if this is not something that somebody who thinks less about these women would say then I don't know what is:

I’m rather dishonorably relying on them to throw my punk-little-sister schtick (I’m 32) into sharp relief. The men I meet are only too keen to tell me how refreshingly different I am from the other girls here. They’re right. I’m different from the other girls in that I’m older, have more social capital, and am probably getting paid more. That means I can afford to have less patience.

If you ask a girl in the Eastern European strip club: "Where are you from?", most of them answer that they are out of town, sometimes even from a different country. If they open up to you more, you might find out that they moved because they don't want to accidentally see their classmates in a strip club. They don't worry so much if their parents will know (mothers or aunts sometimes already do), they are just trying to avoid the despise from former peers (mainly other women from the same school they went). Also, who is the most critical about men who pay for adult entertainment? Answer: Other women, feminist and brainwashed men with feminist views.

Is this a freedom that we still have a social stigma about adult industry workers and that some men pay for that kind of entertainment? Is there any help by the feminists to these women at all with articles like these or do they actually make things even worse?

What feminist doesn't seem to realize is that you can't force women to attend technology conference if they are not interested, but what you can do is stop stigmatizing adult industry workers and stop treating them always as victims when in reality they came there voluntarily for the money. They are not victims of any rich man, they are actually victims of government, war, and hyperinflation.

Open for everybody to participate

Not all women on the cruise were paid hostesses, there is actually enough women in technology to have a "Women in Blockchain" panel, but even then Laurie Penny finds a negative comment about that:

“When these women talk about how it’s a new industry, there are not as many barriers, we can build it to be how we want it…I just think that’s bullshit because the crypto space didn’t just evolve out of nowhere. A lot of the evangelizing of it came from places that are actually hostile to women, like 4chan. Blockchain doesn’t need more women, it needs more feminists.”

A little bit of history lesson here because it seems goal of that article is to link cryptocurrencies to something horrible with quotes that fit the narrative. Bitcoin didn't start from 4chan, it started in 2008 with a white paper that was sent to mailing-list of people interested in cryptography and after that, it moved to a separate forum. It didn't get much attention until the end of 2010 when PayPal stopped accepting donations for WikiLeaks and they started accepting Bitcoin instead, which Bitcoin community was not that happy about at that point in time. After that, cryptocurrency communities have spread to many social platforms including YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Slack & Github. I haven't heard of any cryptocurrency having an official channel on 4chan and it's hard to tell who got rich thanks to finding out about it through that site.

Cryptocurrencies don't need feminist, it doesn't care about gender (it's irrelevant). It's not cryptocurrencies fault that men are more into technology and women are more into interacting with people. You don't have to look far to see this is the case because countries with more equality of opportunity, more people pick the job that they actually want to do, not the job that pays better.

There is no barrier to entry, nobody needs a banking license to build a cryptocurrency or use their API in their own app. Nobody needs to know what gender you have, but if you are a woman or a developer then everybody is more than happy to get you to join because there could never be too many of them (women or developers) in any cryptocurrency community. All you need to do is pick a project you like and join the social network that the team members also use.

How to get involved

If you are interested to know what Roger Ver actually tells people about Bitcoin then first 12 minutes of this interview on The Rubin Report will teach you the basics.
If you listen the whole hour then you will learn why Roger Ver actually renounced US citizenship. It was not what Laurie Penny thinks it was about (tax evasion) and it was also not only about the disagreement about where the tax money is spent.

If you want to learn even more about cryptocurrencies then I suggest you watch Andreas M. Antonopoulos videos.

In my last blog post, I told my story how I got involved with cryptocurrencies and how I found myself a project that I think is worth my time. Anybody is more than welcome to join, all you need to do is join Byteball Slack. You can find more info about it on Byteball.org website.