
All-White Town’s Divisive Experiment With Cryptocurrency - thesauri
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-an-all-white-towns-divisive-experiment-with-cryptocurrency/
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JadeNB
Although it's easy to figure out, the apostrophe in the title migrated ("An
all-white's town" should be "An all-white town's", as in the article itself).

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dang
Right you are. Belatedly fixed.

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whatshisface
Since the article keeps bringing up that everyone involved is "all white,"
i.e. a 10% minority in SA, that probably means that they won't be able to keep
a good relationship with the SA government if it collapses and they'll
probably end up with the military stealing all of their stuff. Too bad they
can't immigrate to America, they are clearly smart and entrepreneurial.
Unfortunately collapsing states tend to turn on minorities. Really, they
should forget about surviving the collapse and focus on preventing it...

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empath75
They’d have been sued out of existence in America because of housing
discrimination laws.

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dopamean
As is appropriate.

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lordgrenville
As a South African expat, I've long thought that South Africa's poor service
provision provides a natural laboratory for libertarian ideas. This piece
highlights their strengths and weaknesses: high levels of cryptocurrency
speculation (and a currency that's pegged to the rand and hosted on AWS!), but
also small-scale local provision of electricity, water, sewage treatment, and
security; and financial services based on face-to-face transactions and
community trust.

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atomical
> Commerce would continue, with state-backed currencies swapped for crypto
> alternatives that float freely on an open market.

I'm assuming this means a stable coin?

Has anyone figured out how to verify the backing on a blockchain? If that was
possible Tether's fraud would have been exposed sooner.

Also, why is Facebook's new currency rumored to be backed by multiple
currencies? That seems like it would add volatility instead of lessening it.

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JamesBarney
> Has anyone figured out how to verify the backing on a blockchain? If that
> was possible Tether's fraud would have been exposed sooner.

And this is always the problem with block chain. You can't cryptographically
verify real life things that people care about like how much money is in
someone's bank account.

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panarky
_> real life things that people care about like how much money is in someone's
bank account_

How is a ledger entry in a bank's computer more "real" than a ledger entry in
a public blockchain.

Funny how blockchain discussions proceed in endless circles when people
believe without evidence that familiar money is in any way "real" instead of
an imaginary social construct, while blockchain money is somehow fake,
fraudulent or unreal.

Let's guess the next argument in the endless circle: (a) money is backed by
the military, (b) money is backed by tax payments, (c) money is backed by
debt, or (d) tulips.

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JamesBarney
I'm not arguing it's more real, I'm arguing you can't cryptographically
guarantee how many dollars some entity owns. In this context real life mean
off block chain information. Basically the block chain can only verify whats
on the blockchain. It can't make any guarantees about off block chain things
except that someone with a possession of a certain private key said something
at some time.

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panarky
Sure, a blockchain provides cryptographic consensus about assets on the
blockchain, but it can't control things that are not on the blockchain.

Things like legal contracts in a filing cabinet, bank databases, gold bars in
a vault, or how many coins I say are in my pocket.

For all those things, the blockchain can act as a database, but you need to
trust someone that the entries in the database correspond to these other
things that the database is supposedly tracking.

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JamesBarney
Which is the entire issue the op asked about, can you verify a party has
enough dollars to back a stablecoin on the blockchain.

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ralusek
Racial discrimination aside, it gives me hope to see liberal/libertarian
ideals holding against the ever expanding state in almost every country on
Earth. Liberty and self determination are dying virtues, and people don't know
what it is they're giving up so willingly.

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Covzire
Was any actual racial discrimination cited?

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panarky
_Orania is managed as a private company, and the town council retains a tight
grip on who can move in. Each prospective resident is carefully screened—not
by race, the council claims, but by avowed devotion to Afrikaner culture.
Either way, the end result is the same: All of the town’s 1,500 or so
residents are white.

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challenging me to name a country where "blacks have gotten it right"

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There is a map of South Africa, with a magnifying glass hovering over Orania.
The village is surrounded by spear-bearing Africans and huts emblazoned with
ANC flags. The introduction reads: "The year is 2017 AD. South Africa is
entirely occupied by the blacks. Well, not entirely … One small town of
indomitable Afrikaners still holds out against the invaders."_

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Covzire
That's an allusion, not evidence. They're not a gated community in
Johannesburg, they're a town in the sticks and every culture on earth self-
segregates to some degree or another. It sounds like the Wired author found a
peaceful community is wanting to change that because they read racism into
where there may not even be any.

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KorematsuFred
"all white" in South Africa is a minority struggling against majority. They
can't be "far right". Far Right means nativists which in South Africa
continues to be black people and not white.

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JadeNB
> "all white" in South Africa is a minority struggling against majority. They
> can't be "far right". Far Right means nativists which in South Africa
> continues to be black people and not white.

I don't think that most people understand 'far right' in that way. For
example, are you saying that someone whose political philosophy hasn't
changed, but who moves from one place to another, might go from being far-
right to not, or _vice versa_?

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KorematsuFred
Obviously. Radical Christians in India are far left. Hindus are far right. In
USA hindus are far left and not on right. White folks are on right.

Omar Ilhan is far left in USA she would be far right in Pakistan.

It is just boggles me how stupid western media is about rest of the world.

