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As a part of an ethnographic study on blockchain organizations, I recently attended two major conferences Dcentral Con and Consensus held back-to-back in Austin, Texas during a blistering heatwave. My collaborator, Johannes Lenhard, and I had conducted a handful of interviews with angel investors, founders, and venture capitalists, but wed yet to conduct any fieldwork to observe these types of operators in the wild. Dcentral, held at Austins Long Center for the Performing Arts, and Consensus, held at the Austin Convention Center and other venues throughout downtown, provided the perfect opportunity. The speaker and panel topics at both conferences varied widelyfrom non-fungible tokens (NFTs), to the metaverse, to decentralized finance (DeFi). At both conferences an underlying debate regarding the role of established institutions repeatedly bubbled to the surface. The differences between the two conferences themselves offered a stark contrast between those who envision a new frontier of crypto cowboys dismantling existing social and economic hierarchies and those who envision that same industry gaining traction and legitimacy through collaboration with regulators and the traditional financial (aka TradFi) sector.

Dcentral was populated by scrappy developers of emerging protocols, avid gamers, and advocates for edgy decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), such as Treat DAO, which allows adult content creators to sell NSFW (i.e., not safe for work) NFTs. Attendees at Dcentral sported promotional t-shirts and sneakers, and a few even showed up in Comic Con style garb, flaunting flowing white togas and head-to-toe blue body paint. Over the course of Dcentral, many speakers and attendees crafted passionate arguments around common libertarian talking pointsself sovereignty, individualism, opposition to the Federal Reserve, and skepticism about government oversight more broadly. Yet governments were not the only institutions drawing the ire of the Dcentral crowd. Speakers and attendees alike took aim at corporate actors from traditional finance systems as well as venture capital (VC) firms and accredited investors.

Perhaps the most acerbic critique of institutionalization in the crypto sector was issued by Stefan Rust, founder and CEO of Laguna. Wearing a white cowboy hat, he opened his presentation [see 3:19] with a criticism of protocols that impose undesirable middlemen between the user and their intended transactions:

This is what we want to avoid. We invited these institutions into our ecosystem and we now have layers, on layers, on layers that have been created in order to take a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash ecosystem to fit a traditional, TradFi world, the system that weve been fighting so hard since 2008 to combat []. Do we want this? I dont know. I didnt sign up to get into crypto and Bitcoin and a peer-to-peer electronic cash system for multiple layers of multiple middlemen and multiple fees

In his view, increasing involvement of institutional actors could lead to SSDD. That is, same shit, different day, which according to Rust, is exactly what the ecosystem should be dismantling.

Consensus, held directly after Dcentral, had an entirely different feel. In contrast to the casual dress of Dcentral, many attendees at Consensus wore conservative silk dresses, high heel pumps, or well-tailored suits, despite temperatures that topped 100 degrees just outside the conference center doors. In a panel aptly entitled, Wall Street Suits Meet Hoodies, Ryan VanGrack, a former advisor at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), opened with a comment about how he felt uncomfortably informal in his crisp button-down shirt, slacks, and pristine gray sneakers. According to one marketer at a well-known technology company, the cost of hosting a booth on the exhibit floor was in the neighborhood of 75K. This was not the ragtag gang of artists and emerging protocols from Dcentral; these people were established crypto players who saw the pathway to revolution as running straight through the front door of institutions rather than by burning them to the ground.

Like Dcentral, speakers and panelists at Consensus called for the reform of the financial industry, often similarly drawing from libertarian values and arguments; however, unlike Dcentral, many at Consensus emphasized that regulation of the crypto industry is not only warranted, but necessary to expand its scope and market adoption. According to them, the lack of regulation has imposed an artificial ceiling on what the crypto sector can achieve because retail investors, would-be protocol founders, and institutional players are still waiting on the sidelines for regulatory clarity. This position was not merely abstract rhetoric. Current and former government actors such as Rostin Behnam, Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as well as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Cynthia Lummis, and Pat Toomey, participated in panels. These panels focused on the role of regulation in the crypto ecosystem, such as measures that preserve innovation while also preventing catastrophic failures such as the recent collapse of Terra, which financially decimated many retail investors.

At Consensus, advocates of institutionalization were no less enthusiastic in their endorsement of the mission of crypto and web3 than the anti-institutionalists at Dcentral. In other words, they too were true believers, just with a different theory of change. On Friday night I was invited to attend an event hosted by Pantera Capital, a top-tier crypto VC fund. I mentioned to one of the other attendees that I had attended Dcentral. His face pulled into a grimace. Why the look of disgust? I asked. He clarified that while disgust was too strong of a word, he felt that events like Dcentral delegitimize what the industry seeks to accomplish. Rather than being the true embodiment of the web3 ethos, he felt these crypto cowboys and their antagonistic rhetoric risked undermining the very efforts that were likely to have the biggest impact.

At the conference, panelists and attendees referred to Terra as the elephant in the room. But it struck me that personal wealth and its tension with the crypto vision was a much bigger and far less acknowledged elephant. Possibly the only speaker to directly and unambiguously call attention to this was Assistant Professor of Law Rohan Grey. In a panel entitled Who Should be Allowed to Issue Digital Dollars, Grey noted that as the resident pet skeptic he would act as a rare detractor to the self-congratulatory industry love-fest or circle jerk that would unfold at Consensus. Establishing common ground with the crypto community, he noted that he too supported efforts to resist Big Brother as well as Wall Street and Silicon Valley. But then he offered a withering critique of crypto industry actors, especially those with ties to the established financial sector:

We should be very clear about the difference between private, for-profit actors providing public goods for their own material benefit and actual public goods. So, who are the people who want to issue digital dollars if not the government? Were talking about licensed limited liability companies backed by venture capitalists, many of whom are standard Wall Street actors. Were talking about people with a fiduciary responsibility to a particular group of shareholders. Were talking about decisions being made on behalf of the public by private individuals who are there only because of their capacity to hold wealth initially, and those actors will then be lobbying for laws favorable to themselves in government and creating the same revolving door that weve seen with Wall Street for decades.

The idea that private sector actors who made their fortunes in the traditional financial sector could serve as the vanguard of a financial revolution certainly merits scrutiny. Yet, even if somewhat dubious, it is at least possible that these actors, having seen from the inside the corruption and ill-effects of existing financial institutions, could leverage their insight to import better, more democratic values into an emerging crypto financial system. Along these lines, one man I chatted with at an after party said it was his experience witnessing what he felt were morally reprehensible, exploitative lending policies while working at a bank that ultimately pushed him to adopt the crypto vision. Still, more than a little skepticism is warranted given that institutional or even anti-institutional actors stand to materially benefit from greater adoption of crypto and its associated technologies, a point that Grey himself underscored.

Following such skepticism, a cynical take is that people will always behave in alignment with their own incentives, even when doing so causes harm to others. I have heard people espouse exactly this sentiment when excoriating scams, NFT rug pulls, or even failed DeFi applications. Yet such a bleak view of humanity is overly simplistic given the body of empirical data about human prosocial behavior (e.g., Fehr, Fischbacher & Kosfeld, 2005). People can and often do behave in ways that are altruistic or in the service of others, even at a cost to themselves. Many advocates both for and against institutionalization of the web3 and cryptocurrency sector are likely motivated by a sincere desire to benefit their fellow man. But intentions arent the only thing that matters. The positive and negative real-world impacts of blockchain applications both direct and indirect are critical. Whether this increasingly institutionalized sector will spark a real revolution or further entrench SSDD remains to be seen.

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Dcentral vs. Consensus: Are institutions frens or enemies of crypto? - Freedom to Tinker

[This piece has been published in Restoring America to highlight the evils of communism and the importance of American leadership in keeping it at bay.]

Remember these two numbers: 100 million and 1.5 billion.

Those were the two numbers emphasized at the dedication on Wednesday of the new Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C., which I was privileged to attend along with my family.

An estimated 100 million is the number of human beings slaughtered, massacred, and killed by Marxist,communist regimes in the past 100 years, from the Soviet Union to Red China to Castros Cuba. And 1.5 billion is the number of people still suffering under oppressive, tyrannical communist regimes today.

The museum has been more than 30 years in the making, starting with an idea from Anne Edwards, the wife of Lee Edwards, the prolific author, historian, biographer, and scholar at The Heritage Foundation who was the driving force behind the creation of the museum.

Lee Edwards, the chairman emeritus of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, received the foundations annual Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom at the grand opening for all of the work he has done, not only to bring the museum to fruition, but to help the victims of communism all over the world. The man at the podium is Ambassador Andrew Bremberg, president of the Victims of Communism Museum.

The attendees at the dedication were not the usual Washington crowd. The museum was full of individuals and families who not only fought against those murderous regimes, but helped lead the opposition. It included Wang Dan and Jianli Yang, who were student leaders in Tiananmen Square in 1989, when the Chinese army brutally killed more than 2,000 peaceful protesters who wanted democracy and freedom in China.

There are artifacts from that protest in the museum, including some of the handmade freedom flags of the students.

There were also families of the freedom fighters who staged the first revolt against the Soviet Union in 1956 in Hungary, when NATO and the Allies simply stood by, ignoring their pleas for help as Russian tanks crushed the rebellion and ruthlessly arrested and killed everyone involved.

As I watched a video of the fighting in the streets of Budapest thats in the museum, all I could think about was what a difference it would have made if those Hungarian patriots had been equipped with Javelin missiles and had destroyed the Soviet tank armadas the way the Ukrainians are doing today.

My own father was a White Russian officer who fought the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war.

In addition to remarks by Bremberg and Elizabeth Spalding, the president and a director, respectively, of the new museum, there were also speeches by Szabolcs Takacs, the Hungarian ambassador to the U.S., and professor Piotr Glinski, the deputy prime minister of Poland.

The presentations by the ambassador and the deputy prime minister were especially poignant, because they spoke from experience and know vividly and personally the evils of that vicious, deadly ideology. And that is exactly what communism is an evil as Glinski said repeatedly, contrary to the ignorant beliefs of the Marxist fools who inhabit too many of our academic institutions today.

Some of the most moving artifacts in the museum are a series of paintings that I first wrote about more than a decade ago, and which finally have a home where they can be permanently displayed.

In 1953, a Ukrainian painter, Nikolai Getman, was released from the Soviet gulag, where he had spent eight years for being present at a meeting where someone had drawn a caricature of Josef Stalin.

The paintings were smuggled out of Russia in 1997 because Getman was afraid the post-Soviet Russian government would destroy them to hide a past it pretends never existed.

The paintings are haunting. They are the only visual counterpart to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns writings, which exposed this terrible system of mass imprisonment that Robert Conquest has rightly called unexampled coldblooded inhumanity.

The only difference between the Holocaust and the gulag is that the Soviet communists never got around to using gas to kill their prisoners just old-fashioned bullets, beatings, starvation, and literally working them to death.

Getmans stark paintings cover everything from the transportation of prisoners to the camps in unheated trucks and ships to the horrible and almost unspeakable living conditions in the gulag.

We see the routine brutality with which prisoners were treated. The fragile existence they led is captured in Getmans paintings, which represent an enormous accomplishment, considering that all of the scenes were painted from memory.

One painting shows the despairing faces of a group of men taken from their barracks in the middle of the night and executed by the NKVD (the forerunner of the KGB), the secret police organization that ran the entire gulag system.

These kinds of executions occurred constantly and for no apparent reason. All of the prisoners knew that if you were taken out of your barracks in the middle of the night, you never came back.

And thats happening today in places such as China, where the communist government has set up a gulag-type concentration camp system for the Uyghurs. There are millions of current victims being repressed, tortured, and killed in a country that big American companies, such as Nike and Apple, routinely do business in with no concern.

Raising money for the museum has been a long, hard task. Yet countries like Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia all contributed money to help establish this very important museum. And as I noted, there were speakers at the dedication ceremony from some of those countries.

Who was absent, and who hasnt contributed a single cent? The U.S. government and the current administration. Representatives of the country that has been the leader of the free world, which led the fight against communist dictatorships starting with the hot war in Korea and during the 40 years of the Cold War, were nowhere to be seen on Wednesday.

The Victims of Communism Museum has long been needed. And every student in every collegeand university who thinks Marxism, communism, and socialism (which is just communism under another name) is a wonderful idea should pay a visit to this museum to understand what that evil ideology has imposed on the world.

So, remember: 100 million and 1.5 billion. We not only have a lot to remember; we still have a lot to do to bring the flame of liberty to the enslaved people of the world.

This piece originally appeared inthe Daily Signal and is reprinted with kind permission from the Heritage Foundation.

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30 years in making, museum dedicated to victims of communism opens in Washington - Washington Examiner

During the pandemic, North Korean propagandists have revitalized the term communism in official rhetoric, marking a shift in the countrys discourse after socialism or our style socialism became the customary post-Cold War way to refer to its socioeconomic system.

On the one hand, this sudden revival signals a push to strengthen ideological control over citizens amid the upheavals of the pandemic. At the same time, it appears to highlight something DPRK scholars and analysts may be inclined to minimize: a genuine desire by North Korean leaders to move back toward a Soviet-style planned economy.

During the pandemic, North Korean propagandists have revitalized the term communism in official rhetoric, marking a shift in the countrys discourse after socialism or our style socialism became the customary post-Cold War way to refer to its socioeconomic system.

On the one hand, this sudden revival signals a push to strengthen ideological control over citizens amid the upheavals of the pandemic. At the same time, it appears to highlight something DPRK scholars and analysts may be inclined to minimize: a genuine desire by North Korean leaders to move back toward a Soviet-style planned economy.

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How North Korea's revival of communism goes hand in hand with ultranationalism - NK News

While Alex Mashinsky may be caught in the eye of a crypto meltdown, his personal website shows little sign of struggles.

Alongside a biography that describes the co-founder and chief executive of crypto lender Celsius Network as "born into communism, reared under socialism and is currently thriving under capitalism'', are an array of family snaps portraying domestic idyll.

Interspersed between pictures of Mashinsky plugging business triumphs are personal shots of his wife, Krissy, and their six children. It exudes a strong effort to plump the serial entrepreneurs image as a successful cyber currency mogul.

Mashinskys reputation was cast in a less flattering light this week, however, after the millionaire became the central figure of a crypto downturn.

On Monday, Celsius halted all withdrawals from the Bitcoin 'bank' following what it described as extreme market conditions. In a blog post, the five-year-old company said it was taking "necessary action for the benefit of our entire community in order to stabilise liquidity and operations".

In other words, the accounts of its claimed 1.7m retail users - including in the US, UK and Israel - have been frozen until further notice. It has rattled the entire crypto markets.

Bitcoin, the world's biggest digital token, hit a year-and-a-half low at $20,834 (17,182) on Tuesday, having dropped a further 10pc, after cryptocurrencies already shed $100bn of their value on Monday.

The sell-off was worsened by Binance, the largest crypto exchange globally, which temporarily halted trading in Bitcoin over a so-called "technical error".

Mashinsky, 56, now faces a battle to protect the reputation of Celsius, and stop the crypto chaos spiralling further. It is not the first time he has endured tough times, or criticism.

Born in Ukraine, but raised in Israel, Mashinsky founded companies such as Transit Wireless and Arbinet to mixed success in the telecoms sector.

He also claims to have invented internet voice calling and has issued more than 50 patents for his ideas during a long road towards creating a business heavy-weight capable of disruption.

On his website, Mashinsky admits to "many failures", including a "decision to leverage two of his ventures with debt" during the 2008 financial crisis that "turned disastrous".

Despite this, Mashinky, who now lives in America, has remained focused on becoming a self-made man.

In an interview with Foundr in 2018, he said he gave up wanting to work for someone else after struggling to make ends meet as a parking enforcement officer. A chance encounter saw him come close to dishing out a fine to a potential business customer he had met days earlier.

He has even cast himself as a Robin Hood figure determined to disrupt the status quo through the decentralised systems underpinning Bitcoin.

"The barons of the internetthe Facebooks, the Googles who control the data and are basically just giant toll collectorsare squeezing so much out of the system that everybodys looking for a way to replace them," he told Foundr. "Decentralisation is the only way to replace them."

Ahead of triggering a crypto crash this week, Mashinsky exuded confidence. When asked on Twitter over the weekend why he had many enemies, he reasoned: because I am winning and giving it all to my community.

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Meet the refugee from communism whose Bitcoin 'bank' has triggered a crypto crash - The Telegraph

More than 170 years since the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Marx and Engels, the "spectre of communism" still haunts the bourgeois class.

The news come from Sweden, the country which alongside Finland submitted an application to join NATO, where the Communist Party cannot participate in September elections under its own name! In a communique, the Communist Party of Sweden (SKP) points out:

The Party the statement reads immediate filled an appeal in order to make the Election Authority to reconsider its decision. The Communist Party had participated in previous elections under its own name, which is fully registered. However, the Authority provided a negative response, stating the same reasons about the existence of another party with a similar name.

Thus, our party was denied the right to participate in the elections with its own name. We can't see this as anything other than a sabotage action and attack on our right to take part in the elections, reads the communique.

After months of bureaucratic confusion, the authorites informed the Communist Party that it can run under its initials SKP.

On September 11, 2022, the workers, the people throughout Sweden will be able to vote for the Communists by choosing the ballot paper with the initials SKP and the sickle and hammer.

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Sweden: Communist Party was denied the right to use its name in the elections - In Defense of Communism