I don’t really like cryptos at all, they’re way too laissez-faire/anarcho-capitalist for me, and not to mention the energy consumption, but let’s talk about them for a minute. I want to write down some thoughts. I have 0 crypto holdings, but I researched them a bit recently, it’s good to be informed.

Apparently, Oxen is a fork of Monero, which is apparently an almost fully private crypto. I’m all for privacy of information, knowledge and messages but I don’t think money aka power should be private. Incredibly bad for democracy, not to mention it goes against the idea of taxation. This is pretty much a deal breaker for me for a messenger that would strive to become mainstream and challenge the big tech oligopolies.

If a piece of software like this wants to use crypto, it should be a crypto that’s private only for small transactions (think, nobody needs to know you bought that candy, or that laundry detergent, I’m fine with the privacy of small purchases, in fact I think it’s good) but any transaction above a certain threshold should be public. In a crypto, this limit can be “voted” on, which is great, and I think in newer ones, like Polkadot, it doesn’t even require a hard fork.

Also, while we’re on the topic, I’d love if a crypto had in-built ”taxation” within the system itself, that takes a reasonable amount of money from big transactions or even wallets, divides it and distributes it randomly to other users. As it is now, crypto is essentially just a ”make the rich richer/increase the wealth gap” kind of thing, even more than normal money is, plus it’s a global casino/gambling on top, which also has the same end results. It’s hard for me to enthusiastically get behind it. Btw, I’m not surprised a "socialist” crypto like this hasn’t been created yet, the incentives and the type of crowd is just not there, but I would be surprised if it doesn’t get created eventually.

Secondly, the energy consumption. Apparently, Solana is a crypto that uses a new “proof of history” method (as opposed to proof of work or stake) that uses at least a 1000 times less energy than Bitcoin, and maybe even many more orders of magnitude less (1) and doesn’t suffer from the types of centralisation of power that happen with proof of work or even proof of stake. It’s apparently like a normal server in terms of energy consumption. If Session used this type of crypto I’d be more open to it.

As it is, I just don’t know what’s the purpose of Session. An attempt to create a private mainstream messenger? Can’t really support it, at least that’s how I feel about it, in its current form. A fully private messenger for extreme cases, like journalists or something? There’s Briar for that, without the iffiness of crypto.