Vocabulary
- sats – Bitcoin can be seperated into tiny coins called “satoshis” or “sats” for short
- FOSS – Free and Open Source Software
Jupiter Broadcasting is a group who make several Linux themed podcasts. I love Linux, so I have really enjoyed their content over the years. They get really deep into some of the technical details of projects and tools they experiment with, and they also often have actual developers, testers, documentation folk, etc. on their show. This adds such a great amount of depth to their content, and makes it a great listen.
So what’s the problem? Well, a couple years ago, Chris Fisher, who is the lead of the team, runs the business and organises all the shows, got completely into crypto-currency and Bitcoin. He introduced the concept of “streaming sats” to the show, which allows listeners to auto-send sats based on the amount of content they consume. He also moved away from all other forms of follower feedback to “boosts”, which is a sending some sats along with a message, and if it’s over 2,000 sats they will read the message and discuss.
Chris supports this approach by saying that Bitcoin is a completely free and open source platform, and disconnected from the “big corporations” like Paypal and the like, who can randomly lock/cancel your accounts, or hold funds, which can put small businesses into serious jeopardy. He also rightly complains about the ridiculous amounts of fees that payment providers charge. This in particular really hits small transactions, making something like replacing “boosts” with Paypal transactions non-viable – you would lose almost half of a $1 transaction through Paypal to fees. He’s not entirely wrong about some of the issues with the big providers, but I’m concerned that he’s thrown himself all-in on Bitcoin.
However, Bitcoin’s primary use case is speculation, crime in the form of money laundering, avoiding regulations and scamming people. Crypto also has an enormous environmental impact, and huge amounts of the mining is run on fossil-fuel energy, making our current climate crisis worse every day. Chris does point out that the traditional money industry uses a lot of power and compute as well. He claims that it’s more than Bitcoin, but I’m not sure this is actually true. Also, traditional infrastructure does orders of magnitude more than Bitcoin, so it’s not a fair comparison. Further, over time traditional infrastructure gets more efficient, but Bitcoin has the opposite incentive. Because of these reasons, I refuse to use any Crypto projects or services.
When Chris and the team first introduced their Crypto stuff a couple years ago, I cancelled all my podcast subscriptions and didn’t listen to any of their stuff. In the last few weeks I’ve started listening to a few of their podcasts again, and can confirm they are still all-in on the Crypto crap.
So now you see my moral conundrum. Can I support the podcast, and listen to it, even with their Crypto stuff? I obviously wouldn’t use the Crypto tools, but is even listening and growing their followers ethical? I’m really not sure what way to go here. By growing their audience, it will make more listeners hear their advertising for Crypto, and potentially get into the space – possibly leading to them being scammed, but even just using it makes the world worse. Also, annoyingly, they spend a lot of time talking about and pushing Crypto crap each episode. However, the rest of the content is great quality, and very interesting.
What do you think, reader? Should I listen or not? Send me an email with your thoughts -> https://jaytuckey.name/about/