The Truth Machine is an unapologetically pro-crypto book. I read it because I’m not a pro-crypto person and I wanted to see what a fawning take on the technology could do to sway my opinion. I am largely unswayed, though cases in which this book covers real world applications of crypto were interesting. To that end, it opens by describing a refugee crisis in Jordan. As an experiment, the UN decided to use blockchain technology to track how refugees were accessing their food allotments. This was in response to active hoarding and theft rings of the traditional vouchers at the refugee site, which theoretically was resolved by having retinal scans of each refugee, entered into a blockchain, used as a source of identity. The book does not explain how or why hoarding or theft of the food itself wouldn’t occur afterwards, nor does it explain why an example where society in a region has literally collapsed is what we should use as our template for the decentralized future.
There’s a lot of handwaving in this book. Decentralization via the blockchain is treated as inherently better than anything under a centralized control. Centralized controls and governments are, without exception, treated with ultimate suspicion and distrust. No one will ever do anything without direct compensation (except for Linux, which has been a free open source project since its result, and which the author holds up as the highest in open source development, before pivoting back to explaining why we all need to be rewards with tokens or we’ll never do anything for anyone).
At the end of this book, I understand why I’m not a crypto true believer: I’m not a Randian Objectivist. In the worldview presented by this book, libertarian ideals are naturally better, and everything following market forces auto-sorts into perfect harmony, trust, and peace. The trust part in particular is a weird assertion, seeing as how the author argues in favor of decentralized power grids in which every house has solar panels and actively sells power to one another via IoT and smart contracts. The rub here is that because we’re all theoretically selling it to one another, we’re all looking out for our own best interests, but somehow handwave handwave we’re also taking care of each other? Because we’re all squeezing profit out of one another with these shitcoins that are worth something because… it just doesn’t make sense. This isn’t a community, it’s a series of micro monopoly empires and people ready to cut one another’s throat the moment the profit stops flowing. The Ferengi would be proud.
My favorite example was a posited future in which self-driving cars can pay one another to allow one to pass another if they “need to get somewhere faster.” What’s to stop some entrepreneur from sending hoards of coordinated slow cars to extort passing rights and coin from other drivers? Literal highway robbery. I’ve yet to meet an Ayn Rand disciple who can explain to me why this shit (utterly unregulated markets) won’t just turn into monopolies and robber barons, especially when that’s what happened every time we’ve had regulation free anything throughout history.
Read this book if you’re curious what the theoretical applications for crypto post-wide adoption could be. Don’t expect much of it to actually come to pass: it was written in 2018, and in 2023 we’ve seen every major crypto player revealed as fraudsters and market manipulating Ponzi wannabes. I’m not holding my breath for this future.
