His favourites received contracts under conditions whereby they, cleverer than the alchemists, made gold out of nothing.
– Karl Marx, Capital Vol.1
Introduction
The spread of distributed ledger technologies in the Information and Technology sector has been the cause for much speculation and hype. The modern blockchain is rooted in the work of Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta who in their paper “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document” first outlined the use of cryptographic hashing to solve the problem of the immutability of digital records. Later on Dave Bayer joined Stornetta and Haber and the trio conceptualised the use of Merkel trees to collect several document certificates into one block. The next stage in blockchain’s development was generated by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in their 1992 paper “Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail,” which proposed the idea of “requir[ing] a user to compute a moderately hard, but not intractable function…”. Their conceptual ideas were realised by Adam Back in 2002 in his paper “Hashcash – A Denial of Service Counter-Measure,” which in turn evolved into the modern day Proof-Of-Work. Both of these ideas were brought together in the infamous white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 to lay the foundation of bitcoin – both the blockchain and the cryptocurrency that would operate on it.
Simply put, the core idea behind the blockchain was to have a publicly distributed ledger that was based on blocks which were securely linked using cryptographic hashing. If every block on the ‘chain’ were to contain a cryptographic hash of the previous block, along with a timestamp, and transaction data (as a Merkle tree), then the chain would be resistant to modification – the data on a block could not be altered without altering all subsequent blocks.
But what was the reason behind Nakamoto coming up with the cryptocurrency? To answer this all we need to do is take a look at the year of his white paper. In 2008, according to Dan Olson,
the economy functionally collapsed . . . The basic chain reaction was this: Banks came up with a thing called a mortgage-backed security, a financial instrument that could be traded or collected that was based on a bundle of thousands of individual mortgages. . . This is because the houses were being bought, just mostly not by people intending to live in them. They were being bought by speculators who would then maybe rent them out or often just leave them vacant with the intent to sell a couple years later. Because speculators were buying up the supply it created synthetic demand. The price keeps going up because speculators keep buying, which creates the illusion that the value is going up, which attracts more speculators who buy up more supply and further inflate the price. . . It’s a bubble. The bubble burst as the teaser rates on the mortgages started to expire, the monthly cost jumped up, and since the demand was synthetic there were no actual buyers for the speculators to sell the houses to. . . And, the cherry on top: the people largely responsible for it all knew that because they and their toxic products were so interwoven into the foundations of the economy they could count on a bailout from the government (Olson, 2022).
The greed and ignorance of those in power and the corruptive influence of the system on all levels of bureaucracy created the ideological ground for both anti-capitalist and hyper-capitalist systems and criticisms. When introduced, on purely philosophico-political grounds, bitcoin, and cryptocurrency in general, was paraded as a solution to banks and centralised finance.
This is what cascaded into present-day Decentralised Finance (DeFi), which claims to solve the problems of Centralised Finance, but instead just introduces a suite of new problems and a host of new ways for the bourgeoisie to exploit the working class while generating more capital. And the core strategies deployed to achieve these goals are the old classics – jargonification, propaganda and obfuscation.
The rules of the decentralised system are ‘transparent’ but only readable as code in a specific programming language. The system is ‘immutable’ but only as long as a hard fork isn’t in the interest of the original developers. The system is ‘equally accessible to all’ but only if you can afford to pay the gas fees. The system is ‘democratic’ but more democratic for those who can afford more computational power or afford to set up mining farms.
The starting point of any analysis of blockchain technologies must thus first dismiss the veil of hype and innovation that it has been strategically cloaked in and see it for what it is: a new technology that has a singular relation with capital; a relation that is subservient and results in the same valorisation of value previously brought on by the innovation of the steam engine, dynamite, nuclear energy, personal computers and the internet (see Marx, 2013).
Analysing Blockchain Applications and Technologies in Crypto
Smart Contracts
A smart contract is a program or a protocol that automatically executes, controls or documents legally relevant events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. In his 1998 paper “Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority”, Nick Szabo theorised that the infrastructure for a smart contract can be implemented by replicated asset registries and contract execution using cryptographic hash chains and Byzantine fault-tolerant replication.
The purported objectives of smart contracts are the reduced need for trusted intermediators, arbitrations and enforcement costs, fraud losses, as well as the reduction of malicious and accidental exceptions. Another aspect, and one that is highly advertised by those in the corporate crypto space, is the transparency of a blockchain-based smart contract to all users of the blockchain. This leads to a situation where bugs, including security holes, are visible to all yet – importantly – may not be quickly fixed by anyone. There is no incentive that can properly motivate the users to identify and fix all of the bugs – however, this seems to be the go-to expectation and response when designers of these systems are asked for solutions.
Ethereum smart contracts are rife with ambiguities and easy-but-insecure constructs within its contract language called Solidity, manifesting in compiler bugs, Ethereum Virtual Machine bugs, and attacks on the blockchain network, where the tenaciousness of bugs illumines that there is no central source documenting known vulnerabilities, attacks and problematic constructs. An attack along these lines was successfully executed on The DAO in June 2016, draining one third of the total Ether from their wallet – 5% of the total Ether in circulation at that point valuated at about 50 million dollars. The DAO program had a time delay in place before the hacker could remove the funds from the wallet, and so a hard fork of the Ethereum software was executed to claw back the funds from the attacker before the time limit expired. This led to the split between Ethereum Classic and Ethereum as it exists today. We will explore this attack further in the section on DAOs.
Another interesting aspect of these contracts is the language they are written in – Solidity. Solidity has been blamed for the error-prone implementation of Ethereum smart contracts due to its counterintuitive nature, its lack of constructs to deal with blockchain domain-specific aspects, and its lack of centralized documentation of known vulnerabilities. Functioning in the “Code is Law” paradigm, It offers no way to fix faulty contracts or to even debug them. It is a bug-prone ‘transparent’ object oriented programming language that can only be read by specialists.
Cryptocurrencies
The loss of the gold standard found the most impassioned advocates for its return in the libertarians. So when the idea of a “Digital Gold” was floated it found impassioned support by the people who wanted a standardised basis for fiat money. Let us now try and trace the evolution of this Fool’s Gold.
In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx notes:
Labour-time is the only measure of both gold and commodities, and gold becomes the measure of value only because all commodities are measured in terms of gold; it is consequently merely an illusion created by the circulation process to suppose that money makes commodities commensurable. On the contrary it is the commensurability of commodities as materialised labour time which converts gold into money (Marx, 2010: 32).
Continuing, a little later, he writes:
But because prices convert commodities only nominally into gold or only into imaginary gold – i.e., the existence of commodities as money is indeed not yet separated from their real existence – gold has been merely transformed into imaginary money, only into the measure of value, and definite quantities of gold serve in fact simply as names for definite quantities of labour-time (Marx, 2010: 32).
In Crypto-Capital: The Political Economy of Cryptocurrencies, Fridmanski argues that cryptocurrencies fail as a money-commodity because they fail to break the exchange into its two component parts, C-M and M-C. Furthermore, he lists out that crypto does not and cannot serve as a measure of value, a reliable medium of exchange, a store of wealth, and as a means of payment; as such, it cannot serve as a money-commodity. His elaboration is worth quoting at length:
The reason for why cryptocurrencies fail in all these respects is not particularly complicated, it is due to its volatility which in turn is driven by speculation – something that cannot be enforced nor can these systems be regulated into submission due to their global and decentralized nature. The volatility and speculation make it impossible for a vendor to even reliably price a commodity in cryptocurrency units. One minute a book may be worth .02 Bitcoin and the next .001. Even if the vendor were to accept cryptocurrencies for a book they would have a difficult time using it to purchase another commodity without first converting it into a local currency immediately upon sale, thus failing to break up an exchange into its two component parts, C ? M and M ? C. The last two functions also fail for similar reasons. Even if this online vendor is able to continuously update the price of the book by linking the web page to a cryptocurrency price tracker, upon sale of the book the vendor may be hesitant to keep the cryptocurrency tokens – or eager to hold them – in their original form due to this very same volatility – either way this automatically puts the vendor into a category of speculator themselves (constantly weighing whether they should sell or hold the tokens). These same problems extend to cases of taxes, debts, and rents – in fact one has to pay taxes on their cryptocurrency in some countries but cannot pay their taxes with the same tokens. In all these cases cryptocurrencies have to be converted into a local currency before being used in any of these essential functions unless the receiver is interested in speculating on its future value too. There are multiple anecdotal counter-examples that show cryptocurrencies are being used in these ways, but just because an object is used as a money-commodity does not mean that it is a money-commodity (Fridmanski, 2021: 19-20).
The situation is further complicated by both the ever shifting values of crypto, which makes it useless as a currency that can be used to buy a commodity with a fixed exchange value, as well as how in very real terms it can’t function without the internet and cell phones.
Fridmanski’s analysis did not and perhaps could not anticipate the rise and use cases of NFTs. But the core of his argument still holds true. Let us ‘steelman’ the opposing argument by taking into account the evolution of crypto and NFTs over the last year towards the future – even after these considerations, we will see that cryptocurrencies can’t serve as money.
Let’s take a use case where a given crypto, say Ethereum (Eth) is universally adopted in conjunction with stable coins and fiat money. Because of the conversion and sale of physical assets, land deeds and all other commodities as utilities attached with NFTs or as NFTs themselves, it is now possible to purchase a given physical commodity seamlessly. (There are already organisations working on turning physical assets and land deeds into NFTs – which, on a base level, is a case of the privatisation of commons, but we will get into that in a later section.) Now, let us further assume that instead of thinking in terms of the NBUs (Next Billion Users), we live in a world where everyone has a smartphone, or a smartwatch through which they can seamlessly use their exchange wallets to purchase physical and digital assets that are for sale as NFTs. The reified crypto now contains definite quantities of labour-time (functioning not just as the absolutely alienated commodity but also containing within itself the dead labour that vampirically sucks the blood out of the living labour in order to maintain itself on the blockchain.)
Even in this use case, the substitution of the Fictitious Commodity (NFT/C*), which needs an actual commodity attached to it, stops the C-M-C or the M-C-M circuits from being realised. The Fictitious Commodity (C*) disrupts the C-M and the M-C circuits, where C*-M and M-C* circuits are closed off. But this disruption isn’t the same as the disruption caused by the metamorphosis of the commodity that led to gold assuming its independent existence as money. In the interrupted circuit C-M, the existence of the commodity as money, a chair, for example, is not separated from its ‘real’ existence. So, at least gold can function as imaginary money with a nominal value. Cryptocurrencies cannot even function as imaginary money, they are ‘less than nothing.’
NFTs
In its simplest form, an NFT is similar to a deed. A non-fungible token is a non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain, a form of digital ledger that can be sold and traded. NFTs may be made with digital files such as photos, videos, and audio. Since each token is uniquely identifiable, NFTs differ from most cryptocurrencies, which are fungible. The claim of NFT ledgers is to provide a public certificate of authenticity or proof of ownership, but the legal rights conveyed by an NFT are largely uncertain. NFTs do not restrict the sharing or copying of the underlying digital files, nor do they necessarily convey the copyright of the digital files. Furthermore, they do not prevent the creation of NFTs with identical associated files, and as a matter of fact, many NFT projects are premised on the same image, without any change, being sold hundreds of times. This is further complicated by the fact that multiple NFTs can be made depicting the same physical object. NFTs are used as a speculative asset and are responsible for a heavy carbon footprint carbon footprint associated with validating blockchain transactions (larger than the country of Argentina at the time of writing). They are frequently used in art scams: NFTs of “art” bring together the high-stakes money laundering of the art world together with the uselessness of cryptocurrency, in one neat package.
Their existence is even more ironic since the economic bubble that they are creating is the result of a process that was intended as a solution to the economic bubble made by synthetic CDOs (collateralized debt obligations).
The manufacturing of digital scarcity, in conjunction with the linking of physical assets to a digital deed, is not merely an example of simulacra production but a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the entity nature of an NFT by making it seem more ‘concrete,’ more ‘real,’ through its link to physical objects and events, while still maintaining it as a speculative asset.
DAOs
DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations, are pitched as a “revolutionary” new way to organize people, which will allow for the decentralized governance of crypto and DeFi systems. In theory, a DAO is an organization whose membership, roles, and privileges are governed by the possession of relevant tokens on a given blockchain, and it’s also the underlying software that executes relevant operations. In practice most things that call themselves DAOs don’t have the underlying mechanism in place, and a significant number of them don’t have the tokens.
Using Olson’s analysis in his film Line Goes Up, we can see that the benefit of a DAO is that it makes it relatively simple to build a formal organisation at any scale, from a few people to large groups of stakeholders, and the program layer allows for the automation of specific operations and outcomes. If the organisation uses the DAO interface to vote, the results are automatically recorded and executed. However, this framing is deceptive. A DAO, just like the tokens themselves, has no inherent functionality: it’s simply a container for code. I could just as easily be talking about everything a webpage can accomplish.
As previously stated, many organisations posing as DAOs do not have any machine functionality. It’s rather common to encounter a DAO that has produced a governance token and a voting script, but where the tools to actually use that token are placed somewhere in the roadmap’s vague future.
While the claim is that these machines will further democratise the internet, the technical complexity that they add, as well as the new specialised programming expertise that they require, concentrates a lot of power in the hands of those who can create the templates that enable non-programmers to actually use them. This merely sows the seeds for the status quo to be recreated in the future.
Some DAOs are simple enough to convert into computer programs. Automated bookkeeping, payouts, collections, and data tracking are all things that corporations can theoretically use. DAOs aren’t a revolutionary new concept in and of themselves; they’re a tool built into the side of cryptocurrencies that only has significant benefits when used for speculative trading and managing financial instruments. Everything else is a gimmick, a slow inflexible tool for conducting straw polls. Many of these, once again, boil down to a ploy to limit the creators’ culpability. Olson summarises the situation succinctly:
It’s all hollow hand waving and technobabble to distract from the fact that it’s just shareholding. It’s the corporatization of everything, the conversion of the entire world into claves governed by power granted via token possession and enforced by machines that allow humans to wash their hands of the outcomes. At the end of the day every DAO pretending to be useful is still a forced entry point to some hype-driven memecoin whose existence only benefits its creators and the exchange that sells it (Olson, 2022).
Web3
The future version of the web, built on the back of cryptocurrency and mediated by financialized tokens, is a dystopia. It’s a technology that’s built to turn everything into money, to treat every corner of our social existence as a marketplace, to attach an abstract, representative token to everything from video games to labour unions.
– Dan Olson, Line Goes Up
Web3 companies are decentralising data storage while centralising data. An important thing to ask now is: Are these financialised tokens absolutely necessary for the construction of a Web3 project? The answer should be a resounding ‘No.’ However, practically every existing Web3 project has a financialized token associated with it.
Web3 proponents will argue with this assessment, notably the allegation that crypto is endemic to Web3 and that the two are irreconcilable, but that is the practical truth of the situation. Every substantial project branding itself under the banner of Web3 is strapped to the side of a blockchain, be it issuing governance tokens, or relying on the chain’s smart contract layer, or requiring possession of a cryptocurrency in order to pay the processing fees that are mandatory in order to participate.
They are conceptually and technologically intertwined at this stage. Web3 is the forerunner of a million paywalls and draconian “code enforced” digital rights management schemes peddled to idealists as a ‘decentralised system’ in which people, not wealthy stakeholders, have the power. But the opposite is true.
The Reproduction of Crypto-Capital
Having previously explored how crypto isn’t a money-commodity, it is now pertinent to ask: What purpose does it serve as an entity? What is its use value, its exchange value? Why are companies investing in it?
The third question is the easiest to answer. A critical point that doesn’t get highlighted enough is that this is an attempt by companies to do what has essentially been under the purview of nation-states ever since the world shifted off the gold standard: the issuance of ‘fiat’ money as legal tender backed by the state. If we take the evolution of multinational corporations into de facto nation-states to its logical end, then at some point they would need to issue their own currency. However broken or defunct the currency might be, the intent behind its issuance is what’s pertinent. As of now, crypto is not substantially or categorically different from store credit: the only critical point of difference is its speculative value.
With the deliberate obfuscation of entities at play, we need to remember that at the end of the day there is a distinct transfer of capital at play in every transaction on the blockchain.
Mining
Miners are a network of computer systems that sustain and maintain the blockchain. Mining is central to the generation of new tokens of a Cryptocurrency and for the maintenance of the transactions on the ledger. It is the only way in which new tokens can be generated. There is a pre-decided limit to the amount of tokens in a system – the deflationary aspect allows for the value of the tokens in the system to rise over time. While not all computers in the network need to be built with mining in mind, it is a practical reality as it allows the participants to leverage greater computing power. During a single mining period (10 minutes in Bitcoin, 15 seconds in Ethereum) a set of transactions are pooled in a block after which all the computers work to solve a complex cryptographic hash puzzle which in practice verifies the block, i.e. it checks if all the addresses in the block exist and if they have the funds for the transactions.
Anyone can download a mining software and let it run in the background. The process is competitive and not cooperative, so only one computer successfully ends up mining the block and thus reaping the block rewards. While the base claim is that the process is fair because of its probabilistic nature, it is a case of conditional probability. Whoever has the higher computational power has a greater advantage. To that end a host of server farms have popped up all over the world – and the prospect of a single user competing against these farms, and hoping to get the block reward, can now only elicit mirthless laughter.
The Crypto-Capital Relation
In terms of measured variables there are four important factors involved in the crypto-capital relation: price-value of the tokens in USD, total mining capacity (hash/computational power), the number of transactions, and the number of active users.
– Ethan Fridmanski, Crypto-Capital
The foundation of mining on weighted probability places an incentive for miners to increase their computational power so as to reap more block rewards in a given mining period. The simplest way to do this is to buy more hardware. But as we have seen earlier, ordinary retailers are unwilling to buy or sell things in crypto. This is where the Decentralised Exchanges (DEX) come in, enabling the miners to expand their operations in exchange for their tokens. The exchanges are thus flush with new crypto without having to deal with the hassle of mining. This however isn’t the only way in which exchanges hoard crypto: the gas fees (transaction fees) on every trade also add to the hoard. Traders are people who purchase and trade crypto with the singular purpose of realising more value than their initial investment. With the open-ended and decentralised nature of crypto, it is often possible for traders to make a large profit simply by trading the tokens in a different market. The miners gain constant capital and expand their operations by being paid in the local currency by the exchanges, who then use the acquired tokens to enable trading which gives them more liquidity, since the traders pay in local currencies to purchase the crypto. This creates a recurring cycle that ramps up production indefinitely.
In summation, a system initiated to counter the very existence of the gambling aspect of the stock market has transmuted into a more unregulated, more abstracted and more alienating gambling market, all the while being largely owned by the same firms, funds, and venture capitalists that have had a controlling interest in traditional finance. Marx’s insights on fictitious capital In Capital Vol. 3 and the Grundrisse are taken to their logical end, exacerbated and systematically abstracted by the crypto industry.
Capital as Flow and Capital as Form
The rejection of a traditional Marxist enquiry into the exploitation of labor takes the form of the redefinition of an expansive sense of production: the production of desire or the productivity of power relations. There is a critique of the idea of production, or labor, as an anthropological constant that opens up the possibility of an exploration of the “productivity” and materiality of multiple dimensions of human existence. The rejection of an anthropological and instrumental “schema” of labor, a subject working on an object through the use of an instrument, would historically coincide with the rise of a “services-” and “knowledge-” based economy in which labor has expanded to include the production of subjectivity (tastes, desires, concepts) by subjectivity.
– Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital
Ray Brassier pointed out recently in a seminar that the de-anthropologization of labour results in the ontologization of production.[1] In his view, the ambit of Deleuzian politics is limited at the root by the abstraction of the capitalist conjunction of flows (labour and money) from the social relations that condition it. He highlights the vacuity of the claim made by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus that labour and capital can exist together as decoded flows. There is no social relation to account for the conjunction of ‘flows’ in their description.
The foundational confusion introduced by Deleuze & Guattari results today in a superfluity of positions that support the rise of crypto, NFTs, and DAOs while believing that these systems can lead to the emancipation of the working class and the subaltern.
Let’s start with an accelerationist exposition. Nick Land outlines his ideas on the structure of economies as follows:
Economies are assembled from flows. Unsurprisingly, therefore, their native codes are currencies, or current-signs. As societies mobilize matter-energy resource streams, their monetary conventions register these flows by inversion, and strict reciprocity (Land, 2018).
We can see how Land’s ideas about the constitution of the economy as a conjunction of codified flows is firmly rooted in an abstraction first introduced by Deleuze & Guattari. Land outlines his ‘revolutionary praxis’ in the following way:
The revolutionary task is not to establish a bigger, more authentic, more ascetic exteriority, but to unpack the neurotic refusal mechanisms that separate capital from its own madness, luring it into the liquidation of its own fall-back positions, and coaxing it into investing at the deterritorialized fringe that would otherwise fall subject to fascist persecution. Schizo-politics is the coercion of capital into immanent coexistence with its undoing (Land 2011: 278).
Land’s advocacy for a cosmic schizophrenia that will liquidate capitalism fails to note that capitalism and the capitalist axiomatic are inseparable. Here accelerationism turns inevitably rightwards towards techno-fatalism and results in a neoreactionary macropolitical embrace of the capitalist axiomatic. Land’s techno-fatalism is the determining core of his thoughts on crypto:
The machines have sophisticated themselves beyond the possibility of socialist utility, incarnating market mechanics within their nano-assembled interstices and evolving themselves by quasi-darwinian algorithms that build hypercompetition into ‘the infrastructure’. It is no longer just society, but time itself, that has taken the ‘capitalist road’ (Land, 2011: 625).
Posthumanism and its associated ‘decelerationism’ is served up as the politically progressive alternative to Land and company. Their position effectively advocates for a minoritarianism inside institutions in a micropolitical form of resistance. But it is important to note that the institution already has in its interests engagement in a Foucauldian form of resistance that is increasingly pessimistic about the possibilities of social and political change and is instead happy with being ‘ontologically pacifist’ and ‘exhausted’ against capital. Consequently, this response proposes modes of ‘becoming’ that are also limited to the capitalist axiomatic and nothing beyond it. It is perhaps an indictment of the ‘critical posthumanities’ as a whole that it is already aware of and anticipates most criticisms of its own position. But instead of addressing them, posthumanism chooses to reassert its own position with a flippant faux-defence: “Sceptics will see this as being concomitant with neo-liberal [ideology] . . . whereas it is intended to be exactly the contrary” (Braidotti, 2019). In supplanting the supposedly ‘exclusionary humanism’ of Marxism, it institutes a defanged posthumanism that is still exclusionary. It is an exclusionism that is best seen in the idea of the “missing people” it inherits from Deleuze – subsuming the subaltern into a vacuity that is superficially radical but effectively results in a position that fetishizes the disintegration of the proletariat.
Tactics and Strategies
Every purported solution to a problem in Decentralised Finance inevitably leads it functionally closer to Centralised Finance. The proposed shift from “Proof of Work” to “Proof of Stake” – in order to minimise the carbon footprint of blockchain technology – centralises the system. And, it is also interesting to note, like most projects in Web3, this “shift” has been talked about by Ethereum for many years with no concrete steps taken forward.
In the short term, it is best to be wary of ‘Vaporware Projects’ (projects that propose to build something and promote a coin based on a new idea, but ultimately just use the manufactured hype to make money using speculative assets and getting people to invest in tokens). This is applicable to most if not all NFT projects. With respect to crypto tokens, investing in them is equivalent to participating in a “Bigger Fool Scam.” These systems are Pareto efficient – the only way to make money in them is to wait for other people to invest at a higher price so that you can “cash out” on the created liquidity. This is what the ultra-wealthy do when there is a surge in investment into tokens, usually and largely around the holidays by the middle class. In effect, the whole system is a poverty trap designed to funnel the funds of the working class into the pockets of the wealthy so they can then use them in a class war against the ultra-wealthy. However, since most of the firms are themselves backed by or owned by the ultra-wealthy, the only thing this does in effect is to rob the working class in daylight while selling it to them as a “just” war between the rich and the poor.
There are a few use cases of blockchains that can be beneficial as tactical manoeuvres in the modern day surveillance states that we live in. One notable application is the application of blockchains to Mixnets. (VPN and Tor Mixnets are not completely reliable and can be easily used to track users through traffic analysis.)
But a critical question that we need to ask ourselves is this: Do these projects really need a token attached to them to be effective?
Notes
[1.] https://thenewcentre.org/archive/capital-form-flow/
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