- Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, does not believe in cryptocurrencies, calling them a vehicle for scams and a Ponzi scheme.
- Torvalds was once rumored to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, but he clarified it was a joke and denied owning a Bitcoin fortune.
- Torvalds also dismissed the idea of technological singularity as a bedtime story for children, saying continuous exponential growth does not make sense.
Right, his talk about how he’s not very good at computers is pretty funny. I don’t understand the crypto hate on Lemmy. Although I guess I don’t understand a lot of why things are hated here. I guess crypto is too close to capitalism maybe? Freedom is frowned upon here.
Crypto is hated because it’s an MLM for terminally online people.
It gains value because people want it and people want it because it gains value is both a perfect description of cryptocurrency and scams.
How does this working into Foreign Exchange? This also sounds a lot like trading USD to PESO like my aunt does…
This describes pretty much all moneys.
Cryptocurrencies have a lot of problems, but being a medium of exchange without intrinsic value is not one of them.
People generally don’t trade currencies as commodities or treat them as investments. When the same people promising crypto is totally a currency actually start treating it like a stable currency to exchange for goods and services and not an investment or commodity to be traded, I might revisit it. For now, the evangelists refuse to walk the walk.
A metric shit ton of people use currencies as investments. Forex trading is pretty big and been around a long time.
I said generally. Your parents who get paid in local currency for their job are not trading in foreign currencies. The fact that rich people can find ways to squeeze more money out of just about anything isn’t a win for cryptocurrencies.
The main test is to give cryptocurrency to my grandparents and they should be able to figure that out and do their grocery shopping. I pity the people having to explain how to use cryptocurrency to my grandparents at the cash register.
Kind of the same idea as explaining how tap your card/phone or credit cards work though.
Not really. “Take your card out of your wallet, and instead of putting it in the machine and typing your pin, you just tap it against the screen”
Vs “well, ok. I set up a wallet for you. No it’s not a real wallet, it’s on your computer. Anyway, your wallet has this huge long code that you can’t remember, so keep it safe, because if you lose it you lose all your money, ok? Right, well before you buy anything, you’ll need to register with an exchange, there are a number of exchanges, like XYZ, so sign up with one of those, then — wait what do you mean you don’t know how? Just give them your email and whatever else they need… you don’t know your email address? Christ on a bike. Ok we’ll sort that out soon — anyway, back to the exchange… go onto their site and trade your cryptocurrency (the weird money in your wallet… no not your real wallet, grandad, your computer wallet), now you need to wait a while for the transaction to happen and you to receive your money. Now you can go to the shop and pay by card. Amazing, isn’t it? And it’ll only get better when everywhere accepts [coin], I’m sure that’ll happen any day now!”
“Bank pays seller on your behalf and then you pay the bank” vs however the fuck you want to explain the clusterfuck of crypto
My parents do this regularly. There are many Latino American families who regularly exchange USD to PESO and vise versa.
You have obviously have not heard of forex and the vast quantity of money that flows through it on a daily basis if you think currencies are not traded as commodities, nor have you heard of places like Argentina or Turkey apparently if you don’t know currencies are treated as investments.
There are many many scams in cryptoworld but there is no need to throw out the baby with the bath water as it were. Crypto can and is being used as valid alternative to fractional reserve issued currency; the thriving and resilient darknet proves it so.
I don’t think that’s how the typical guy/gal you’d bump into on the street uses their bank balance.
I appreciate and applaud anything that can even attempt to separate state and money. That will imho be the best thing for humanity since the separation of state and religion.
I look forward to the day VISA and MASTERCARD become obsolete! Please save my aunt’s small business from predatory transaction fees. ♥
I have no like of transaction fees but… you know they exist in the cryptocurrency world right? And that they’re generally higher? Those transactions take work and aren’t done out of charity.
Compares transaction speed of credit card vs buttcoin
Lmao
Buttcoin is pretty slow. To my understanding many other coins have already evolved past Bitcoin’s slow ass speed.
Or gold, or any other precious metal, or any other currency really for that matter….
Tangible items can have utility in the real world, where cryptocurrencies can never be anything more than numbers on a display.
Gold can be used in electronics, and I get that people are mad that currencies are just something we all mutually agree have value, but generally speaking powerful governments back those up. Cryptocurrency is backed up by people promising it’s totally gonna be a real currency any second now. Please ignore that crypto can wildly fluctuate in value which generally a horrible thing for a currency to do.
Haven’t multiple governments accepted it as real currency at this point? The arguments are valid, but fall flat when you actually look into each.
Hell diamonds are valuable because of artificial scarcity, so that’s a wrench in every precious metal argument….
Yeah, El Salvador, people from there told me quite recently that it’s not at all what the government propaganda is trying to sell. Nobody uses Bitcoin and it is only accepted by a few state institutions. As for Venezuela, we had Petros for a while, now the shitcoin has been completely phased out and discontinued since nobody but a few oligarch used it to launder money.
The only two countries that accept bitcoin as a legal tender are noted powerhouses El Salvador and the Central African Republic… not exactly world leaders.
No, no major government has completely adopted cryptocurrency as legal tender. El Salvador became the first country in the world to do so in September 2021, but there have been significant challenges :
Cryptocurrencies are still considered too volatile and risky by most governments for everyday transactions.
And crypto is more stable than some governments’ real currency. It’s been a life saver for some people.
It’s also a lot faster for transactions than normal banking when sending money to people in other countries.
It’s still in the early days… like email in the late 80s / early 90s. It should get better, but there’s so much crap and scams out there right now. It’s still very much the wild west. It’s like Wall Street on acid.
EDIT: people downvote but don’t say what was wrong. Awesome.
They downvote the truth and/or facts when they are contrary to the hive mind.
The circlejerking and hive mind on Lemmy is shockingly worse than Reddit somehow. Not what I ever expected.
Well you’re talking about a technology that can obsolete VISA and MasterCard and their predatory transaction fees!. There’s a lot of money riding on cryptographic currencies taking off or not.
Okay, go buy some of Rudy Giuliani’s gold then. Enjoy.
Gold is actually used as a critical component in the creation of computers and other vitally important industries.
If crypto had pivoted to freedom and prioritized mass-adoption, it would have been great. Instead, almost everyone who invested got more people to buy in, dumped it, and got their payday. So yes, very much like capitalism.
Really, the only crypto that comes anywhere near :
Is Monero. Unfortunately, it falls short when it comes to mass-adoption. Still, it’s just as volatile as any other crapto-currency, so using it as an investment vehicle is a bad idea. It seems almost like crapto-currency is fundamentally incompatible with stock market style investments.
Shitcoins yes, bitcoin no. If you fell for Craig Wright’s scams you’d fall for any other kind of scam also.
the idea of crypto on its not bad on its own, its just there are a lot of bad actors agressively trying to prop up the value of some arbitrary crypto without actually selling a good or service in order to make a quick buck.
at least teams like the one behind Axie Infinity offered a product/service. Most don’t, which is the problem.
if your marketing essentially has to relate to other people buying into buying it, then theres a big problem.
Because it went from being a novel decentralized payment method, into a speculative asset, and finally a Wall Street commodity.
Yes, I know there are projects where that core ethos is still relatively intact, but those aren’t what come to mind whenever people publicly discusses “crypto”.
I hate it in part because its adherents seem intent to relearn all the mistakes of the free banking era and constantly evangelize long-debunked economic theories. It’s like the goldbuggism of libertarian cranks of yore.
Also, for Bitcoin specifically, the extra demand for electricity raises rates for nearby residents. It’s essentially a transfer of wealth from ratepayers. A lot of them are in Texas and if you think Texas has “excess capacity,” then explain why they literally pay bitcoin miners an absurd amount not to mine when there’s a cold snap or heat wave.
I could go on about fraud and money laundering but I think being dumb as shit and raising electricity bills is plenty reason to hate it.
I dislike crypto for the grift but also that people had repackaged it as a form of DRM in NFT’s, it became commercialisation in the extreme promoting materialism.
Also Cryptos relation to libertarianism makes it very off putting.
If you were not living in a powerful first world country, you would like it a hell of a lot more. It is such a luxury to not have to constantly be worried about your currency collapsing. In places like Turkiye, crypto is massively popular because their currency is constantly devaluing. There are many countries like this that many Americans and Europeans seem to forget even exist.
It probably won’t be too long until even the spoiled nations will want to be able to hold value somewhere that isn’t free falling as well. The US is now paying more to service their debt than they are to the military. Not everyone can afford to hold their wealth in real estate and successful businesses.
Please get fucked on assuming where i live and inturn my life style.
If capitalism died we wouldn’t have first world countries feeding on third world countries. Crypto won’t help with this issue, you will still have american companies drilling oil out of third world countries paying workers fuck all, sweat shops will still need to be somewhere too and the capitalist would prefer it away from they’re first world country. If anything crypto will only shield the exploiters but at least the libertarian can be happy whilst getting fucked by daddy bazos.
Read my comment again, you entirely missed the point. This has nothing to do with anything you pointed out. I guarantee you don’t live In a poor country because there isn’t a chance that you would have no idea how much they are benefiting from bitcoin. I’m sorry you’re so offended, but you were your ignorance so prominently that it isn’t hard to see at all. I’m also in the 1st world, but I desire to understand the whole picture enough to be able to tell. Use your anger over something you know nothing about as a guide of where to educate yourself.
I saw the point you where trying to make, diminishing my knowledge in the matter due to your presumption of my privileges.
Then railroading off with how its good as poor countries are forced to invest in these schemes.
Do you know much of rune scape gold farming? Gold farming in rune scape was very profitable. Westerners would pay slave wages to poor countries to play and farm in run scape working 60 hours, this was eventually broken up which also didn’t lead to a good outcome as a large community lost the financial structure they depended, essentially chewing up and spitting out the disadvantaged.
Similar instances have popped up since crypto where again it has created a work force built on shaky ground which doesn’t just exploit but creates a dependency on something liable to fail.
So again no crypto will not fix third world problems as it allows for massive exploitation.
Oh my. Hold your horses buddy. Nobody is forcing poor people to buy bitcoin. People are just faced with a choice, they can hold their value in fiat currencies that corrupt governments are printing like crazy, or they hold their value in a decentralized currency that nobody has control over and nobody can print on a whim. Just because you feel like you missed out on a good investment and so you are bitter towards an entire growing industry doesn’t matter at all to people who are using it to escape corruption.
It really isn’t nearly as complex or evil as you think it is. It really is just a way for people who have repeatedly been screwed over by corrupt politicians to escape corruption. It’s just a matter of time until more and more people around you realize the same, and eventually you will join in, albeit a bit late due to your ignorant bitterness. You do yourself no favors by being against something simply because you don’t take the time to understand it.
like nobody is forcing the poor to drink dirty water or go without food…
you make a lot of assumptions. next you’ll be calling me a basement dweller.
capitalism isn’t evil, guns aren’t evil, physical currencies aren’t evil, they are instead an easily manipulated vehicle that intern can be used for evil. crypto has proven itself with the sheer amount of scams to be easily manipulated. i don’t see crypto as complex, i have followed it since 2013 and have a good understanding of encryption and decentralized systems as well as economics.
the main reason i don’t like or see use for crypto is that i am a socialist, crypto goes against core socialist economic values. it also pollutes as the oil cost is high, it promotes commercialization, its abusive to human psychology with fomo, it feeds into libertarianism.
Poor people all over the world are less poor because they have used bitcoin to escape predatory devaluing fiat currencies. Go check out much of Africa, much of South America, Turkey, Georgia, and Southeast Asia. There are literally people eating better food and drinking cleaner water thanks to the fact that they can maintain their hard-earned value with bitcoin.
Nobody said capitalism is bad. Nobody said guns are bad, I have no idea why you would feel the need to conflate issues. I get that you can read headlines, but dig a bit deeper, and you will actually be able to argue from thought-out stances. The crypto oil thing was a scare tactic that got thoroughly disproven many years ago. Mining is rapidly ushering in the transition to renewable energy sources. It is also preventing waste of energy that would just dissipate.
The information is out there. It’s just up to yourself to put in the work to educate yourself. I don’t mean run around trying to find anything that will agree with your original hunches or whatever to try to guard your ego. I mean, look at it with fresh eyes and be willing to expand your view after critically analyzing the situation without bias. It is actually a good thing to be capable of arguing from both sides so that you are able to honestly weigh the situation. Right now you are just spewing old headlines that you once saw and not even attempting to make a coherent argument.
It will only help you to educate yourself. It’s not nearly as daunting as it seems. The next step is to quit trying to defend a stance that you don’t understand and to spend some time researching and asking questions. If you had understood what bitcoin was in 2013, then you would be in a much different situation than you are in right now.