- 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.
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.
Taking on Visa and Mastercard is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to things like smart contracts.
Gold is actually used as a critical component in the creation of computers and other vitally important industries.
Okay, go buy some of Rudy Giuliani’s gold then. Enjoy.