Linus Torvalds has said that cryptocurrencies are simply "a great vehicle for scams"
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.
It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero. I’m thinking here also of his rant not long ago on social.kernel.org (a kernel devs microblog instance) that was essentially a pretty good anti-anti-leftism tirade in true Torvalds fashion.
I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.
Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.
I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?
I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.
And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.
It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero.
It's just that almost everyone else that could do it ended up being fucking ghouls of people.
Torvalds can be... brusque, sure. But he doesn't support child labor, he doesn't cheat on his wife, and he isn't some crazy cult leader waging a war against workers' rights.
To be clear, he is rich. But he's not crazy crazy rich, like nowhere near billionaire status.
With that in mind, his kernel is a key component of RedHat's, SuSE's and Canonical whole business, with at least two of those being multi billion dollar businesses.
His kernel is a key component of Android phones, which represent over 50 billion a year in hardware spend, and a bunch of software money on top of that.
His kernel is foundational to most hosting/cloud services with just mind blowing billions of revenue quarterly.
It's used in almost every embedded device on the planet, networking gear, set top boxes, thermostats, televisions, just nearly everything.
People with a fraction of that sort of relevance are billionaires several times over. A number of billionaires owe much of their success to him. Yet he is not among their numbers.
Now there's more to things than just a kernel to be sure, but across the hundreds of billions of dollars made while running Linux, there was probably plenty of room for him to carve out a few billion for himself were he that sort of person, but he cares about the work more than gaming the dollars. I have a great deal of respect for that.
Means that while he may not always be right, but I at least believe his assessments are sincere and not trying to drive some grift or cover some insecurity about being left behind.
Yea. It's almost like caring about your craft and being motivated chiefly to just make good things and fix things ... aren't terrible character traits?!?
I wonder what direction the Linux kernel will go once he's gone. Obviously it will continue to go on and Torvalds should get a statue somewhere if he doesn't already have one.
I don't follow thinigs closely at all, but I'm under the impression he's already starting to kinda take his hands off of the wheel? If so, maybe that picture is emerging now, at least behind the scenes.
For a rant, that made complete sense. It missed all of the unhinged outcries, alternative facts and illogical reasoning we've come to expect of modern day rants.
Holy shit, the crypto bros are really triggered by this, out in full force in the comments. If the only argument you can bring for crypto is that you make/made money on it, that sounds a lot like a Ponzi scheme
It is a Ponzi scheme. Very clearly one. How that garbage is legal, I will never know. I could have gotten into crypto from the ground floor eons ago and made tons of money but I didn't because I knew it was illegal and figured the whole thing was going to collapse as soon as governments found out about it. Imagine my shock when most legitimized the damn thing. Still wouldn't bother even if I could go back and do it again knowing the brain dead, money-greedy idiots are going to legalize a literal Ponzi scheme because I have values and morals.
Yeah, it's relatively easy to make good money in crypto if you understand investing. There are a lot of things that are illegal in regulated securities markets that are not yet illegal with crypto.
I intentionally don't invest in crypto, because it doesn't produce anything. Any money you make is just taken from another investor, usually because they don't know what they're doing. When you invest in a company, you make products and sell them to customers. Something is created and rarely are people cheated.
The people investing in crypto are intentionally cheating uninformed investors in a way that is not possible in regulated securities markets.
How many people got in early, made some money, lost it all getting scammed or just making bad choices, and will spend the rest of their lives chasing that dragon? How many drunks are at some bar right now talking about how much money they could have made if they had waited to sell, or how much their nft portfolio is gonna be worth when the market rebounds?
I actually had the same thing happen to me because I discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and dismissed it as crazy and that the governments would never let it exist. And then several years later heard about it again in a news article and was like, wait, the government hasn't shut that down yet and started doing some reading and really understood
I mean not to mention the ridiculous amount of electricity it uses, and heat generated. but hey it's low priority even though every year lately is the hottest in record.
For clarification. To my understanding, the older cryptographic currencies use an immense amount of power (Proof of Work). But newer models have solved that issue by switching to a Proof of Stake model instead.
Fully agree. I think there exist both good and scammy-bubble types of blockchain and crypto. Crypto can be a scam, memecoin rugpull, ponzi scheme, ..etc, but it can also be the peer-2-peer decentrilized self-custody borderless international currency of people away from governments manipulation, inflation, banks and middlemen, which is something that has its own advantages and negatives as we've seen it with criminals, tax evation and money laundering, but also used by people fleeing war zones after their banking come down and escaping trumbling government fiats. However, it also needs regulations and the protections of world governments to work but also claims to want governments and regulations off.
To clarify my position honestly, I think blockchain programming is here to stay but today 99% of it including BTC could be the scammy bubble type and does not represent or have most of the therotical advantages of the bitcoin's original white paper which I listed above.
Alright, as a crypto entrepreneur myself, I'll bite and try to break down exactly what the appeal of crypto is. But b4 I do I would appreciate some updoots since I have a new account. Anyway, crypto, it's a way to do transactions anonymously. You know how when your wife frequently accesses your bank account to meticulously track every offbrand sex toy you get on temu (at least mine does, filing a divorce at the time of writing, just trying to keep custody of the kids even though they hate me) so you can feel the sensation of plastic child labor alone in your bedroom? But yeah I don't really use crypto that much personally, too many scams.
Cryptocurrencies in general are not anonymous. There might be exceptions, but all I've seen is pseudonymity. And an eternal backlog of every transaction ever, i.e., if your identity gets revealed for a single transaction, it will get you revealed for every transaction you ever did.
I fucking hate that the crypto currency ghouls have captured the word “crypto”. When I first read this I was wondering why in the fuck would Linus not like cryptography. My brain is old and crypto will always mean cryptography.
Absolutely. That's why I always write "crypto-tokens" instead. It's a bit longer and more annoying to write but I feel we owe it to the respectable field of cryptography.
I still haven't warmed up to using it for currency either, for me it's a command on Cisco's IOS. Which, BTW, I have to make clear is made by Ciscoand make my phone write with a capital i.
I understand that the world evolves, and that languages do as well ... but I do have a problem with the speed which it evolves with, as well as it seems like the ignorant use of existing terminologies, is the main evolutionary factor these days.
I for one would love for Linus, probably Woz, and a third party yet to be decided(this would be Aaron Schwartz in a better world) to be given free reign to gut the whole industry and rebuild it into something isn’t wholly based on ad revenue and grift
Edit: a bunch of good suggestions of people I need to read about for position three. If anyone can think of a digital equivalent to Marshall McLuhan I think we desperately needs input of that sort
I understand why Linus wanted to clean up his act with people he works with. That is a good and admirable thing to do. I wish he would have kept his smoke for companies though.
Interestingly, for a currency to actually be useful, there needs to be a demand for it, something that you can only pay for in that currency. For real currencies that is normally taxes. England only accepts taxes paid in pounds, so there's a demand for pounds from every person who has to pay taxes in England. For crypto, extortion is basically the only source of demand.
Sure, occasionally there are places that accept both real currencies and crypto currencies, but for legit businesses almost none of the revenue comes from the crypto side. But, for ransomware, etc. the hackers only accept crypto. That means there's a demand for crypto, which means that it has some value.
Yeah, that headline is very misleading. Crypto(graphy) is essential for the digital world to exist whereas the other stuff is a pyramid & money laundering scheme.
So the equivalent of the population of the United States plus 40% are money-londerers. Because somewhere between five and seven percent of the world's population uses cryptocurrency and that's 400 million to 550 million people.
Never heard it commonly used as a short form for "cryptography". But did hear it commonly used for "Cryptocurrency". Why not let the morons have it? Do you have a scam running that relies on "Crypto" being short for "Cryptography"?
Using "cool" brevs is the mark of the amateur anyway, if someone said "crypto" to me when he meant cryptography, I'd forever judge them as a silly person.
Before 2010 it was almost exclusively used to refer to cryptography, outside of some even more niche fields (parts of biology, political sciences, etc)
I run /r/crypto on reddit, for cryptography, and the spam is horrendous and the flood of idiots is never ending
Good point, I always wondered if there is a way the technology will evolve and somehow find a niche that's unexpected. But you're right, 16 years is a long time to be meandering.
It's such a first-world thing to not understand all the good that crypto has done. There are countless lives that have been financially saved by having a safe place to hold wealth while their countries' fiat collapsed. It's just a short matter of time until many first world folks understand this as well.
Federal investigators believe the fraud in the investment management division and advisory division may have begun in the 1970s. However, Madoff himself stated his fraudulent activities began in the 1990s. Madoff's fraudulent activities are believed to have accelerated after the 2001 change from fractional share trades to decimals on the NYSE, which cut significantly into his legitimate profits as a market-maker.
Alerted by his sons, federal authorities arrested Madoff on December 11, 2008.
For all the reasons that crypto is a scam, every "value" stock - stock which does not now, and never has any intention of ever paying dividends - is also a scam.
Except, you know, the stock being tied to ownership in a company that sells real goods or services. Definitely problems with how stocks are traded, but they’re quite different from crypto.
The focus of what Torvalds said is the concept of tech singularity. TL;DR "nice fiction, it doesn't make sense in a reality of finite resources". I'll move past that since most of the discussion is around cryptocurrencies.
Now, copypasting what he says about cryptocurrencies:
For the record, I also don't believe in crypto currencies (except as a great vehicle for scams - they have certainly worked very well for the "spread the word to find the next sucker holding the bag" model of Ponzi schemes). Nor do I believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, or the Easter bunny.
For those who understood this excerpt as "Tarvalds thinks that cryptocurrencies dant ezizt lol lmao": do everyone a favour and go back to Reddit with your blatant lack of reading comprehension. When he says that he doesn't believe in them, he's saying that he does not see them as a viable alternative to traditional currency. (He does not say why, at least not in that message.)
And for those eager to babble "ackshyually ponzi schemes work different lol lmao": you're bloody missing the point. He's highlighting that a large part of the value associated with cryptocurrencies is speculation, not its actual usage. Even cryptocurrency enthusiasts acknowledge this.
I apologise to the others - who don't fit either category of trashy people I mentioned above - for the tone. Read the comments in this very thread and you'll likely notice why of the tone.
The vast majority of the crypto world failed to understand one key concept, money is not the value for which goods/services are exchanged, it is the value by which they are exchanged. People do not have a use or value for money beyond what it can be exchanged for, if no one is willing to exchange for it, it has no value.
Crypto only had value as a currency if people would accept it for goods or services, and the only thing people ever accepted it as payment for, in any meaningful capacity, were illegal goods and services. The value beyond that was purely based on a speculative ideological assumption that people would abandon the traditional banking system for a new system that they couldn’t buy anything with.
the only thing people ever accepted it as payment for, in any meaningful capacity, were illegal goods and services
That used to be true. Hardly any BTC is being spent on drugs nowadays. It's not anonymous enough. However, people are buying high value items like real estate and luxury goods with BTC.
Bitcoin is mostly being spent on electricity and new hardware.
most of the bitcoin being spent on electricity and hardware gets exchanged for actual
currency before it is spent. And most of the luxury goods sales are gimmicks and limited time.
And there is a huge amount of criminal activity with bitcoin still, they just mainly use it to launder money now as the transactions are impractically slow and costly for anything but particularly large trades.
Not sure if has hit all time high, but I doubt it. But even if it did, the reason why it did is pretty simple. It's unregulated and a scam. So, get a bunch of sociopaths and let them target people, get them to invest in crypto and then they will be able to sell their own imaginary money to these people for real money. This is how it works in its most raw form. Someone invents monopoly money, convinces someone gullible that it's the future and sells the people the monopoly money for real cash.
Of course there's a whole bunch of obuscation and hype talk to hide what's really happening, so it's not immediately obvious to those people.
Muddying the waters is also the small group of true believers who really think that it's only matter of time when the monopoly money is going to take over and via the power of magical thinking completely fix capitalism and the rich bastards who have money instead of them.
So the signal to noise ratio is pretty bad for really seeing what is actually going on.
That is not true, for the vast majority of the history of money it was based on a commodity that was valuable in its own sense. It is only in the last century that we have begun experimenting with currencies that are not pegged to the value of a commodity.
Cryptocurrencies derived their value from being a network of users (metcalfe's law) so they are more like a commodity money. Thing about something like Meta, which has a valuation in the trillions despite its physical assets not be worth nearly that and its functionality as a website being easily replicated on an alternative platform. The users are what is valuable.
for the vast majority of the history of money it was based on a commodity that was valuable in its own sense.
True, but using grain or tools as a currency would make the modern financial system pretty much impossible. Even for simple banking, you need something small and light like gold or currency notes.
So you are saying more than the population of the United States as money launderers because somewhere between 400 and 550 million people use cryptocurrency. I kind of doubt they are all money launderers.
I actually considered a non-governmental, community regulated currency as a pretty good idea.
Problem is, crypto is too ecologically expensive and wasteful to fit the bill.
While there were some interesting ones, that actually used the processing power for something useful, most are not. So for now, I'll just go with governmental currencies.
I actually considered a non-governmental, community regulated currency as a pretty good idea.
That goes against the entire history of currencies. Every successful currency in history has been controlled by either the state or a religion (which was effectively state-like).
As long as they use energy they are wasteful, considering they don't provide anything constructive for that wasted energy which could have been used for better things.
Yeah, it's bad at being a currency. I don't think it's a scam or was ever intended to be. It does however suck. Currency serves convenience. Crypto sucks at that.
I think there was a potential future where cryptocurrency could've actually been useful, but it was ruined by scammers, rug pullers, and of course, speculators.
I'll still hold a little bit of Monero, since it holds the most potential for being a real currency in my opinion. But otherwise, I fully agree with the sentiment.
It's always only going to be useful for things like buying drugs, cases where you want to skirt regulation or you really want privacy. Which is fine. It can have it's niche. Pretending it was ever going to be more than that was a mistake.
When the Wild West was around Medicine was used as a scam too. Snake Oil salesmen aren't very nice people. But that doesn't mean medicine is a bad idea ya know?
I agree that there are a lot of snake oil sellers in the cryptographic currencies realm. But that world is basically the digital wild west at the moment to me. I too am waiting to see what happens.
The problem is that snake oil stuff was (mostly) solved not because snake oil salesmen decided to be nice and close up shop, but because regulations and laws were put in place to protect people from them.
Likewise, we've seen crypto get hit with pretty much every issue that has ever afflicted fiat over the entire history of money. The only reason we've seen anyone get punished for it is because governments still have some jurisdiction over crypto traded by their citizens. People will say "but smart contracts!", but the only proven way to be safe with those is to verify the code is both bug-free and not malicious, and that's a lot to ask of someone trying to buy dog food. A lot of exploits have been executed on contracts that were marked safe by audit companies.
I think the idea as a concept is interesting, as I don't exactly trust the government or banks either, but I trust random black box companies and individuals a lot less.
To me, the difference there is that the jokes about snake oil and homeopathy, healing crystals, or essential oils are roughly the same - e.g. "what do you call X that works and has been peer reviewed? Medicine."
So far, there has been no equivalent positive usage in the crypto sphere. Medicine, though often administered to different levels, is a good idea in itself.
Actually, for most uses of crypto it's attempting to muddle in and "add" value to a previous known-good thing. Is the comparison here that crypto is snake oil currency, snake oil databases, or snake oil contracts? In every case, to me, crypto is the snake oil salesman trying to sell you the brighter tomorrow - without adding anything positive, and often getting the heck out of dodge (or folding a company and moving on to, e.g. LLMs) before delivering on promises.
That's definitely true. I've always liked the concept, but never bought into this hype around the speculation, which really gives it a bad name.
That's why I think Monero is really the way forward to a good cryptocurrency. It's price is fairly stable and makes more sense than Bitcoin in many ways. I'd use it more if there were more vendors using it. The most I've done with it is buy a Mullvad subscription.
Cryptocurrency is a useful technology that has some real-world use cases - for example, living in Russia, I use it to circumvent sanctions to donate to some of the crypto-friendly creators, pay for a VPS abroad, and I keep calm knowing I can transfer money to my relatives abroad.
However, it is obviously not the answer to how we should build the financial system. The problem is not environment, actually - many Proof-of-Stake blockchains allow to transfer crypto with minimal environmental impact - but the poor on-chain regulation (including taxation, too) and potentially excessive infrastructure, as well as little protections against malicious and fraudulent actors.
Besides, inability to control emission, while helping maintain the value of the currency over the long run, also means that many interventions that can save economy in a crisis are simply not available. And a deflationary nature is known to cause bubbles.
Yes, but that was caused by other factors, while deflationary policy directly leads to them as it punishes spending, but rewards accumulation. As a result, everyone sits on a pile of cash, and they either don't spend it, like, ever, grinding economy to a halt, or start buying, strongly depreciating the currency and forming a death spiral.
Oddly enough lots of people do mess with V-Bucks for FortNite, Riotpoints for League of Legends, and/or CoD points for Call of Duty. Damn you chucky cheese money in my video games!
Crypto currency, when in its infancy, had a halfway decent concept.... now? It's a shitshow.
Crypto bros tend to argue about the main currencies, Bitcoin, etherium, etc. Meanwhile, there's about 1000 currencies that aren't talked about for every currency with any weight behind it.
The main problem with CC's is that it's all hype and confidence based. There's nothing tangible attached to it. I often equate it, for non-cryptocurrency people, to stocks trading. Often, stock is trading above what the actual value of the stock is. Most of the time in IPOs the price of the stock immediately jumps after the stock is released, then trends along some impression of how the company is doing. If there's a loss in confidence in the company the value of the stock drops, etc. It's pretty simple supply and demand beyond that. If investors have high confidence in the company to profit, demand for their stock will increase, and since supply is pretty much fixed (aside from shenanigans like stock splits and whatnot), price goes up. Same goes for the inverse, low confidence leads to low demand, price goes down.
It's similar with so-called crypto. Confidence goes up but supply is fairly stagnant, so the price goes up. Same with the inverse.
The primary difference between the two as investments, is that stocks get repaid (depending on a few factors) if the company goes under. The stock represents a monetary value for assets owned by the company, both liquid and physical assets. Crypto, however, has no such backing. If Bitcoin goes away for some reason, all you're left with is essentially digital trash.
This is mainly true for all of the talked about cryptocurrencies. The majority of currencies are not really following the same trends. After the initial golden era of CC's, it became a breeding ground for pump and dump schemes. Since it's entirely unregulated, borderline impossible to regulate, and AFAIK, no such regulation exists to govern it, there's no law against pump and dump schemes in the CC world. So it became a huge problem. We see this a lot with NFTs. Touching on NFTs for a second: if you own an NFT, all you actually own is a receipt that is an attestation or receipt that you paid for whatever the NFT is. That's it. The content behind the NFT, whether it's artwork or whatever, isn't locked. It's actually the opposite of locked, it's publically available on the blockchain, by design. The only thing you "own" is a tag in the blockchain that says you paid for it.
Pump and dump, for those unaware, is where you artificially inflate the value of something making it seem like a really good deal so everyone buys it, raising demand and prices, then the people who generated the hype dump their investment, cashing out when the value is high, and making off with the money while the value of the investment tanks.
This is very very frequently the case with NFTs. Since it's unregulated and entirely confidence based, the creators of NFTs will say whatever they have to (aka lie), to increase the confidence in the NFT, then sell it, and let the value freefall afterwards. They've even gone to the point of buying their own NFTs with dummy accounts for top dollar to have records on the blockchain that people can look up, which say it was sold for x amount in whatever cryptocurrency, to inspire others to think they're getting a bargain when they get it for some fraction of that initial transaction. The perpetrators then sell and disappear.
Several other crypto scams like this have also happened, mostly with NFTs but also with lesser known currencies. One that I heard of, required some token to exist to perform any transactions on the blockchain. When the perpetrators were done, they deleted the token, effectively locking the currency to never be traded again. Therefore those with the now digital trash of that crypto/NFC, couldn't sell to anyone else and they were stuck with the digital garbage data that used to represent their investment.
"Big" currencies, especially older currencies, are fairly stable in terms of confidence, but they're still volatile, and backed by nothing more than confidence. Any "new" CCs are a gamble to see whether they're legit at all, or just a pump and dump. The number of currencies that start high, then drop to nil and never recover, is significant.
Here's a controversial one, Elon Musk, for all of his flaws, isn't an idiot. He pump and dumped Dogecoin, by tweeting about it to bolster it, then divesting when it surged from his influence. I think this was pretty obvious, but I think a lot of people missed it. IIRC, he did it twice. I'm speculating, since I don't know which blockchain wallet is his, so I can't verify, but, he likely picked up a crapton of Doge then did his tweet, dumped when it went high, waited for it to drop again, picked up a crapload more, tweeted again, and finally dumped at another high to earn even more. Since then, doge has not been doing superb. He inspired volatility in the currency and profited from the crypto bros getting excited about it.
The evidence is there and when you look past the confidence game, and look at the numbers, it tells a story that most people don't want to see.
Crypto currency, when in its infancy, had a halfway decent concept
The premise of Crypto as currency was "Lets make a currency that has a soft cap on gross volume, so nobody can ever print any more of it and its value will only rise over time."
Even halfway and in its infancy, it wasn't a decent concept because
It presumes continued increasing cash investment (which repeated crypto crashes illustrate isn't true)
It refuses to acknowledge the potential for Shitcoins
Here’s a controversial one, Elon Musk, for all of his flaws, isn’t an idiot.
He's a carnival barker with a penchant for talking billionaires out of their wallets. That takes a certain kind of cunning, but its also heavily predicated on circumstance and opportunity. Had Elon Musk been born on the other side of the South African color line, he wouldn't be a billionaire right now because Peter Thiel wouldn't have had anything to do with him. Neither would the US military or the Wall Street banks or the East Asian automotive industry.
He pump and dumped Dogecoin, by tweeting about it to bolster it
The Dogecoin pump worked entirely because of the soft cap on the original Bitcoin. It wasn't an Elon invention (Elon repeatedly failed to recreate Dogecoin magic with Shibecoin and Muskcoin and a few other shitcoins of note). Dogecoin surged as a precursor to the Stablecoin market, because you didn't need to wait half an hour for the transaction to clear. Once you had Doge, you could trade it as a proxy for BTC.
And this functionally became the "Central Bank printing unlimited money" solution to the problem BTC created when they objected to a central bank printing unlimited money.
The joke about crypto is that its an object lesson in why things like the gold standard and fixed currency rates don't work. All the natural inventions within the crypto market parallel what western financiers were doing a century ago, just with dumb cutesy nicknames and more graft.
All very true but missing one point. Most (all?) current "regular currency" is fiat (let it be done) with no backing except tax payments and government spending. Sure, that's not nothing but it's also not so much something.
Crypto, as fiat currency, has the value people ascribe to it. If it can be traded for goods and/or services, it has value. What value? Only time will tell.
There's a whole discussion that can be had here about the merits of most fiat currencies. My viewpoint is that the currency is essentially a "stock" note for the country. The same way stocks are a representation of the value a business has. The value of that note goes up and down (relative to other countries) as they prosper or falter financially across their entire economy.
The fact that most currency is compared to the US dollar doesn't and shouldn't imply that USD is stable, instead, when they falter, all other currencies gain value, and when USD prospers, all others fall by an appropriate amount.
There's still some sort of backing on it, something to weigh the confidence in that currency against. It's easier to draw that comparison between stocks because it doesn't take as much creative thought to work out how the numbers change compared to a single fiat currency. However, I would argue that the same principles apply.
From there we could get into the weeds with fiat currencies and national debts and whatnot; the whole global banking industry, but we get pretty far from the main topic of cryptocurrencies pretty significantly, and into the realm of whether money exists and what the concept of money actually is. That discussion would circle back to cryptocurrencies eventually in the fact that they are currencies, the many of the same ways, and in the end we wouldn't really prove anything.
Though, I'd like to point out that this is by far one of the best comments I've seen in reply to my post so far. Not that others lack merit or any reasonable discussion points, or that they are somehow not worthy of further discussion. There is a lot to say about the idea, and I don't think anything I've said thus far is inherently false, nor do I think any of the replies don't have merit, they do; but by far, this is the best discussion point so far. I commend you for your time and effort in furthering the discussion.
Crypto, however, has no such backing. If Bitcoin goes away for some reason, all you’re left with is essentially digital trash
It's crypto's weakness and it's power is that it's not and cannot be regulated. It acts as a protection against malicious regulations. Of course, it does bear numerous risks and should be approached with extreme caution. But I can literally remember the seed phrase and go through dozen of checkpoints and criminal neighborhoods without any risk of losing any of it, even if they rob me completely naked. It is safe as long as I'm alive and of sound mind, and probably wouldn't really care anymore if I'm not. As far as I know, there's nothing else in the world that could offer such a security level.
The content behind the NFT, whether it’s artwork or whatever, isn’t locked. It’s actually the opposite of locked, it’s publically available on the blockchain, by design
There's not even a guarantee that the content stays up. The receipt just points to some content on some server. Or to ipfs, but ipfs isn't magic, if there isn't anyone on there hosting said content then it is gone. Same problem, but a lot less probable, is that if all nodes on the blockchain go offline, then the NFT itself, along with all currency, is gone.
Pump and dump, for those unaware, is where you artificially inflate the value of something making it seem like a really good deal so everyone buys it, raising demand and prices, then the people who generated the hype dump their investment, cashing out when the value is high, and making off with the money while the value of the investment tanks
Ideally, in a perfect world without hype and idiots, this would be a guaranteed losing scheme. Because to "dump", you'd have to have someone who is ready to buy. If people don't buy, then the perpetrators would have no option but to take the hit themselves. I heard this was the case when somebody managed to short logan paul's shitcoin immediately after the pump. There should be less hype and more of that, and more frequently.
Meanwhile, there’s about 1000 currencies that aren’t talked about for every currency with any weight behind it.
Who cares? It's an open source tech. If people want to gamble on random shitcoins, that's not the fault of the technology.
There are probably 10000 worthless video games for every few that are good. That doesn't mean video games are terrible.
Also there are scams. But there are scams with the dollar too in fact many many more. People need to be aware and defend themselves.
It's almost impossible for me to feel any sympathy for people who bought NFTs. Really that's the fault of the buyer not the underlying tech.
Sure crypto is kinda terrible but you need to consider the alternative: state paper. It suffers all the same deficiencies but even worse. Literally destroying the planet.
To my understanding, the older cryptographic currencies are the energy consumers. Newer models have avoided the massive energy consumption. A.k.a Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake.
Crypto - Meh, I have digital banking and payment processing already, with easy enough international transfers. I'm good.
AI - I see the possibilities, I think we should continue to develop it even if just for the medical applications of machine learning. Right now people just like playing with it, but, privacy issues aside, I don't think it's a waste.
I think both have their uses. A true state backed cryptocurrency used interchangeably with physical cash could be quite useful. Crypto as it is now not so much.
AI has a bunch of useful applications in medicine, manufacture, research, monitoring... But where we see it is language models, art remixes, and deep fakes.
Lets see, cryptocurrencies involve tech bros, fin bros and lots of money. I am not surprised it is on its way to become the most disgusting money making scheme in the world.
Cryptos can be a useful technology in certain targeted fields but they are not the solution to capitalism, it is much more important to focus on social issues and mutual aid.
I used Monero to pay for my domain and VPS while under sanctions and thus failed by the mainstream payment system. And in daily life I use pretty much only cash.
Also the phrasing of this implies some "nothing-to-hide" mentality. Would I be in danger if I paid for my stuff with a KYC method? Not really, I connect to my VPS and request my domain daily from home, their existence is not secret. Do I benefit from the transaction being anonymous? Still yes, the less data you trust the third parties with, the better. Same as to why I encrypt my chats even though they are mundane. Just because they are nobody's business.
Buying groceries. Personally, I guess I don't need an anonymous cryptocurrency, but why wouldn't you have an anonymous cryptocurrency? That would be the equivalent of letting everybody in the world see your bank account and your withdrawals and deposits. And who would do that? That and while people would like you to believe otherwise, you still have a right to privacy.
I read somewhere that someone was using anonymous currencies to buy life saving medicine from "non traditional" markets because they were much much cheaper. Let me see if I find the article
Isn't Nano the one where they distributed the coins by CAPTCHA, but there was a central party that verified all these CAPTCHAs? They could just have given themselves 51% of the coins for free.
Initial distribution was through a captcha-protected crypto ‘faucet’. The faucet is still up. Did the developers keep a large part of the coins themselves? I’ve never heard that.
What if... crypto currency has been a psyop all along. Ultimately eliminating physical currency and government having full blown control of digital currency.
Crypto is a textbook example of why we as a society can't have nice things. To many people are selfish and self serving, and not enough people are willing to ostracize those types of people from society for such actions.
I don't believe in crypto either because it's current value is solely derived on how much you can exchange it for real money. Outside of a few edge cases, nobody buys anything with crypto outside of the black market.
I'm sure crypto is a great solution to some finance problems related to centralized banking that I'm too lazy or dumb to care about, but I look at the energy consumption to calculate these massive chains for little tangible benefit, and the scammers and hypemen who are profiting off of other people's hopes and desires to get rich quick on the next big boom, and I can't help but feel like it's an actively harmful element of society. At the very least, whatever regulations are currently in place that are attempting to reign in crypto are insufficient at reducing harm.
The value of a crypto token is ostensibly related to the value of the apps which the blockchain supports. It's meant to be both a form of compensation for participating in the network, and as currency for purchasing services from blockchain apps. That's how it derives intrinsic value. So if there is social media which runs on a blockchain, then the hosts within that blockchain get tokens for participating, and eg, advertisements or subscriptions are purchased in tokens. This means those who manage those participant nodes can sell their tokens to those who want to buy blockchain services. As the cumulative value of these services grows, an entire crypto economy is established, and it becomes effectively another form of fiat which has a real exchange rate backed by some real economic activity.
This is how it's supposed to work. The problem is that we just don't have any compelling apps, and the initial speculation has all but ensured that this cannot happen organically because the market cap is already just so much bigger than any realistic medium term outlook for intrinsic value. Bitcoin's blockchain would have to support some form application value which is bigger than the biggest companies in the world, and right now it basically has zero useful applications.
You can just use crypto for its intended purpose and not give a shit about the whole culture around it. I frequently use it to buy gift cards not available in my country, a VPN, and pay securely without giving away all my data.
The real issue is people coming and bastardizing the concept by trying to get rich, and treating it as some kind of gambling machine.
He didn't say "i don't believe in crypto because it's a scam" he said "I don't believe in crypto, except on its use as a scam" so it'd be great to hear why.
I think crypto does have its place in anonymous transfers and stuff like that but the current form of crypto isnt that. First of all it would need to be something stable and crypto is everything but stable.
All currencies fluctuate against each other, but in most cases the currencies all fluctuate downwards in value within very close proximity to each other. You only see cracks start to appear when one currency becomes much weaker than the other ones. Look at the Japanese yen in the most recent days for an example. The big difference is that with the major cryptocurrencies the supply is either capped or very seriously constrained so it actually goes up in value while every other fiat currency in the world goes down in value over time.
I've literally only made millions off of crypto. Of course this is the Internet and I don't need to verify me making shit up, but I will continue to say so because otherwise my feelings will get hurt. If you uplemmy this comment I will send you one trillion Bitcoin, real!
It'll be a bad day when crypto really crashes. A lot of guys in my generation have most of their savings in crypto. When they lose that money they are going to create a very big political problem for the rest of us.
I only know one 40 year old who started dumping everything into crypto (DCA, hasn't contributed to 401k or IRA in 15 years), but he even took lower pay to work on devops in crypto.
It’s gambling. Why anyone would be foolish enough to invest their life savings into it is no less stupid than the trump stans dumping their savings into trump bux or that trump credit card hat was apparently going fill up with cash when trump was reinstated.
It’s all a scam that has some likelihood of coming true if all of the right occurrences line up, no matter how unlikely. Except with crypto it’s like picking a random slot machine and somehow investing everything you have on one spin. Whereas the trump stuff is like betting on roulette, but one guy is spinning the wheel and he may just put the ball down on one of the random things and make a few people rich. Or maybe it’s more like throwing all your money into the casino toilet and flushing it because you’re too drunk to realize it’s not a slot machine.
Linus creates kernels. Nothing to do with cryptocurrency.
Tech is tech, but I wouldn't necessarily listen to him about other things than kernels and computers.
For example, he doesn't even believe in FOSS, and he openly supports Google because of Android, Chromebooks and ChromeOS using Linux.
Love how privileged people who never ever had to hide money from their governments debate the usefulness fo crypto. Ask him about woman hygiene products as well.
I fucking guarantee that Linus Torvalds DOES believe in cryptography. Stop calling cryptocurrency "crypto", because "crypto" is short for cryptography, not cryptocurrency.
Why does the headline say "Crypto" but then snippet says "cryptocurrencies"? Do people not realize these are not the same thing? The inventor of Linux does believe in crypto, that's why it's in Linux!
Algorithm??? I can understand not coming up with "Artificial Intelligence", but if "Al" is "algorithm", then that means they think its A L, with the L lowercase. So, that means they aren't pronouncing it "aye eye" or "aye el" they're pronouncing it "Al". Like the first name Al.
Which just makes me think of a reboot of Married with Children. Except it's just Peggy surrounded by cyborgs made to look and sound like the original characters.
So now Peggy wants sex, and she says "OOOOHHHHH AAAAAALLLLLLL!!!!"
Followed by a robot drinking a beer, and sticking his hands down his pants. Somehow even artificial Al looks defeated.
It's the most annoying thing of these enthusiasts: they glorify cryptocurrencies and blockchain while glossing over the massively important and actually useful cryptography discipline in the background.
"Crypto" has become a widely used abbreviation for "cryptocurrency," even though "crypto" itself refers to the general field of cryptography and its encryption techniques. This informal usage reflects how cryptocurrencies have become the most recognizable application of cryptography for most people.
Equivocating cryptocurrency, block chain tech, and bitcoin is disingenuous to say none of that exists like fairies or Santa Claus. It exists just as much as PGP or AES or the deficit does. It's dumb to think any of that is going to launch you to extreme wealth or solve everyone's problems, but it is a good way to try to prevent governments from using that currency issuance power in ways their citizens would prefer they did not.
Even if you don't agree with the politics it is a pretty interesting technology for consensus building between potentially adverse participants. Someone with experience maintaining open source repos could at least appreciate that aspect.
it is a good way to try to prevent governments from using that currency issuance power in ways their citizens would prefer they did not.
And instead it should be hedgefunds that have that power?
There is a need for currency and someone is going to have control over the value of that currency. At least with the government you can vote the bastards out.
Nobody has to have control of the production of money, it is especially bad when corrupt people have the power to generate it into their pockets. I know it is hard to understand how generating money for one's self is theft from everyone with money, but it is the case, you just have to try a bit harder to wrap your head around it.
I don't think anything we've seen yet solves wealth inequality, but whether that becomes a property of a currency or not may change.
I agree voting is important for governance but what if citizens held that specific power by default instead of the government, and if the government wanted to use that power they would require asking for it? It's the same people doing the voting but for a specific measure instead of a representative. I didn't think we're there yet but that being a possibility seems hopeful.
I definitely made some assumptions, I'd probably do well to read a bit more and comment a bit less. No harm just down votes let me know there's plenty more to learn
Most of bad rep is generated by insufferable hype train enthusiasts we started to call cryptobros and big tech CEOs trying to capitalize on putting this edgy technology everywhere, just like with LLMs right now. Many people who escape shit states in recent years legitly use cryptocurrencies to bring their unconvertable money abroad and that's more reliable than a suitcase of precious metal bars, lol. This tech is no Jesus or Devil, it just needs to mature and overcome the initial fascination, with most bad realizations and schemes dying off. In ten years this discourse would be very different.
You're free to shit on cryptocurrency all you like, but it has many use-cases where traditional banks and payment systems fall short.
Without cryptocurrencies like Monero we wouldn't have anonymous VPN services like Mullvad, and we would have a global web being forced to follow US laws despite being based elsewhere.
For example, Visa is forcing art platforms to ban (legal) adult content or face blocking. The alternative is master card and other cards that you can't get in many parts of the world, and there is no guarantee that those cards also won't start enforcing restrictions. For those places, cryptocurrency is easiest, cheapest and fastest.
Also, a ponzi scheme is something where you pay investors with newer investors' money. This is not how cryptocurrency works. People pay a tiny amount per transaction to stakers or miners that keep the network going. Anything else is purely a result of the giant surge of new investors, and once we hit a period of stability, mining and staking will be virtually the only way to "earn" money from cryptocurrency and that is completely fair seeing as you're paid to keep the network going.
Ethereum Layer 2 is cheaper than credit card transactions, by the way.
And the biggest vehicle for scams is google and Amazon gift cards.
Torvalds also dismissed the idea of technological singularity as a bedtime story for children, saying continuous exponential growth does not make sense.
Let's not forget that crypto also enable wide deployment of ransomwares (which was not possible due to the lack of untraceable online payment at scale), while less and less ecommerce platform allow crypto payment. If this trend continues, eventually no one would use crypto except for speculation and paying off ransom.
Even online crime often settles with gift cards though because it's too much of a hassle to explain to the Average Joe how to setup an account and buy and transfer crypto-tokens.
The internet enabled that. Are we going to get rid of the internet?
Also, crypto is for peer-to-peer transactions. E-commerce platforms were never the target anyway. And if you really need to pay with crypto on these, you still have crypto-linked debit cards, and these platforms won't know the difference.
There isn’t a coin out there that can process 1/10 of the number of transactions that Visa does in an hour.
Ethereum had a sharding update done recently, which boosted the maximum TPSs by 1000 times.
Arbitrum claims to be capable of 40,000tps now. That's 2/3 of visa.
Combine all blockchains and they all surpass all credit cards combined.
Also, credit cards charge 1.5% - 3.5% processing fees. Ethereum L2 charge less than 0.01$, making them much cheaper than credit card transactions.
https://l2fees.info/
Anonymous vpns would still exist, as block chain existed prior to crypto
No they wouldn't. They'd be vpns directly linked to your credit card. You're more anonymous without a VPN at that point.
You’re right, it’s not a ponzi scheme, it’s the “bigger idiot” scam.
It is a currency. It has inflation. Anything with value can become a "bigger idiot" scam. Google stocks are a "bigger idiot" scam except you also help them destroy the internet when you invest.
For example, Visa is forcing art platforms to ban (legal) adult content or face blocking.
Only because the social pressure after the metoo charade. Visa itself was more than happy to allow these transaction before it. And once all this stigma on adult content will pass, Visa will be more than happy to allow these transactions again. They are money to them.
That's not happening soon. The stigma is only getting worse in the US and non-us services are paying the price. Look at pixiv who had to IP ban American users.
I totally agree with you. Cryptocurrencies have their place, and I'm going to make a serious effort to normalize use of Monero because I think it's important to have a digital equivalent to cash for a whole host of reasons, from activists and whistleblowers being able to get support, to an average teenager trying to buy something online discretely without their parents knowing.
Privacy is important, and there should be an option for that.
That said, most cryptocurrencies don't have privacy as a goal, and are instead pure speculation of the higher order. There are a ton of scams in the cryptocurrency space, so you need to be very carefulb when venturing too far outside the norm. Most of the value in most coins is pure hype, not utility.
I don't buy cryptocurrencies as an investment, but I do buy Monero for actual spending.
we wouldn't have anonymous VPN services like Mullvad
I don't follow. Mullvad would exist regardless of cryptocurrencies existing, and you could still buy it anonymously with their cash option. Paying with cryptocurrencies is pretty cool, but it's hardly a requirement for it to exist.
See, you are the reason that most everybody here hates cryptocurrency. Number go up is not the reason to be in the technology. The reason to be in the technology is for human freedom and privacy and liberty. I may be mischaracterizing you, and if I am, I'm sorry. But that's how this comment comes off.
And these my friends, are the only people who use crypto currencies: people who want to get rich from it
It isn't being used to buy anything useful, it isn't designed to make the world a better place.
It is only designed and used to increase profits.
And the only way these make profit is by converting everyone they can using any method they can. Lies, manipulation, scams. All just so they can increase the number and cash out on other peoples money.
Well, I guess big name figures have a right to be wrong. Surprising since he is the creator of such a foundational piece of open source software that he would not like another piece of open source software just seems a bit hypocritical in my opinion
Maybe I'm thinking more Richard Stalman than Linus Torvalds. But if he made Linux to promote freedom from corporates, then it seems like he should like cryptocurrency because it's open source as well and permits freedom from government inflation. Humanity has never had a money not controlled by governments, except for gold and silver, and those are not easily sent over the internet.
I guess we should all get rid of our bitcoin that's worth hundreds of times more than when we bought it, because an operating system kernel developer doesn't like it.
Linus is awesome but he's not a god, his opinion of things outside the Linux kernel is just the opinion of a guy. Stop worshipping him, he doesn't even like it.
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.
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 :
If crypto had pivoted to freedom and prioritized mass-adoption
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.
I would like to introduce you to my friend Monero. It actually gets used as a currency and has people who believe in human freedom using it, which is why the government's hate it so much and purposely try to get it delisted from as many exchanges as they possibly can because they do not want normals like us to have it.
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.
Which is primarily the reason that I will only use Monero. It actually offers something that other cryptocurrencies do not. And that's privacy. If you need to see which crypto to buy or use, look at the government's efforts. The government has Wall Street accepting Bitcoin and put in people's retirement accounts. Why? Because they can control it. Where with Monero, they're trying to purposely get it delisted from every single exchange they can possibly get away with. Why would they be so willing for you to have Bitcoin? But not willing at all for you to have Monero? Simple. Because with Bitcoin, they can see everything you spend at all times and see your balance at all times. Where with Monero, they can't control it and they know it. Monero is what Bitcoin people thought they bought.
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.
Exactly. These people seem to have no idea what they're talking about and or flip flop on issues. As an example, they flocked to open source software. The minute a billionaire bought the company they previously used, because in open source software, they finally see that no billionaire can buy it and control it like they can a closed source system. But yet, oh no, we can't have open source money. That doesn't make any sense.
The minute a billionaire bought the company they previously used, because in open source software, they finally see that no billionaire can buy it and control it like they can a closed source system.
I’m genuinely struggling to understand what this sentence means. Is it badly worded or am I just brainfarting?