- 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.
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.
You could very well make the argument that ultimately crypto is backed by energy, which is something we all agree has value. Without energy, you can’t go to work, heat or cool your house or anything like that. If you believe that electricity is fundamental for society, then by extension, crypto is backed by the most fundamental force that there is even bigger than a government.
Crypto is just evidence energy was used. It’s not stored energy.
Oh, but it is, because you could exchange it for something else. As an example, I can take mine and go exchange it for groceries.
You can also use it to… pay for that energy you just used… Hooray!! /s
I’ve recently been hearing a lot about mining, consuming energy that either would not exist otherwise, or would be wasted. For example, places in Africa can build like a hydroelectric power station, but don’t have the money to run lines far enough for all the energy from the power station to be used, so they give most of it to a crypto mine and let the residents use the rest. If the residents ever need more power, then the crypto mine can shut down temporarily or slack off on their usage in order to provide the residents with more power.
You know what else they could do? Store it… in batteries… which are reliable for long term storage… and aren’t nearly as volatile… and use it on stuff that generates more value per watt consumed… For example, batteries can be used to power homes and businesses, which can help to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and improve air quality e.g. improving quality of life which generates a shit load of value. Batteries can also be used to provide backup power in case of a blackout, which can be essential for critical infrastructure such as hospitals and data centers. I just don’t see how most crypto currency can compete in this space… maybe something highly power efficient? But even then the value is extremely volatile.
Also consider that many peoples (me) would like to move from the older cryptocurrencies that needs lots of power to run (proof of work) and try to advocate for newer proof of stake models.
To my understanding proof of stake models have dramatically lower power requirements.
But it’s not backed by energy.
The energy was consumed in the process of creating the crypto, that energy no longer exists and since it doesn’t exist it can’t back anything.
Isn’t there a person that famously said something to the effect of energy is neither created nor destroyed, only modified? I want to say it was like Isaac Newton or something. Some big name anyway. So you’re not destroying the energy. You’re changing the energy into heat, which during the winter can heat your home as a subsidy to your furnace, and you are turning it into a digital representation that you can take and spend anywhere in the world.
Still not describing anything that indicates it backs it.
Good news though, I did reply again so feel free to condescendingly demonstrate your intelligence again.
In this case the heat is something data centers spend even more energy and water on to dispose of
Which is why Monero’s proof of work algorithm ends up being better than Bitcoin. Because for a data center with tons of computers, it makes more financial sense to do something else with the machines rather than mine. But for a home user, it makes tons of sense to mine and get the heat to subsidize their electricity bill during the winter.
I get you’re desperately trying to sound smart, but in this context, “energy” meant electricity. Because that’s what it takes to produce cryptocurrency. Not the general definition in the realm of physics study. And electricity can most certainly be created and destroyed.
When you buy gold, you have the gold. It’s backed by the thing you have.
When you buy cryptocurrency, you don’t have the electricity that was spent in fabricating those numbers. You don’t get sent a battery in the post. You have nothing.
So if I have nothing, why are people willing to give me things for it?
Again trying to sound smart. You have nothing tangible. You have numbers on a screen, and for some people that’s enough to throw money at.
Nice attempt at moving the goalposts, btw.
Except that’s not what “backed by” means. It consumes energy. You can never exchange cryptocurrency to get the energy that it consumed back.
Have you tried running a cryptocurrency miner during the dead of winter? It makes your electricity bills quite a bit lower. That’s for certain.
Hard disagree here, I literally cannot access a cryptocurrency without power but I can absolutely pay cash to buy some water during a power outage.
Sure you can. There’s absolutely nothing stopping somebody from putting a private key on a piece of paper and loading money onto it and spending it physically as long as the private key has not been exposed. Kind of like those Amazon scratch-off gift cards. And just to prove my point, take a look at this.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Casascius_physical_bitcoins
Yes I’m sure the 7-11 cashier would love for me to try this.
Depends on who the 7-11 cashier is. If they are really smart, they would gladly take your crypto and pay for your items with their fiat. You are not going to get big places using it first. You are going to get little places using it first. The Amazon’s and 7-11’s and Walmart’s of the world will come later. And trust me, they will come. There’s a natural tipping point apparently, where when 5% of the world population uses something, the other 95% generally soon follow, because it’s more useful. Crypto has already hit that 5% mark.
Any day now bruh, trust me
I haven’t seen an exchange where I can trade in Crypto for kilowatt-hours.
Coinsbee.com allows you to purchase debit cards, which you can then use to purchase kilowatt hours.
Translation: actual currencies can be used to purchase energy, but cryptocurrency cannot.
What you’re saying is precisely like saying “I know a guy that trades turnips for money. Therefore turnips are a great currency that you can buy anything with.”
Thank you Nagus for your financial insights.
The only currency I give a damn about is gold-pressed latinum, damn it!
Sure, you can’t buy energy with crypto directly yet. But that would make total sense for a power company to accept crypto in the future.
If it made sense they’d be doing it, no?
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.
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.
How does this working into Foreign Exchange? This also sounds a lot like trading USD to PESO like my aunt does…