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.
  • @slaacaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    191•4 months ago

    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

    • beanEnglish
      23•4 months ago

      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.

    • @answersplease77@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8•4 months ago

      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.

    • @Asudox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3•4 months ago

      I agree. Every crypto except XMR seems to be only seen as an investment to make more money.

  • maegul (he/they)English
    292•4 months ago

    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.

    EDIT:

    Torvalds’s anti-anti-left post (I was curious to read it again):

    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.

    • @Ledivin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      138•4 months ago

      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.

      • @jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
        72•4 months ago

        Another interesting thing to consider.

        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.

        • @sudo@programming.devEnglish
          24•4 months ago

          git is a way more important contribution to the world that the linux kernel IMO. Its basically the assembly line of almost all modern software production. And Linus actually wrote most of the initial code for it. With Linux he organized the project but was almost immediately not a major contributor. He developed git in the process of maintaining the linux repo.

          • ZekasEnglish
            15•4 months ago

            Can’t two things both be important in different ways? Why must we always relativise?

          • @iopq@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0•4 months ago

            git is why we can’t have nice things

            There’s many better VCS, but everyone just goes on GitHub and uses git.

            I dread ever having to touch it. The CLI is unintuitive, the snapshot system is confusing, and may God have mercy on your soul if you mix merging and rebasing

        • @yogurtwrong@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5•4 months ago

          Well, I think Linus Torvalds is one of the rare rich people who actually “deserves” being rich.

          I think the main motive behind leftism should be stopping 8 people from owning the 50% of the world’s wealth, not to distribute Linus Torvalds’ 50 million dollars which a well deserved amount of wealth for someone who created the OS which runs the modern world.

          Besides, what Linus owns is not even a droplet compared to billionaires like Bezos, Musk or Bill Gates

          • @jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5•4 months ago

            I think it’s a shining example of the ‘right’ sort of rich. Despite a significance that overwhelmingly exceeds usual billionaire level, he’s not nearly so ‘rich’ and yet he has enough to just not worry about money, but he has earned it.

      • maegul (he/they)English
        40•4 months ago

        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?!?

            • @Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1•4 months ago

              They’re the cheapest to aquire, put hotels on, and they’re right at the start of the board. If you overshoot go, you’re PAYING $250 instead of recieving $200 if you land on baltic. And you, as the owner of the brown properties would either get $250 or $450 everytime.

              All for just $610 to buy both, and upgrade them both to hotels.

              • KushanEnglish
                1•4 months ago

                Statistically, the best properties to have are the ones just after jail. Everyone who passes go still has to pass them, while those who get sent to jail also have I pass them. The organge properties are the best, because the average dice roll is 7 and from jail that lands you right on them.

      • @IronKrill@lemmy.caEnglish
        1•4 months ago

        Or we could just… not glorify people we barely know and invariably be disappointed when it comes out they’re flawed some way or another.

    • @bulwark@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16•4 months ago

      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.

      • maegul (he/they)English
        13•4 months ago

        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.

        • RustmilianEnglish
          16•4 months ago

          Linus hasn’t written kernel code in years at this point, however he still is the final gate keeper of what gets merged and an active code reviewer, he manages the entire direction of the project.

          As of what will happen when Linus passes, that’s already been decided. The position of projects leader will go to his most trusted project co-maintainer, which we have a good idea of who that is.

      • JackbyDevEnglish
        2•4 months ago

        You know what’s hilarious? Disney dollars were more regulated than most cryptocurrencies.

    • sebinspaceEnglish
      5•4 months ago

      I fell asleep to that by myself.

      Getting digital cable in my bedroom as a kid was both a blessing and a curse, and I listened to Michio Kaku a lot. Didn’t understand half of it, but hey, it was cool.

      Keep in mind, this was when I was a kid and thought all adults were good people and didn’t understand that Kaku and Tyson were dickheads or that Discovery Science was junk food borderline scifi.

  • @iAvicenna@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9•4 months ago

    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.

  • @takeda@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81•4 months ago

    If after 16 years you still have to be asked if you believe in crypto, then chances are that it is a scam.

    • @MataVatnik@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22•4 months ago

      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.

      • @baru@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7•4 months ago

        No clue how long scams usually last, but famous ones easily last multiple decades, though funny how unclear if is when the scam started:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal?wprov=sfla1

        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.

        • @Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1•4 months ago

          Madoff was hidden. Bitcoin is out in the open.

          I think “bubble” could be a better description. Bitcoins bubble pops regularly every 4 years.

    • @cmbabul@lemmy.worldEnglish
      59•4 months ago

      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

      • @AlexWIWA@lemmy.mlEnglish
        11•4 months ago

        Old Linus with Woz and Schwartz is a dream.

        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.

      • @ArbiterXero@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6•4 months ago

        Richard stallman is the only answer.

        I really hate everything he says, but so far on a lot enough timescale he has been fucking right about everything

        • @very_well_lost@lemmy.worldEnglish
          16•4 months ago

          I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Stallman, is in fact, GNU/Stallman, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Stallman. Stallman is not a man unto himself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

            • @micka190@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2•4 months ago

              All you need to do is make the S stand for “Stallman”, and you’ll get a stack overflow before ever reaching the other letters (so you don’t need to think of a value for them).

        • @ArbiterXero@lemmy.worldEnglish
          -2•4 months ago

          The only possible correct answer

          No matter what crazy shit he says, give it a few years and he will be right . And I really hate that

  • @MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
    25•4 months ago

    My hot take is this:

    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.

    • @UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11•4 months ago

      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.

    • @WildPalmTree@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1•4 months ago

      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.

      • @MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
        1•4 months ago

        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.

    • @Skullgrid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      -2•4 months ago

      The main problem with CC’s is that it’s all hype and confidence based.

      oh boy do I have some news for you about the economy

        • @Skullgrid@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1•4 months ago

          everyone uses money, but “faith in the market” leads to people buying and selling or hoarding stocks, which in turn affects actual stock prices, which affects company worth, which leads to people being hired/fired, money invested or divested from companies and industries, leading to more and more effects.

          all based off “hype and confidence”. Real companies and people are affected by feelings.

            • @Skullgrid@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0•4 months ago

              It’s fiat currency, the value of which is determined by faith in the market and stock prices.

              You think your money has worth because it’s backed by something real? No. It has worth because people think it does.

              Edit: if everything about the USA stayed the same, but people stopped believing the USD was worth anything and started using Euros instead, the dolar would be worth nothing. It’s all based off feels.