- 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.
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 difference is that medicine, as a concept, is useful.
Is not currency, as a concept, useful? How about transfer of value over vast distances instantly? Is that not useful?
Well know you are just using circular logic. The thing is that cryptocurrencies aren’t currencies.
I hear what you’re saying. But USDC is absolutely a token on many different ledgers that represents a currency.
I’ve been deep in decentralized finance for years as an investor and fulltime software dev. I get the whole “hur hur Bitcoin is dum” but you’re really missing the forest focusing on a tree.
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.
Now a days we peer review medicine. As I mentioned, in the “wild west”. There’s no peer reviewing. The metaphor of the wild west was also pointing out the infancy of a technology. Another example could be how the “self driving cars” aren’t actually that self driving. However I suspect that over time even those cars will actually become peer reviewed, functional and what not.
The example that I saw that I liked the best was video games. Just because someone sells bad video games. Doesn’t mean all video games are a scam. Ya, know?
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.
Like I said. It’s the wild west in that sphere right now. No rules no nothing. But I also think that even the wild west was tamed over time. Meaning I’m not sure if it will stay so unregulated forever.
Right, but the wild west was tamed by increasing regulation, which is precisely what crypto fans want to avoid. The truth is, though, most people won’t trust crypto without some kind of centralized authority guaranteeing that their money is safe, whether that be a government or a private entity. This pretty quickly materialized with the NFT craze, which saw the vast majority of NFTs were created on the same two sites, with only the biggest names having their own domains and redundant storage for their images.
All the ‘advantages’ to crypto seem to me to really be ways of avoiding regulation (or are only advantageous without regulation)
That may be true. To me, however, not all regulation are ethically or morally sound. I hear people in countries with corrupt governments can use these new fangled monies to avoid the regulations/sanctions put on their countries.
The example that comes to my mind was some guy in Turkey buying medicine. I guess Turkey isn’t allowed to trade many countries because they government is corrupt? And this person was unable to get the medicine they needed in Turkey. Only way was to in port I guess? So they converted their local turkish currency to something the medicine maker would accept.
I can’t really verify such claims but seemed like an alright “breaking of the rules”.
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.