- 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.
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.
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.
I don’t know much about crypto but this doesn’t seem right?
Didnt it hit an all time high recently? All while no one is using it to buy anything anymore?
A coin is worth what someone will pay for it, and people are paying lots because they think it will be worth more later.
It has no inherent value or utility.
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.
Which is EXACTLY the same as all other fiscal vehicles. Except in the case of USD, the group of sociopaths you describe are the elected representatives of USGOV. What defines money as real, Vs not real? The fact that it’s backed by the central bank? Is that actually a good thing and positive for anyone? Decentralised finance as a concept is a good thing. Sometimes it takes a little froth for something to take hold. I’ll bet there were a bunch of people who said similar things about trading shares and futures trading. You can argue that both of those things are ultimately scams. They are legitimised only due to the fact they make capital. Crypto makes capital. And it’s now easy to swap between fiat and crypto.
I LOL at OSS people who say that a government backed crypto currency is a good thing. Explain how monolithic control of finance is good for everyone. Please