7mo ago

Linux Inventor Says He Doesn’t Believe in Crypto

u.today Linux Inventor Says He Doesn’t Believe in Crypto

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.

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I only like two cryptocurrencies.
Nano: free transactions, each wallet runs it’s own blockchain, so it’s got no negative impact on the environment.
Monero: allows for anonymous transfers
- I ask this sincerely, what have you personally needed an anonymous currency for?
  
  I use anonymous currency daily without issue. It's called cash.
  
  You can't use cash online tho
  
  You just have to fold it really small to poke it down the wires.
  
  It's a series of tubes, actually. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
  
  True. Although you can put cash on a debit card and spend that online. Pseudo anonymous because there is some degree of traceability.
  
  In which fairy tale cash is anonymous?
  
  All fairy tales. Stories are awash with bags of coins and no-one ever worries who owned the cash previously.
  
  Yeah, tell that to the officers who investigate fake cash and money laundering.
  
  Sorry. Which fairy tales have officers who investigate fake cash and money laundering?
  Neither of which have anything to do with the anonymity of cash.
  
  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.
  
  nothing-to-hide
  In most civilized countries the law is "innocent until proven guilty" - and if I (and the vast majority of people) are innocent, why the fuck is tracking a thing?
  
  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.
  
  In the case of groceries, use cash? I understand the overall privacy issue, and I don’t fall into the “I have nothing to hide so why should I care” category, but I struggle to find a real world example of where an anonymous digital currency would be required outside of illegal purchases. There are certainly “illegal” purchases that shouldn’t be illegal, depending on your area. Birth control will be a big one.
  
  The problem is that cash suffers from the same thing that digital money does being inflation by the government, whichever government you happen to live under. Ask people in Argentina or Venezuela how good cash is. The answer is it's not. The government cannot be allowed to print money because they will abuse that power and hurt everybody.
  
  I'm sorry, do you think inflation doesn't apply to prices just because they are using a different sign?
  
  And remember, crypto is super stable 🙄
  
  Inflation occurs when governments print money and so with these cryptocurrencies, at least the good ones, the amount that is printed is known in advance and will never exceed certain boundaries. So even though the greedy people may wish to print more for themselves, they cannot do it because the system will not let them. And right now the system is perfectly happy to let them and fuck everybody else.
  
  That is such a poor understanding of how inflation works but I suppose it's par for the course when talking to a cryptobro
  Have a nice day
  
  You do the same. Have a wonderful day.
  
  It instead gets inflated by crypto exchanges which have no regulations and only exist to make a quick buck.
  
  The big difference, though, is that if a crypto exchange says that there's more crypto than exists, they have to make good on that promise. Or they, you know, go bankrupt because they don't actually have the money they say they have. Where would they government? That's not the case. There are only 21 million Bitcoin available. If a crypto exchange tries to make it sound like there are more than that, then people will pull their money off of that exchange and then exchange will go bankrupt because they can't produce the money.Also, real crypto people don't rely on centralized exchanges anyway. They either trade peer to peer or use decentralized exchanges that can't be manipulated like that.
  
  The obvious one is buying drugs. I don't feel like arguing the morality of doing that but anonymous money is definitely useful for that.
  
  I’ve bought drugs online and in person so don’t worry about judgement. Drugs are fun.
  
  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
  
  Well, that might be the only form of payment they take, and so you’ve got to use it I suppose. But the anonymous part really isn’t a huge factor here.
  I would be a little cautious of buying “non traditional” medication from someone who doesn’t want a paper trail.
  Unless you mean drugs, and then yes a paper trail is bad haha.
  
  Haha no drugs in that article at least. I can't find it but I think it was either for diabetes or asthma
  
  In most countries it's illegal to purchase or sell non-OTC medicine without a doctors note (buyer) and license (seller). Even if government doesn't care, I'm sure that big pharma would like to keep their profit margins.
  
  My preferred lemmy instance is funded with xmr.
  
  I like it as a way to donate to creators without revealing my identity. It comes close to handing over cash.
  You could also use it to pay for a VPN, but since the VPN provider sees your original IP address anyways, I don’t think that’s useful.
  
  Another use I can think of is paying for a domain and registering it with fake info. Registrars require pretty sensitive information, and apparently can check if it is real by comparing it to the info tied to a card used to pay, which crypto eliminates.
  Wish there were more XMR-accepting registrars though.
  
  One time phone numbers are another good thing, to avoid the ever increasing tracking we are all exposed to.
  
  Love it for donations. Monero specifically is also super fast: open wallet, scan QR, enter amount, hit send. Easily done in 30s or less.
  It's also good for VPNs, because now the VPN provider needs to figure out who owns the IP, rather then looking up the clear name in the payment info. Doesn't make you anonymous, but reduces risk of data brokers buying your personal info.
- Omg we're cryptocurrency twins. I hold exactly these two for the same reasons
  
  Hold? Or use?
  
  Mostly holding Nano, used Monero quite often - should probably spend some Nano at one point... But vendors accepting it here are rare
  
  I only use Monero, but still, it's a very good one.
- 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.
  
  There's no way to audit that.
- What about ETH? It also doesn't use electricity.
- Then you like Bitcoin too, since it pegs them.
  
  No, because I’m not a trader. It’s not all about the exchange rate for me, but about the utility of the coin.
  Most coins exist because other coins exist. Nano and Monero not necessarily.
  
  BitCoin was the progenitor of those projects and rapidly gained value after strong usage (aka utility) and the ensuing scarcity. So you like BTC?
  
  No, because one transaction uses as much energy as a normal household in a year. Or something like that.
  
  Right, so fork it and make BTC Lite.

674 comments