- 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.
I mean yeah… Linus may not like it but people will still build on top of Ethereum & others
What if… crypto currency has been a psyop all along. Ultimately eliminating physical currency and government having full blown control of digital currency.
I think there was a potential future where cryptocurrency could’ve actually been useful, but it was ruined by scammers, rug pullers, and of course, speculators.
I’ll still hold a little bit of Monero, since it holds the most potential for being a real currency in my opinion. But otherwise, I fully agree with the sentiment.
Why didn’t you tell me this eight years ago, John Linux?!
Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, does not believe in cryptocurrencies, calling them a vehicle for scams and a Ponzi scheme.
To be fair, that’s because Crypto is a vehicle for scams, and a Ponzi scheme.
How are you asking Linus about crypto and not about the blockchain.
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.
So… he’s into CBDCs, I assume? Yeah, no thanks!
Crypto is a textbook example of why we as a society can’t have nice things. To many people are selfish and self serving, and not enough people are willing to ostracize those types of people from society for such actions.
Equivocating cryptocurrency, block chain tech, and bitcoin is disingenuous to say none of that exists like fairies or Santa Claus. It exists just as much as PGP or AES or the deficit does. It’s dumb to think any of that is going to launch you to extreme wealth or solve everyone’s problems, but it is a good way to try to prevent governments from using that currency issuance power in ways their citizens would prefer they did not.
Even if you don’t agree with the politics it is a pretty interesting technology for consensus building between potentially adverse participants. Someone with experience maintaining open source repos could at least appreciate that aspect.
Most of bad rep is generated by insufferable hype train enthusiasts we started to call cryptobros and big tech CEOs trying to capitalize on putting this edgy technology everywhere, just like with LLMs right now. Many people who escape shit states in recent years legitly use cryptocurrencies to bring their unconvertable money abroad and that’s more reliable than a suitcase of precious metal bars, lol. This tech is no Jesus or Devil, it just needs to mature and overcome the initial fascination, with most bad realizations and schemes dying off. In ten years this discourse would be very different.
Equivocating cryptocurrency, block chain tech, and bitcoin is disingenuous to say none of that exists like fairies or Santa Claus.
You know good and god damned well that’s not what he was saying.
I definitely made some assumptions, I’d probably do well to read a bit more and comment a bit less. No harm just down votes let me know there’s plenty more to learn
it is a good way to try to prevent governments from using that currency issuance power in ways their citizens would prefer they did not.
And instead it should be hedgefunds that have that power?
There is a need for currency and someone is going to have control over the value of that currency. At least with the government you can vote the bastards out.
I don’t think anything we’ve seen yet solves wealth inequality, but whether that becomes a property of a currency or not may change.
I agree voting is important for governance but what if citizens held that specific power by default instead of the government, and if the government wanted to use that power they would require asking for it? It’s the same people doing the voting but for a specific measure instead of a representative. I didn’t think we’re there yet but that being a possibility seems hopeful.
It already exists without crypto tokens and it’s called a referendum.
Different countries use it to different extents. The Swiss Country does a lot of it, for example.
But referendums are not always a good idea and are extremely prone to manipulation by the media and populism (see Brexit). Minorities are also underrepresented in referendums, which poses a real problem with these things.
Having an elected government with separation of power is definitely always better, than whatever DAOs are doing.
Nobody has to have control of the production of money, it is especially bad when corrupt people have the power to generate it into their pockets. I know it is hard to understand how generating money for one’s self is theft from everyone with money, but it is the case, you just have to try a bit harder to wrap your head around it.
Money needs to be backed by someone for it to hold value.
If there is no control of the production of money, then everyone can produce money, making it completely useless.
Yes, if everyone can produce as much of it as they want, then it would lose value. However, someone doesn’t need to back something for it to have value. The most common currency in all of history was seashells. Nobody backed the seashells. Gold has had value for a long time and still does. Nobody backs gold. The reason these things had/have value is for a number of reasons, but possibly the most important reason is what you said, that nobody can just produce as much of if as they want. This is also a fundamental reason why Bitcoin has been steadily increasing in value, nobody can produce as much of it as they want. This is a major flaw that is inherent in fiat currencies(usd, euro, lira…), they can be produced as much as somebody(governments, counterfeiters) wants.
This is very simplistic, there are other reasons that various things are good ways to hold value. Divisibility and transportability are two big ones, both which Bitcoin excels at.
In the United States you cannot vote for the people who issue currencies. The Federal Reserve are a bunch of privately owned banks.
Well, I guess big name figures have a right to be wrong. Surprising since he is the creator of such a foundational piece of open source software that he would not like another piece of open source software just seems a bit hypocritical in my opinion
inventor of sushi hates my “crumbly strawberry queso” idea? just seems a bit hypocritical imo
Maybe I’m thinking more Richard Stalman than Linus Torvalds. But if he made Linux to promote freedom from corporates, then it seems like he should like cryptocurrency because it’s open source as well and permits freedom from government inflation. Humanity has never had a money not controlled by governments, except for gold and silver, and those are not easily sent over the internet.
Being open source does not make it good by default.
The ledger being visible to every node makes it pretty bad. You can figure out the identity of users just by circumstantial evidence.
And just because it’s not controlled by the government doesn’t mean, there aren’t powerful corporate people inside that can and will enact control over the chain. Otherwise Ethereum classic wouldn’t exist and Jordan Belford or Peter Thiel wouldn’t be fans of crypto.
In that case, though, why should it matter if Linus Torvalds promotes it? Something is a money if it is generally accepted as payment; gold and silver have self-evident value to people, and governments can use violence to ensure the value of money, but celebrity endorsement is hardly a reason to accept something as money.
Exactly. In Linux, he is God. In the rest of the world, he’s just your average dude. It doesn’t matter what he thinks.
He (Linus Torvalds) made Linux as a hobby during his time in college/university to teach him about operating system design. Because it was the part of the operating system called the kernel that the GNU project didn’t have yet (more on this in a moment), it became very popular. Richard Stallman created the GNU project because he believed that every person should have the right to study and share the software that runs on their computer.
There is nothing specifically anti-corporate in either of their motivations.
he should like
Just because it’s open?
Being open source is a big deal.
What’s the point there? No one has to like something just because it is open.
Fair enough, that should be a point in its favor though, at the very least. Our entire banking system runs on closed source proprietary software that people cannot inspect for vulnerabilities on generally closed source operating systems that people cannot inspect for vulnerabilities.
Nice mind gymnastics you got going there.
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 awfully like a Ponzi scheme
Linus creates kernels. Nothing to do with cryptocurrency. Tech is tech, but I wouldn’t necessarily listen to him about other things than kernels and computers. For example, he doesn’t even believe in FOSS, and he openly supports Google because of Android, Chromebooks and ChromeOS using Linux.
Crypto means cryptography, stop using it to talk about cryptocurrency.
I think crypto does have its place in anonymous transfers and stuff like that but the current form of crypto isnt that. First of all it would need to be something stable and crypto is everything but stable.
