1600
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
1600 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
70995 readers
2987 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Right, his talk about how he's not very good at computers is pretty funny. I don't understand the crypto hate on Lemmy. Although I guess I don't understand a lot of why things are hated here. I guess crypto is too close to capitalism maybe? Freedom is frowned upon here.
Crypto is hated because it’s an MLM for terminally online people.
It gains value because people want it and people want it because it gains value is both a perfect description of cryptocurrency and scams.
Or gold, or any other precious metal, or any other currency really for that matter….
Tangible items can have utility in the real world, where cryptocurrencies can never be anything more than numbers on a display.
Gold can be used in electronics, and I get that people are mad that currencies are just something we all mutually agree have value, but generally speaking powerful governments back those up. Cryptocurrency is backed up by people promising it’s totally gonna be a real currency any second now. Please ignore that crypto can wildly fluctuate in value which generally a horrible thing for a currency to do.
Haven’t multiple governments accepted it as real currency at this point? The arguments are valid, but fall flat when you actually look into each.
Hell diamonds are valuable because of artificial scarcity, so that’s a wrench in every precious metal argument….
Yeah, El Salvador, people from there told me quite recently that it's not at all what the government propaganda is trying to sell. Nobody uses Bitcoin and it is only accepted by a few state institutions. As for Venezuela, we had Petros for a while, now the shitcoin has been completely phased out and discontinued since nobody but a few oligarch used it to launder money.
The only two countries that accept bitcoin as a legal tender are noted powerhouses El Salvador and the Central African Republic… not exactly world leaders.
And crypto is more stable than some governments' real currency. It's been a life saver for some people.
It's also a lot faster for transactions than normal banking when sending money to people in other countries.
It's still in the early days... like email in the late 80s / early 90s. It should get better, but there's so much crap and scams out there right now. It's still very much the wild west. It's like Wall Street on acid.
EDIT: people downvote but don't say what was wrong. Awesome.
They downvote the truth and/or facts when they are contrary to the hive mind.
The circlejerking and hive mind on Lemmy is shockingly worse than Reddit somehow. Not what I ever expected.
Gold is actually used as a critical component in the creation of computers and other vitally important industries.
Okay, go buy some of Rudy Giuliani's gold then. Enjoy.
This describes pretty much all moneys.
Cryptocurrencies have a lot of problems, but being a medium of exchange without intrinsic value is not one of them.
People generally don’t trade currencies as commodities or treat them as investments. When the same people promising crypto is totally a currency actually start treating it like a stable currency to exchange for goods and services and not an investment or commodity to be traded, I might revisit it. For now, the evangelists refuse to walk the walk.
A metric shit ton of people use currencies as investments. Forex trading is pretty big and been around a long time.
I said generally. Your parents who get paid in local currency for their job are not trading in foreign currencies. The fact that rich people can find ways to squeeze more money out of just about anything isn’t a win for cryptocurrencies.
The main test is to give cryptocurrency to my grandparents and they should be able to figure that out and do their grocery shopping. I pity the people having to explain how to use cryptocurrency to my grandparents at the cash register.
You have obviously have not heard of forex and the vast quantity of money that flows through it on a daily basis if you think currencies are not traded as commodities, nor have you heard of places like Argentina or Turkey apparently if you don't know currencies are treated as investments.
There are many many scams in cryptoworld but there is no need to throw out the baby with the bath water as it were. Crypto can and is being used as valid alternative to fractional reserve issued currency; the thriving and resilient darknet proves it so.
I appreciate and applaud anything that can even attempt to separate state and money. That will imho be the best thing for humanity since the separation of state and religion.
If crypto had pivoted to freedom and prioritized mass-adoption, it would have been great. Instead, almost everyone who invested got more people to buy in, dumped it, and got their payday. So yes, very much like capitalism.
Shitcoins yes, bitcoin no. If you fell for Craig Wright's scams you'd fall for any other kind of scam also.
the idea of crypto on its not bad on its own, its just there are a lot of bad actors agressively trying to prop up the value of some arbitrary crypto without actually selling a good or service in order to make a quick buck.
at least teams like the one behind Axie Infinity offered a product/service. Most don't, which is the problem.
if your marketing essentially has to relate to other people buying into buying it, then theres a big problem.
Because it went from being a novel decentralized payment method, into a speculative asset, and finally a Wall Street commodity.
Yes, I know there are projects where that core ethos is still relatively intact, but those aren't what come to mind whenever people publicly discusses "crypto".
I dislike crypto for the grift but also that people had repackaged it as a form of DRM in NFT's, it became commercialisation in the extreme promoting materialism.
Also Cryptos relation to libertarianism makes it very off putting.
If you were not living in a powerful first world country, you would like it a hell of a lot more. It is such a luxury to not have to constantly be worried about your currency collapsing. In places like Turkiye, crypto is massively popular because their currency is constantly devaluing. There are many countries like this that many Americans and Europeans seem to forget even exist.
It probably won't be too long until even the spoiled nations will want to be able to hold value somewhere that isn't free falling as well. The US is now paying more to service their debt than they are to the military. Not everyone can afford to hold their wealth in real estate and successful businesses.
Please get fucked on assuming where i live and inturn my life style.
If capitalism died we wouldn't have first world countries feeding on third world countries. Crypto won't help with this issue, you will still have american companies drilling oil out of third world countries paying workers fuck all, sweat shops will still need to be somewhere too and the capitalist would prefer it away from they're first world country. If anything crypto will only shield the exploiters but at least the libertarian can be happy whilst getting fucked by daddy bazos.
Read my comment again, you entirely missed the point. This has nothing to do with anything you pointed out. I guarantee you don't live In a poor country because there isn't a chance that you would have no idea how much they are benefiting from bitcoin. I'm sorry you're so offended, but you were your ignorance so prominently that it isn't hard to see at all. I'm also in the 1st world, but I desire to understand the whole picture enough to be able to tell. Use your anger over something you know nothing about as a guide of where to educate yourself.
I saw the point you where trying to make, diminishing my knowledge in the matter due to your presumption of my privileges.
Then railroading off with how its good as poor countries are forced to invest in these schemes.
Do you know much of rune scape gold farming? Gold farming in rune scape was very profitable. Westerners would pay slave wages to poor countries to play and farm in run scape working 60 hours, this was eventually broken up which also didn't lead to a good outcome as a large community lost the financial structure they depended, essentially chewing up and spitting out the disadvantaged.
Similar instances have popped up since crypto where again it has created a work force built on shaky ground which doesn't just exploit but creates a dependency on something liable to fail.
So again no crypto will not fix third world problems as it allows for massive exploitation.
Oh my. Hold your horses buddy. Nobody is forcing poor people to buy bitcoin. People are just faced with a choice, they can hold their value in fiat currencies that corrupt governments are printing like crazy, or they hold their value in a decentralized currency that nobody has control over and nobody can print on a whim. Just because you feel like you missed out on a good investment and so you are bitter towards an entire growing industry doesn't matter at all to people who are using it to escape corruption.
It really isn't nearly as complex or evil as you think it is. It really is just a way for people who have repeatedly been screwed over by corrupt politicians to escape corruption. It's just a matter of time until more and more people around you realize the same, and eventually you will join in, albeit a bit late due to your ignorant bitterness. You do yourself no favors by being against something simply because you don't take the time to understand it.
like nobody is forcing the poor to drink dirty water or go without food..
you make a lot of assumptions. next you'll be calling me a basement dweller.
capitalism isn't evil, guns aren't evil, physical currencies aren't evil, they are instead an easily manipulated vehicle that intern can be used for evil. crypto has proven itself with the sheer amount of scams to be easily manipulated. i don't see crypto as complex, i have followed it since 2013 and have a good understanding of encryption and decentralized systems as well as economics.
the main reason i don't like or see use for crypto is that i am a socialist, crypto goes against core socialist economic values. it also pollutes as the oil cost is high, it promotes commercialization, its abusive to human psychology with fomo, it feeds into libertarianism.
Poor people all over the world are less poor because they have used bitcoin to escape predatory devaluing fiat currencies. Go check out much of Africa, much of South America, Turkey, Georgia, and Southeast Asia. There are literally people eating better food and drinking cleaner water thanks to the fact that they can maintain their hard-earned value with bitcoin.
Nobody said capitalism is bad. Nobody said guns are bad, I have no idea why you would feel the need to conflate issues. I get that you can read headlines, but dig a bit deeper, and you will actually be able to argue from thought-out stances. The crypto oil thing was a scare tactic that got thoroughly disproven many years ago. Mining is rapidly ushering in the transition to renewable energy sources. It is also preventing waste of energy that would just dissipate.
The information is out there. It's just up to yourself to put in the work to educate yourself. I don't mean run around trying to find anything that will agree with your original hunches or whatever to try to guard your ego. I mean, look at it with fresh eyes and be willing to expand your view after critically analyzing the situation without bias. It is actually a good thing to be capable of arguing from both sides so that you are able to honestly weigh the situation. Right now you are just spewing old headlines that you once saw and not even attempting to make a coherent argument.
It will only help you to educate yourself. It's not nearly as daunting as it seems. The next step is to quit trying to defend a stance that you don't understand and to spend some time researching and asking questions. If you had understood what bitcoin was in 2013, then you would be in a much different situation than you are in right now.
Speaking about guns, capitalism and currency were to give examples, and thus context. And if you can show me evidence that crypto has improved so many live in impoverished counties, maybe a crypto GDP study I would love to see it.
I speak of gas prices as I had mined bitcoin and monero and know for a fact that my GPU was 100%, my electricity bill went up. and the crypto miner I repaired PC components for would have a repaste job every few months.
Bitcoin Brought Electricity to Countries in the Global South
Cryptocurrency Adoption in Developing Countries
Bitcoin Spurs Major Renewable Projects From Ocean Thermal To Hydro
BTPI will research relationship between Bitcoin and financial freedom
A great way to really understand just how much Bitcoin and maybe some stablecoins are impacting the lives of people in poorer nations is to just go and talk to people. Spend a few weeks in Tbilisi or similar places and just walk around and talk to average people. Bitcoin is so popular amongst the average people there that many random little shops are even selling socks or Tshirts with the Bitcoin icon on them. So many lives have been saved, and the people there genuinely love Bitcoin.
There is a huge difference between crypto and Bitcoin. There are many shitcoins that try to pretend to be the next Bitcoin or whatever, but literally 99.9% of them are absolute garbage. Luckily, they are drying up and blowing away. For people who this stuff really matters for, they are able and willing to look deep enough to see the benefits of Bitcoin and are much less likely to fall into the BS traps of CyberCoin or whatever.
It is often the uneducated outsider that hasn't lived the horrendous harm of horrible government currencies that are so vehemently opposed to Bitcoin. It just screams privilege, like when some spoiled trust fund kid gets mad at homeless people because they won't just go home. When people are struggling to not drown and they find a life raft, they simply don't care if people in yachts tell them it looks tacky.
If you genuinely want to give this a fair shake, then Google things like "bitcoin encourages renewable energy after:2023" or "Bitcoin adoption in poor countries after:2022". Get recent information and be open to having your mind changed. Bitcoin threatens the imbalance of power, and this is why there is a push to get people in powerful countries to not think deeply about how much it is helping the less fortunate right now. It's just a matter of time though. Knowledge naturally spreads.
I hate it in part because its adherents seem intent to relearn all the mistakes of the free banking era and constantly evangelize long-debunked economic theories. It’s like the goldbuggism of libertarian cranks of yore.
Also, for Bitcoin specifically, the extra demand for electricity raises rates for nearby residents. It’s essentially a transfer of wealth from ratepayers. A lot of them are in Texas and if you think Texas has “excess capacity,” then explain why they literally pay bitcoin miners an absurd amount not to mine when there’s a cold snap or heat wave.
I could go on about fraud and money laundering but I think being dumb as shit and raising electricity bills is plenty reason to hate it.