this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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  • 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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[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

Crypto currency, when in its infancy, had a halfway decent concept

The premise of Crypto as currency was "Lets make a currency that has a soft cap on gross volume, so nobody can ever print any more of it and its value will only rise over time."

Even halfway and in its infancy, it wasn't a decent concept because

  • It presumes continued increasing cash investment (which repeated crypto crashes illustrate isn't true)
  • It refuses to acknowledge the potential for Shitcoins

Here’s a controversial one, Elon Musk, for all of his flaws, isn’t an idiot.

He's a carnival barker with a penchant for talking billionaires out of their wallets. That takes a certain kind of cunning, but its also heavily predicated on circumstance and opportunity. Had Elon Musk been born on the other side of the South African color line, he wouldn't be a billionaire right now because Peter Thiel wouldn't have had anything to do with him. Neither would the US military or the Wall Street banks or the East Asian automotive industry.

He pump and dumped Dogecoin, by tweeting about it to bolster it

The Dogecoin pump worked entirely because of the soft cap on the original Bitcoin. It wasn't an Elon invention (Elon repeatedly failed to recreate Dogecoin magic with Shibecoin and Muskcoin and a few other shitcoins of note). Dogecoin surged as a precursor to the Stablecoin market, because you didn't need to wait half an hour for the transaction to clear. Once you had Doge, you could trade it as a proxy for BTC.

And this functionally became the "Central Bank printing unlimited money" solution to the problem BTC created when they objected to a central bank printing unlimited money.

The joke about crypto is that its an object lesson in why things like the gold standard and fixed currency rates don't work. All the natural inventions within the crypto market parallel what western financiers were doing a century ago, just with dumb cutesy nicknames and more graft.