• 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.
  • @takeda@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    12610 months ago

    If after 16 years you still have to be asked if you believe in crypto, then chances are that it is a scam.

  • @slaacaa@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    309
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    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 a lot like a Ponzi scheme

  • maegul (he/they)
    link
    fedilink
    English
    476
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero. I’m thinking here also of his rant not long ago on social.kernel.org (a kernel devs microblog instance) that was essentially a pretty good anti-anti-leftism tirade in true Torvalds fashion.

    EDIT:

    Torvalds’s anti-anti-left post (I was curious to read it again):

    I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.

    Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.

    I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?

    I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.

    And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.

    • @Ledivin@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      232
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero.

      It’s just that almost everyone else that could do it ended up being fucking ghouls of people.

      Torvalds can be… brusque, sure. But he doesn’t support child labor, he doesn’t cheat on his wife, and he isn’t some crazy cult leader waging a war against workers’ rights.

            • @Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              110 months ago

              They’re the cheapest to aquire, put hotels on, and they’re right at the start of the board. If you overshoot go, you’re PAYING $250 instead of recieving $200 if you land on baltic. And you, as the owner of the brown properties would either get $250 or $450 everytime.

              All for just $610 to buy both, and upgrade them both to hotels.

              • Kushan
                link
                fedilink
                English
                110 months ago

                Statistically, the best properties to have are the ones just after jail. Everyone who passes go still has to pass them, while those who get sent to jail also have I pass them. The organge properties are the best, because the average dice roll is 7 and from jail that lands you right on them.

        • @Coasting0942@reddthat.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          -3010 months ago

          He’ll live long enough to end up on the wrong side of the polygamy rights fight. But I’d like to be surprised.

          • @thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            4310 months ago

            I imagine he will be an old and gray man and someone will ask him his opinion and it will probably be like

            What? Are you fucking with me? I didn’t give a shit what people did behind closed doors 40 years ago, what fuckin made you think I would care now? Are you fucking mental? Did your daddy not love you enough? Get the fuck out of here, your making my blood pressure spike…

          • @VerticaGG@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            link
            fedilink
            English
            1010 months ago

            Polygamy: Mormons, etc. generally opposes womens rights.

            Polyamory: Ideally places noone above another, elevates everyone to have the healthy connections such that noone is a “3rd wheel” or more disposable. Less about “polycules” recruiting new members, and more about individuals pairing with new partners, and existing partners (initially at least) gaining a metaphor. Mileage may vary and the point is everyone’s needs are a bit different and shouldnt feel pressured to fit neatly into a nuclear box.

            Just fyi.

          • @huginn@feddit.it
            link
            fedilink
            English
            1010 months ago

            Polyamory isn’t cheating though.

            Cheating is, by definition, sex with another person against your partner’s will.

            • @Coasting0942@reddthat.com
              link
              fedilink
              English
              0
              edit-2
              10 months ago

              Five guys and five gals will be arguing they have a right to share DNA amongst each other and make a single kid, giving them all parental rights. Religious right will have their scheduled stroke. Most of the population won’t care. Internet trolls will be screaming how it’s a United Nations plan to depopulate the planet.

              Or basically any legal recognition for polygamy.

              • @Syrc@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                110 months ago

                Five guys and five gals will be arguing they have a right to share DNA amongst each other and make a single kid

                …Is that even possible? I thought humans could only have exactly two parents biologically? If I didn’t misunderstand, I’m legit curious about this.

                • @Coasting0942@reddthat.com
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  010 months ago

                  We’ve already reached two lesbians with their combined dna being carried by a surrogate (which has extra dna effects as the carrier). With further dna advancements it should be possible to mix up multiple parents dna.

      • @jj4211@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        11810 months ago

        Another interesting thing to consider.

        To be clear, he is rich. But he’s not crazy crazy rich, like nowhere near billionaire status.

        With that in mind, his kernel is a key component of RedHat’s, SuSE’s and Canonical whole business, with at least two of those being multi billion dollar businesses.

        His kernel is a key component of Android phones, which represent over 50 billion a year in hardware spend, and a bunch of software money on top of that.

        His kernel is foundational to most hosting/cloud services with just mind blowing billions of revenue quarterly.

        It’s used in almost every embedded device on the planet, networking gear, set top boxes, thermostats, televisions, just nearly everything.

        People with a fraction of that sort of relevance are billionaires several times over. A number of billionaires owe much of their success to him. Yet he is not among their numbers.

        Now there’s more to things than just a kernel to be sure, but across the hundreds of billions of dollars made while running Linux, there was probably plenty of room for him to carve out a few billion for himself were he that sort of person, but he cares about the work more than gaming the dollars. I have a great deal of respect for that.

        Means that while he may not always be right, but I at least believe his assessments are sincere and not trying to drive some grift or cover some insecurity about being left behind.

        • @sudo@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          English
          41
          edit-2
          10 months ago

          git is a way more important contribution to the world that the linux kernel IMO. Its basically the assembly line of almost all modern software production. And Linus actually wrote most of the initial code for it. With Linux he organized the project but was almost immediately not a major contributor. He developed git in the process of maintaining the linux repo.

          • Zekas
            link
            fedilink
            English
            18
            edit-2
            10 months ago

            Can’t two things both be important in different ways? Why must we always relativise?

          • @RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            6010 months ago

            I disagree. Git is great but we’d have done fine with Subversion or whatever. Could you imagine the whole internet running on Windows Server though? The thought alone makes my skin crawl.

            • @emptiestplace@lemmy.ml
              link
              fedilink
              English
              -1310 months ago

              You probably need to learn a bit more about VCS fundamentals if you think Subversion would’ve been fine.

              • Kushan
                link
                fedilink
                English
                1610 months ago

                I’m old enough to remember the SVN days (he’ll, even the CVS and…dare I say it… source safe days).

                Git is fantastic. It’s pretty universally uses because it’s the best dvcs out there and it’s free. It wipes the pants with the likes of mercurial.

                In certain industries (such as gaming) there’s still a strong hold by perforce but we can ignore that as it’s proprietary and a bit specialised.

                Anyway, as great as git is for making things easier and cleaner when dealing with distributed development, it by no means makes something impossible “possible” - it just makes it a hell of a lot easier.

                The Linux kernel on the other hand enabled a lot of impossible things. Remember back in the day there wasn’t anything free and open source in the operating system world, it was all proprietary and licensed. If you wanted to create your own operating system, you basically had no option but to spend a fortune either writing your own kernel or licensing someone else’s (and the licensing part means you cannot distribute it for free).

                The fact that the FSF has always wanted to write their own OS and never been able to achieve it without the Linux Kernel, in spite of them essentially writing “everything else” that makes up an operating system, shows just how nontrivial this is.

                • @iopq@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  110 months ago

                  Pijul and similar patch-based systems are a lot better. They match my understanding of independent changes combining. git does the stupidest thing and just compares states - which means it has less information to automatically merge correctly

                • @emptiestplace@lemmy.ml
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  310 months ago

                  Do you think the existence of the Linux kernel might’ve had an effect on how Hurd was prioritized? Also, FreeBSD wasn’t too far behind, chronologically.

                  I’m not saying Linux is unimportant (or even less important), but I think some folks here are pretty clueless about the significance of widespread DVCS adoption.

              • @RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                link
                fedilink
                English
                310 months ago

                Well, I don’t know what you mean, so possibly? I just briefly used SVN in a small team for about half a year and would never claim to be an expert. It’s alive and kicking though, so regardless what you say I don’t believe it’s a complete clusterfuck and a world without git would be doomed.

                • @emptiestplace@lemmy.ml
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  5
                  edit-2
                  10 months ago

                  Torvalds didn’t create git because he was passionate about version control systems, he created it because the existing solutions were not adequate.

                  Git is a distributed version control system (DVCS) that facilitated a fundamental shift in how people collaborate on software projects in general. So, comparing it to SVN and downplaying the significance of Git suggests you’ve kind of missed the point.

                  Edit: with you on the other thing though - fuck Windows.

              • @Ledivin@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                2
                edit-2
                10 months ago

                lol. I’m old enough to have worked with SVN (and many others) as part of my day job, and I promise you that 99% of git users use literally the same exact workflow as they did/would have under any other VCS. Git’s fine, but it’s neither revolutionary nor important from a user’s perspective.

            • @iopq@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              210 months ago

              Free software would be just using freebsd or whatever, it wouldn’t be that different

          • @iopq@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            -110 months ago

            git is why we can’t have nice things

            There’s many better VCS, but everyone just goes on GitHub and uses git.

            I dread ever having to touch it. The CLI is unintuitive, the snapshot system is confusing, and may God have mercy on your soul if you mix merging and rebasing

        • @yogurtwrong@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          1010 months ago

          Well, I think Linus Torvalds is one of the rare rich people who actually “deserves” being rich.

          I think the main motive behind leftism should be stopping 8 people from owning the 50% of the world’s wealth, not to distribute Linus Torvalds’ 50 million dollars which a well deserved amount of wealth for someone who created the OS which runs the modern world.

          Besides, what Linus owns is not even a droplet compared to billionaires like Bezos, Musk or Bill Gates

          • @jj4211@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            610 months ago

            I think it’s a shining example of the ‘right’ sort of rich. Despite a significance that overwhelmingly exceeds usual billionaire level, he’s not nearly so ‘rich’ and yet he has enough to just not worry about money, but he has earned it.

            • @nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
              link
              fedilink
              English
              210 months ago

              It’s a contribution thing. He contributed enough to society to deserve to not worry about money for the rest of his life. It’s rare though since we have a bunch of billionaires who skim the rewards from huge swaths of the population who also have contributed their part.

              The financialization of retirement is a huge part of the problem for the middle class (or what’s left of it, upper-lower-class is probably more accurate). We have to invest in these assholes in order to save for retirement. The harder workers in services, laborers, and fields don’t even get that.

      • maegul (he/they)
        link
        fedilink
        English
        6410 months ago

        Yea. It’s almost like caring about your craft and being motivated chiefly to just make good things and fix things … aren’t terrible character traits?!?

      • @IronKrill@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        110 months ago

        Or we could just… not glorify people we barely know and invariably be disappointed when it comes out they’re flawed some way or another.

    • Lad
      link
      fedilink
      English
      810 months ago

      Chaddiest Chad to ever Chad

    • @bulwark@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      2910 months ago

      I wonder what direction the Linux kernel will go once he’s gone. Obviously it will continue to go on and Torvalds should get a statue somewhere if he doesn’t already have one.

      • maegul (he/they)
        link
        fedilink
        English
        1810 months ago

        I don’t follow thinigs closely at all, but I’m under the impression he’s already starting to kinda take his hands off of the wheel? If so, maybe that picture is emerging now, at least behind the scenes.

        • Rustmilian
          link
          fedilink
          English
          28
          edit-2
          10 months ago

          Linus hasn’t written kernel code in years at this point, however he still is the final gate keeper of what gets merged and an active code reviewer, he manages the entire direction of the project.

          As of what will happen when Linus passes, that’s already been decided. The position of projects leader will go to his most trusted project co-maintainer, which we have a good idea of who that is.

            • Rustmilian
              link
              fedilink
              English
              31
              edit-2
              10 months ago

              There are a few candidates, the most prominent are probably :

              • Greg Kroah-Hartman: Played a pivotal role in stabilizing the memory management subsystem and enhancing block I/O performance, both critical areas for system stability and performance.
              • Sage Sharp (formally Sarah Sharp) : Instrumental in the development and maintenance of the networking subsystem and the ARM architecture code, ensuring compatibility and efficient networking for various ARM-based devices.
              • Git Junio Hamano: Maintainer of Git, the version control system that underpins Linux development. His leadership in maintaining Git ensures smooth collaboration and efficient code management for the vast kernel developer community.

              Greg Kroah-Hartman is speculated to be the most likely candidate, but it also depends on a few factors. Like, if Linus dies suddenly vs dying slowly or just stepping down, there’d be a big difference in selection process.

              Ofc, things may change in the future and there’s many other talented developers who can be considered. Nothing is set in stone.

              • @Andrenikous@lemm.ee
                link
                fedilink
                English
                310 months ago

                Thanks for the details. With things heading more and more towards arm architecture I’m surprised Sarah Sharp isn’t the leading candidate. But this is all new to me so what do I know lol

                • Rustmilian
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  3
                  edit-2
                  10 months ago

                  It’s not like they couldn’t be chosen, they have some serious stake in it. Consider their achievements and read the following :

                  Here are some key qualities a potential successor should possess :

                  • Deep understanding of the Linux kernel: Intimate knowledge of the kernel’s codebase, architecture, and development process is essential.
                  • Proven leadership skills: The ability to effectively guide a large team of developers with diverse technical backgrounds and priorities.
                  • Strong communication and collaboration: Excellent communication skills to bridge the gap between developers, and foster a collaborative development environment.
                  • Technical merit and reputation: A well-established reputation within the Linux community for technical contributions and code quality.
                  • Vision for the future: A clear vision for the future direction of the kernel, ensuring it remains relevant and innovative.

                  I’d say they meet most if not all of them. All of the potential candidate’s are amazingly talented and determined individuals.

          • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin
            link
            fedilink
            English
            310 months ago

            He did rule that Rust can be included in the kernel code a bit ago, but IIRC that’s the last big thing he did with Linux as of late.

    • Possibly linux
      link
      fedilink
      English
      -110
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      Its good to see some antileftism once in a while. We need some other perspectives. I didn’t think we’d get it from Linus but here we are.

    • @abbadon420@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      110 months ago

      For a rant, that made complete sense. It missed all of the unhinged outcries, alternative facts and illogical reasoning we’ve come to expect of modern day rants.

  • @Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    157
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    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.

    • @cmbabul@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      85
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      I for one would love for Linus, probably Woz, and a third party yet to be decided(this would be Aaron Schwartz in a better world) to be given free reign to gut the whole industry and rebuild it into something isn’t wholly based on ad revenue and grift

      Edit: a bunch of good suggestions of people I need to read about for position three. If anyone can think of a digital equivalent to Marshall McLuhan I think we desperately needs input of that sort

      • @AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        1510 months ago

        Old Linus with Woz and Schwartz is a dream.

        I understand why Linus wanted to clean up his act with people he works with. That is a good and admirable thing to do. I wish he would have kept his smoke for companies though.

      • mox
        link
        fedilink
        English
        910 months ago

        I wonder if those three would get along. Collaborative chemistry can be an elusive thing, even if the individuals’ principles are mostly aligned.

        Either way, I’ll bet it would be interesting.

        • @cmbabul@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          610 months ago

          It’s certainly possible they wouldn’t get along, I feel like their shared enthusiasm for tech, plus the fact that Woz can get along with even the largest and stinkiest of assholes would help

          • mox
            link
            fedilink
            English
            610 months ago

            I’ve never met Woz, but yes, I’ve long had the impression that his humility and sincerity reach depths seldom seen in humans, let alone in tech. Sadly, I also suspect these traits have made him easy to take advantage of in the past.

            • @cmbabul@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              410 months ago

              You are very correct, and even sadder the state of tech today is very much a result of the success of his primary exploiter

      • @ArbiterXero@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        1210 months ago

        Richard stallman is the only answer.

        I really hate everything he says, but so far on a lot enough timescale he has been fucking right about everything

        • @very_well_lost@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          3010 months ago

          I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Stallman, is in fact, GNU/Stallman, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Stallman. Stallman is not a man unto himself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

          • dohpaz42
            link
            fedilink
            English
            610 months ago

            I lack the creativity, but someone please come up with a recursive acronym for Stallman.

            • @micka190@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              410 months ago

              All you need to do is make the S stand for “Stallman”, and you’ll get a stack overflow before ever reaching the other letters (so you don’t need to think of a value for them).

        • @ArbiterXero@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          -210 months ago

          The only possible correct answer

          No matter what crazy shit he says, give it a few years and he will be right . And I really hate that

  • @erwan@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    14510 months ago

    Crypto means cryptography, stop using it to talk about cryptocurrency.

  • @YtA4QCam2A9j7EfTgHrH@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    18710 months ago

    I fucking hate that the crypto currency ghouls have captured the word “crypto”. When I first read this I was wondering why in the fuck would Linus not like cryptography. My brain is old and crypto will always mean cryptography.

    • @grrgyle@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      4710 months ago

      We just got to wait it out. Gods willing, it’ll come back to meaning cryptography again.

      • @Syrc@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        710 months ago

        Still waiting for the Swastika/Manji to be de-nazified. Probably not gonna see it in my lifetime, unfortunately.

        • @YtA4QCam2A9j7EfTgHrH@infosec.pub
          link
          fedilink
          English
          4
          edit-2
          10 months ago

          Behind the Bastards had a great few episodes about how a group of indigenous Americans chose to give up their sacred symbol that looked like a swastika because of the Nazis. Pretty sad but i guess fascists ruin everything.

    • @RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      10
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      Absolutely. That’s why I always write “crypto-tokens” instead. It’s a bit longer and more annoying to write but I feel we owe it to the respectable field of cryptography.

    • @BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      310 months ago

      I still haven’t warmed up to using it for currency either, for me it’s a command on Cisco’s IOS. Which, BTW, I have to make clear is made by Cisco and make my phone write with a capital i.

      I understand that the world evolves, and that languages do as well … but I do have a problem with the speed which it evolves with, as well as it seems like the ignorant use of existing terminologies, is the main evolutionary factor these days.

  • @MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    4210 months ago

    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.

  • Lvxferre
    link
    fedilink
    English
    8410 months ago

    The focus of what Torvalds said is the concept of tech singularity. TL;DR “nice fiction, it doesn’t make sense in a reality of finite resources”. I’ll move past that since most of the discussion is around cryptocurrencies.

    Now, copypasting what he says about cryptocurrencies:

    For the record, I also don’t believe in crypto currencies (except as a great vehicle for scams - they have certainly worked very well for the “spread the word to find the next sucker holding the bag” model of Ponzi schemes). Nor do I believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, or the Easter bunny.

    For those who understood this excerpt as “Tarvalds thinks that cryptocurrencies dant ezizt lol lmao”: do everyone a favour and go back to Reddit with your blatant lack of reading comprehension. When he says that he doesn’t believe in them, he’s saying that he does not see them as a viable alternative to traditional currency. (He does not say why, at least not in that message.)

    And for those eager to babble “ackshyually ponzi schemes work different lol lmao”: you’re bloody missing the point. He’s highlighting that a large part of the value associated with cryptocurrencies is speculation, not its actual usage. Even cryptocurrency enthusiasts acknowledge this.

    I apologise to the others - who don’t fit either category of trashy people I mentioned above - for the tone. Read the comments in this very thread and you’ll likely notice why of the tone.

  • Screemu
    link
    fedilink
    English
    2810 months ago

    Linus is already a multimillionaire, he doesn’t need a pump and dump.