- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
gitis 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.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.
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
That guy seems pretty rad.
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.
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.
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.
For the uninformed, who is that?
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.
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.
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.
When the Wild West was around Medicine was used as a scam too. Snake Oil salesmen aren’t very nice people. But that doesn’t mean medicine is a bad idea ya know?
I agree that there are a lot of snake oil sellers in the cryptographic currencies realm. But that world is basically the digital wild west at the moment to me. I too am waiting to see what happens.
The difference is that medicine, as a concept, is useful.
Is not currency, as a concept, useful? How about transfer of value over vast distances instantly? Is that not useful?
Well know you are just using circular logic. The thing is that cryptocurrencies aren’t currencies.
I hear what you’re saying. But USDC is absolutely a token on many different ledgers that represents a currency.
I’ve been deep in decentralized finance for years as an investor and fulltime software dev. I get the whole “hur hur Bitcoin is dum” but you’re really missing the forest focusing on a tree.
USDC is absolutely a token on many different ledgers that represents a currency.
No, it is a speculative investment. If it were a currency it would be something people were using to buy things, accepting for selling things, using to pay taxes and fines, using to invest in something else, etc.
It’s not a currency, it’s at best some kind of intermediate thing used to buy even more speculative “investments”.
Didn’t you repeat what I said? It’s a token on decentralized ledgers that represents a currency. Like a number in the database at your bank. No different than that.
You deposit your currency at a bank, it’s a number in a database. You earn interest on your investment.
Are you saying that is a different concept than usdc deposited into a lending market on a decentralized ledger and earning interest?
Also, usdc is accepted places. In fact Stripe is adding it as a payment method very soon. Would that make it a currency, or does it have to reach some level of acceptance? What about PayPal balance? Currency?
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
Is this going to be the most replied to post on the Fediverse? 635 in 2 days and still going strong.
Edit: since it’s now at 666 replies, please nobody make any more comments
The value of a crypto token is ostensibly related to the value of the apps which the blockchain supports. It’s meant to be both a form of compensation for participating in the network, and as currency for purchasing services from blockchain apps. That’s how it derives intrinsic value. So if there is social media which runs on a blockchain, then the hosts within that blockchain get tokens for participating, and eg, advertisements or subscriptions are purchased in tokens. This means those who manage those participant nodes can sell their tokens to those who want to buy blockchain services. As the cumulative value of these services grows, an entire crypto economy is established, and it becomes effectively another form of fiat which has a real exchange rate backed by some real economic activity.
This is how it’s supposed to work. The problem is that we just don’t have any compelling apps, and the initial speculation has all but ensured that this cannot happen organically because the market cap is already just so much bigger than any realistic medium term outlook for intrinsic value. Bitcoin’s blockchain would have to support some form application value which is bigger than the biggest companies in the world, and right now it basically has zero useful applications.
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.
We just got to wait it out. Gods willing, it’ll come back to meaning cryptography again.
I guess we should all get rid of our bitcoin that’s worth hundreds of times more than when we bought it, because an operating system kernel developer doesn’t like it.
Linus is awesome but he’s not a god, his opinion of things outside the Linux kernel is just the opinion of a guy. Stop worshipping him, he doesn’t even like it.
Linus is already a multimillionaire, he doesn’t need a pump and dump.
Crypto is just a waste of resources, similar to AI
POS does not consume resources.
This goes to show how low-effort the criticism campaigns are.
However… all cryptos have their health tied to bitcoin which is a large energy consumer. So the point is actually still very true (due to some other reason).deleted by creator
I’ve literally only made millions off of crypto. Of course this is the Internet and I don’t need to verify me making shit up, but I will continue to say so because otherwise my feelings will get hurt. If you uplemmy this comment I will send you one trillion Bitcoin, real!
Crypto means cryptography, stop using it to talk about cryptocurrency.
Crypto means hidden, stop using it to talk about cryptography.
Crypto currencies doesn’t mean “hidden currency”, it means currency based on cryptography.
They meant that choosing one possible definition and saying it’s what the word means is stupid. Words mean pretty much what everyone agrees they mean. Look at all the words that have basically flipped definitions since their inception. Just because the modern derivative of a word means something literally everyone understands but is slightly different than what it used to mean doesn’t mean the oldest answer is the correct one. Unwad your jock.
Yeah, that headline is very misleading. Crypto(graphy) is essential for the digital world to exist whereas the other stuff is a pyramid & money laundering scheme.
It’s not “misleading,” because the vast majority of people understand what the current colloquial use of crypto is.
A certain irony in a synonym for “secret” being a term everyone’s implicitly familiar with.
It’s useful for buying drugs online on the dark web so I for one like it
All the fentanyl you can snort.
Cryptocurrency is a currency based on cryptographic keys.
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.
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.
They got to him
Who is ‘they’?
Either you’re dumb or playing dumb. Either way, bad look.
