- 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.
Free software would be just using freebsd or whatever, it wouldn’t be that different
You probably need to learn a bit more about VCS fundamentals if you think Subversion would’ve been fine.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
he doesn’t cheat on his wife
he doesn’t cheat on his wife so far.
I remember this. That was a great day to be on the internet.
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.
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.
You might want to re-read that.
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.
Still waiting for the Swastika/Manji to be de-nazified. Probably not gonna see it in my lifetime, unfortunately.
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.
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
Fully agree. I think there exist both good and scammy-bubble types of blockchain and crypto. Crypto can be a scam, memecoin rugpull, ponzi scheme, …etc, but it can also be the peer-2-peer decentrilized self-custody borderless international currency of people away from governments manipulation, inflation, banks and middlemen, which is something that has its own advantages and negatives as we’ve seen it with criminals, tax evation and money laundering, but also used by people fleeing war zones after their banking come down and escaping trumbling government fiats. However, it also needs regulations and the protections of world governments to work but also claims to want governments and regulations off.
To clarify my position honestly, I think blockchain programming is here to stay but today 99% of it including BTC could be the scammy bubble type and does not represent or have most of the therotical advantages of the bitcoin’s original white paper which I listed above.
I agree. Every crypto except XMR seems to be only seen as an investment to make more money.
I mean not to mention the ridiculous amount of electricity it uses, and heat generated. but hey it’s low priority even though every year lately is the hottest in record.
For clarification. To my understanding, the older cryptographic currencies use an immense amount of power (Proof of Work). But newer models have solved that issue by switching to a Proof of Stake model instead.
It is a Ponzi scheme. Very clearly one. How that garbage is legal, I will never know. I could have gotten into crypto from the ground floor eons ago and made tons of money but I didn’t because I knew it was illegal and figured the whole thing was going to collapse as soon as governments found out about it. Imagine my shock when most legitimized the damn thing. Still wouldn’t bother even if I could go back and do it again knowing the brain dead, money-greedy idiots are going to legalize a literal Ponzi scheme because I have values and morals.
Yeah, it’s relatively easy to make good money in crypto if you understand investing. There are a lot of things that are illegal in regulated securities markets that are not yet illegal with crypto.
I intentionally don’t invest in crypto, because it doesn’t produce anything. Any money you make is just taken from another investor, usually because they don’t know what they’re doing. When you invest in a company, you make products and sell them to customers. Something is created and rarely are people cheated.
The people investing in crypto are intentionally cheating uninformed investors in a way that is not possible in regulated securities markets.
I actually had the same thing happen to me because I discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and dismissed it as crazy and that the governments would never let it exist. And then several years later heard about it again in a news article and was like, wait, the government hasn’t shut that down yet and started doing some reading and really understood
Alright, as a crypto entrepreneur myself, I’ll bite and try to break down exactly what the appeal of crypto is. But b4 I do I would appreciate some updoots since I have a new account. Anyway, crypto, it’s a way to do transactions anonymously. You know how when your wife frequently accesses your bank account to meticulously track every offbrand sex toy you get on temu (at least mine does, filing a divorce at the time of writing, just trying to keep custody of the kids even though they hate me) so you can feel the sensation of plastic child labor alone in your bedroom? But yeah I don’t really use crypto that much personally, too many scams.
Trust me, real crypto people hate those guys as much as you do.
If after 16 years you still have to be asked if you believe in crypto, then chances are that it is a scam.
Good point, I always wondered if there is a way the technology will evolve and somehow find a niche that’s unexpected. But you’re right, 16 years is a long time to be meandering.
It’s such a first-world thing to not understand all the good that crypto has done. There are countless lives that have been financially saved by having a safe place to hold wealth while their countries’ fiat collapsed. It’s just a short matter of time until many first world folks understand this as well.
Sounds like the same shit those rare metal guys are always yapping about but with extra scams…
For all the reasons that crypto is a scam, every “value” stock - stock which does not now, and never has any intention of ever paying dividends - is also a scam.
Behind a value stock is a profitable company. Behind crypto-tokens is a hilariously inefficient database with no application in real life.
Gamble away your money, I’ll take the stock - or “have fun staying poor” like crypto-token morons like to say.
Except, you know, the stock being tied to ownership in a company that sells real goods or services. Definitely problems with how stocks are traded, but they’re quite different from crypto.
Except, you know, the stock being tied to ownership in a company that sells real goods or services.
That’s the scam: without dividends, or at least the reasonable prospect of dividends, it is not tied to the company in any tangible way. Shareholders benefit only from speculation by other investors, and not from actual business operations.
Crypto means cryptography, stop using it to talk about cryptocurrency.
Is it not clear which definition of Crypto he’s using?
Linus coming out against cryptography seems so unrealistically silly to me that it’s not even worth considering.
The security of Linux 2000 will be based entirely on steganography, Linux founder announces
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.
So the equivalent of the population of the United States plus 40% are money-londerers. Because somewhere between five and seven percent of the world’s population uses cryptocurrency and that’s 400 million to 550 million people.
I doubt it
Increasing demographics might initially be attributed to a rise in the number of accounts and improvements in identification. In 2021, however, crypto adoption continued as companies like Tesla and Mastercard announced their interest in cryptocurrency. Consumers in Africa, Asia, and South America were most likely to be an owner of cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, in 2022.
That’s functionally the nut of it. People in countries that lack a traditional western banking sector but enjoy internet access can piggyback on the network of banks with crypto-interfaces. This is more a consequence of the unregulated wing of the financial sector than an raw utility of cryptocurrency itself.
If WellsFargo won’t ratify me as a client, but Coinbase will, I’m stuck dealing in bitcoin simply because I can’t get a credit card denominated in USD.
It’s useful for buying drugs online on the dark web so I for one like it
All the fentanyl you can snort.
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.
good luck, I’m sure this comment will change how everyone talks from now on.
Cryptocurrency is a currency based on cryptographic keys.
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.
It’s as if this headline were written to stir discussion on lemmy.
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
Is there a way to check?
There’s a few with a thousand on top of all time for Lemmy. It would have to break those before it gets there. But since we’ve got a perfect storm of Linux, crypto, and anti ai discussions going, all we need is @PugJesus@lemmy.world to make a top level comment about how not voting for Biden is voting for Trump to really push it over the top.
I didn’t realize I was so famous.
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.
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.
He is just like me. I don’t mess with the chucky cheese token money.
Linus is already a multimillionaire, he doesn’t need a pump and dump.
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?
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.
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!
