Just got very lightly flamed by another user for making fun of crypto and was told that Lemmy and crypto have “the exact same advantages and disadvantages”. Now I disagree heavily there, since even if it shares some principles I’d argue that the scale of the problems change when you’re talking about a global finance system versus a social media platform filled with beans. But it did get me curious- how many of you are crypto supporters?
The technology has potential but right now it’s mainly being used either to buy illicit goods or separate fools from money.
Lemmy is free to use. If you give money to an instance owner, at least you know it’s a donation and that you’ll never get it back.
God, I hope not. Crypto is an interesting technology that’s been used to promote what’s essentially a scam. Just ask yourself this: Are the people into crypto using it to buy things? Or are they going to sell it for dollars at a high value and then walk away?
Most are the latter. Very few people even bother setting up software wallets. They just keep their crypto on markets and try to sell high.
That means that for most people, it’s not a currency at all, it’s an investment. But a normal investment is backed by something of value, while crypto is just backed by pure speculation - that is, it’s backed by all the other people who are trying to sell high, too. The name for a system where you get people to buy valueless assets and drive up their price so you can sell yours and leave others holding the bag is: “Ponzi scheme.”
The name for a system where you get people to buy valueless assets and drive up their price so you can sell yours and leave others holding the bag is: “Ponzi scheme.”
No, that’s a Greater Fool scheme. A Ponzi is more centralized and the people who get paid out are not supposed to be aware that the money is coming from new investors. Ponzi schemes hide that aspect of it. In a Greater Fool you are betting on someone being dumber than yourself enough to buy your worthless investment at a higher price.
A lot of crypto is Greater Fool, but there have been crypto Ponzi schemes.
As a side note, there is a cultural tendency to call all scams Ponzis when they are not. It is a specific type of scam.
It’s a bit of both. The increase in value for those who got in early is propped up by the hype of new bagholders.
Huh. I was thinking of the whole scheme being centralized around a few core people who push crypto, but I think you’re right. “Greater fool” is a better label for it. Thanks!
I’m not a crypto supporter. I do find the tech a bit interesting. I guess, tech-wise, Lemmy would be more comparable federated crypto like Stellar or Ripple (dunno if these are still federated, or if more popular federated crypto exists; been a very long time since I kept up with it). Without some sort of “trust” decentralized systems are too expensive (resource-wise) to be worth it, IMO.
Off-topic, but I’m kinda surprised p2p networks haven’t really advanced since Gnutella. I believe they had the concepts of trust/reputation and self-organizing networks with “super-peers” way back then.
I’ve run into a couple of cryptobros on Lemmy, but not many.
I’m a fan. Go ahead and downvote me.
I use Monero to pay for online services such as VPN, hosting, domains, VPS, E2EE cloud hosting, solely because I don’t want to be on someone’s list of customers and I don’t want constant spam. Same reason I pay cash in stores and don’t have loyalty cards. Might be very slightly more pricey that way but the reward for me is no marketing teams to deal with.
I do own & use cryptocurrencies a bit but would never had thought to link Lemmy to anything crypto related. Don’t even follow any crypto communities around here… being part of the Reddit exodus, over on Reddit there’s so much spam and shills surrounding the topic that I avoid those communities there too.
My guess is you just happened to run into a random crypto bro.
Absolutely not. Hell my whole instance is vehemently anti crypto
Only reason I want to get into crypto is being able to donate to heroes like fitgirl
Goddamned heroes 07
The hivemind of Lemmy has been the opposite so far in my experience. I’m probably what most here would call a “crypto bro,” though I wouldn’t call myself that.
It’s weird to me that the occupy wallstreet folks are all like “banks do it better.” It’s also weird to me that it’s gotten so polarizing. You don’t have to be a libertarian to see its benefits, and you don’t have to be a communist to want scammers locked up.
I am not. Plus the ones needing to be mined by wasting of ton of energy are basically an environmental disaster.
Crypto is and always has been a joke. It also doesn’t work that much like the fediverse, which is basically a webring where the sites like to copy each other. TBH I’m looking forward to the
webring hostLemmy instance drama and people beingkicked from the webringdefederated.i mean if you use stuff like monero to pay anonymously yeah sure go ahead but majority of crypto are just shitty scams.
or you could just pay with cash, the original anonymous payment method
I think cryptocurrency is a cool concept and can definitely have some legitimate uses. I just don’t think we’ve figured that part out yet. I’m firmly in the camp of “I do not support it but also am not against it”.
No? There’s definitely some overlap but they’re completely different concepts, just because I like Lemmy doesn’t mean I enjoy unstable coins that use up a ton of energy for no reason and can lose their value by the end of the day
Lmao, this guy lightly flaming the crypto Bois in the fediverse.
See, that was my response too! Federated servers will waste a bit of energy with duplicate fetch requests, sure, but it’s a far cry from the decades of compute time wasted with adversarial validation and cryptographic mathematics. And that doesn’t even deal with the shitty coins themselves.
Was very confused why they seemed to think the concepts were the same, and thought maybe I was the idiot.
The only concept that is the same I am aware of is that both are decentralized.
I think the person you were talking to had not really given as much thought into the subject.
Thinking about it too much makes them feel uncomfortable and less optimistic, so they avoid it and try to just focus on the many things they will buy when the value of their crypto coins inexplicably goes really high (which it might if a lot of money needs laundering, though I wonder if previous rounds worked out as well as they were hoping or if they got fucked by exchanges disappearing with their money in the night and decided to just go back to 3 mattress stores on one corner in various cities.
I honestly see* more overlap with the open-source community than with the crypto community
Cryptocurrencies are a bit like communism: interesting in theory, but implementations have been a disaster.
(And with this, I’ve just been able to piss off 2 groups in one post)
