So... are Lemmy users also generally crypto supporters?
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?
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
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
Lmao, this guy lightly flaming the crypto Bois in the fediverse.
I don't care about crypto at all. At this point I think of any crypto as pump and dump scams unless proven otherwise
Hell no.
They're almost entirely scams. I don't support tricking people out of their money.
They also ruined crypto as an abbreviation for cryptography, and spam every cryptography-related discussion forum. Even the NIST post-quantum standardization list has been getting their spam.
Just a legal pump and dump and a great example of why we let the SEC regulate markets.
What about Monero? It seems to be the only one that gives a shit about anonymity and privacy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2020/09/14/irs-will-pay-up-to-625000-if-you-can-crack-monero-other-privacy-coins/?sh=1b23b46485cc
It's destroying the environment with the way it works, so it's still an extremely shitty thing to promote.
Monero's ring signatures are an actually interesting bit of cryptography. And it does provide a real benefit (private transactions) that other payment systems don't. Of course that means it breaks all the anti-money-laundering laws to exchange money to/from Monero, but it's less of a joke than the rest. Still PoW though, so inherently destructive and not something I'll support.
It's destroying the environment with the way it works, so it's still an extremely shitty thing to promote.
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
I am not. Plus the ones needing to be mined by wasting of ton of energy are basically an environmental disaster.
No, fuck crypto. At best it's a solution looking for a problem while speedrunning a century of banking regulation reform, at worst it's an environmentally disastrous scam.
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."
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.
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!
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.
No
Unlikely. The hype for crypto scams had fallen off hard in the last year. It peaked like two years ago.
Nope. Crypto is clearly a scam
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.
i’m generally anti-crypto. i’m not against it fully, i think it has a purpose but that purpose is not unstable, highly volatile investments, meme coins, or play-to-earn games.
What is the purpose then? To me it just seems like a solution looking for a problem, and that's not a good way to make solutions.
i suppose i should have said it could have had a purpose. i think it was initially conceived as a way to make private purchases, perhaps of things one might not want tracked back to them. for a simple example, i always pay cash when i visit a dispensary, even though many of them take cards now, because i don’t care for my bank to know that i am making that purchase. if i could pay with cryptocurrency at the dispensary, keeping that transaction more private, i would. but crypto has ceased to be a private currency, and turned into extremely volatile investments. who would want to make a purchase with crypto when it could skyrocket in value the next day and you’ve suddenly spent more than you thought, or the vendor has made less than they thought when the values plummet?
as it is now, it has no real purpose. it could have though. you are right that as it stands it is a solution looking for a problem.
right now it’s purpose is to tell me who i should avoid
Private? It's in a public ledger right, I think monero does some scrambling, but most crypto is a lot less private than paying in cash.
your comment is a moot point. i was saying that it could be private and while it is probably mostly associated with people trying to purchase illegal goods crypto tumblers are a thing so that is something that can anonymize your crypto. also, you can’t pay with cash online so there is a utility of something that can facilitate anonymity in transactions online.
I would argue no, in fact I feel like the Fediverse is a functional version of decentralization as opposed to Block Chains.
Block Chains are resource heavy, to the point of effecting the ecosystem. They're supppsed to be 100% reliable yet major Block Chains have already needed to fork their databases, plus it's very easy to scam and hack into wallets without any legal repercussions. And they have little to no use cases so we had to invent uses like Crypto and NFT. (Yeah there could be use cases for deeds and stuff, but with the unreliability I don't want Block Chain anywhere near my house deed).
Meanwhile we have the Fediverse, which is essientially like a bunch of Discord servers stringed together, and it accomplishes a decentralized social network without the planet destroying or needless money speculation added on top.
Step right up folks, get your hot hot takes here!
Real cryptocurrencies (of which bitcoin is the only one, don't @ me) I think are fine and worthwhile projects. 99% of the rest of the crypto sphere is straight up snake oil, and anyone saying any different is probably trying to sell you something.
The difference with the fediverse is that its main appeal is actually the decentralization and censor resistance, not the boatloads of speculative money to be made. The "entrepreneurs" seeing dollar signs is what made crypto into a joke, so hopefully we can avoid that for a while.
Almost exactly my take on it. I just include monero.
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.Lol, no I am not. Crypto in it's current form, is not going to be a legitimate, stable, daily use currency. Digital money/systems with technological roots in crypto may be the future but it will be a 2nd cousin, once removed, at best.
NFTs as implemented, are also pure BS.
Found to be the opposite here, but I guess it'll depend on what communities you follow.
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.
No. One is a decentralized social media platform. The other is an environmentally irresponsible pyramid scheme. They have nothing to do with each other.
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)
I think in the early days it was because most here were left-leaning or libertarians, but now that the general public is starting to move in, it's more neutral/slightly negative.
No
those are probably vocal minorities
I filtered out every crypto and investing sub on Reddit other than r/bogleheads
Not a fan. I made some money with crypto, lost some as well. It's pretty much useful just for speculation (which really is just gambling but with a fancier name). Cryptobros and their wet dreams of web3 shall forever go unfulfilled.
I've generally been seeing the opposite sentiment on Lemmy and I'm here for it. Crypto bros can stay on the other site.
I've run into a couple of cryptobros on Lemmy, but not many.
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".
Dont think so, they might just be very loud. A couple of other reddit alternatives, on the other hand, …
I'm a fan. Go ahead and downvote me.
I was interested in the beginning, but after the initial hype it just seemed to be a lot of people running scams. I'm sad I didn't gather a bunch early on, but I only would have sold it in/by 2020. I didn't have any use for it but to hold it until it was profitable to sell.
There's a lot of federated (and now defederate) servers that are run by political and/or economic pariahs likely ousted by content flags/bans concerning spam. Now that regular folks are moving in though, the dynamics are quickly changing to a more common ideology.
No.
Also Lemmy is not trustless at all, which is a very important part of crypto. In fact the reason that crypto can’t really do anything worthwhile is because it has to be completely trustless.
Nope. Closest thing I do to crypto is purchase satoshis to fund value for value in Podcasting 2.0, and that one time I bought doge in the dip that it never really rose from, but that's it.
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
Lol. If they're comparing Crypto and Lemmy and getting mad, that's probably just one way of how they got sold on crypto by whatever community they're in. Just ask anyone who uses crypto a simple question: If I pay for a good or service, and I am not given that good/service, what should I do? Having a decentralized money exchange is great (and much needed), as a supplement to a centralized one. Something like Lemmy on the other hand has nothing to do with trading value, it's moreso contribution for the sake of adding value into a shared system. I'm not going to try and find retribution for someone not answering a question I post, because I didn't pay anyone to answer it.
Not a crypto hater so much as the idea of it goes.
It's a lot like the rest of the internet: anonymous things moving and interacting can be unpredictable. From what I've seen on the dark net, I'd assume we will see the same extremes manifesting in transactions; that is that it will be very helpful for crimes, but also very helpful for ppl who need weed medically but can't get it legally, ppl who need money because they are pursued politically, or ppl in other dire circumstances.
It's all very complex, and I think there is a legit good reason for it. That said, I'm not the person to judge what outweighs, I just know it's far more complex than "crypto bad" or "crypto yes". Let's just hope whoever will be in this position is far knowledgeable in that regard than me.
Sincerely, a small developer and 3d artist.
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.
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.
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 appreciate the philosophy, resilience, resistance to censorship, and individual control that both types of decentralization provide.
Crypto has many scams only because it is intended to be traded or used as currency. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a few others have held their value over time because of the network effect: more people use it to transact, so it maintains it's worth as a means of transaction. All those shit coins and alt coins were absolute scams because there was no way to use them (you can use Bitcoin to actually buy products and services).
Decentralized platforms that promote beans are also cool, but their currency is lulz. There's not much value for that outside the platform.
I am. Did it full time for a living for about two years when I was sick. Had $300 dollars left to my name, and turned it into over $200k and paid off stuff for me and my girlfriend and then got a little house.
Not sure what comparison of crypto and Lemmy is, but guess thats my answer. I understand peoples view on support and not supporting crypto.