Linus Torvalds has said that cryptocurrencies are simply "a great vehicle for scams"
  • 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.
  • xlash123@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • slaacaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years 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)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 years 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.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years 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.

      • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 years 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.

        • yogurtwrong@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 years 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.worldEnglish
            0·
            2 years 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.

        • sudo@programming.devEnglish
          0·
          2 years 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.

          • RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            2·
            2 years 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.mlEnglish
              0·
              2 years ago

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

              • Kushan@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                2 years 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.

  • Wilzax@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    If Torvalds was Satoshi he would have done a lot more with those untouched bitcoin than let them sit around for more than a decade

    • sebinspace@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I fell asleep to that by myself.

      Getting digital cable in my bedroom as a kid was both a blessing and a curse, and I listened to Michio Kaku a lot. Didn’t understand half of it, but hey, it was cool.

      Keep in mind, this was when I was a kid and thought all adults were good people and didn’t understand that Kaku and Tyson were dickheads or that Discovery Science was junk food borderline scifi.