- 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.
In the case of groceries, use cash? I understand the overall privacy issue, and I don’t fall into the “I have nothing to hide so why should I care” category, but I struggle to find a real world example of where an anonymous digital currency would be required outside of illegal purchases. There are certainly “illegal” purchases that shouldn’t be illegal, depending on your area. Birth control will be a big one.
The problem is that cash suffers from the same thing that digital money does being inflation by the government, whichever government you happen to live under. Ask people in Argentina or Venezuela how good cash is. The answer is it’s not. The government cannot be allowed to print money because they will abuse that power and hurt everybody.
I’m sorry, do you think inflation doesn’t apply to prices just because they are using a different sign?
Inflation occurs when governments print money and so with these cryptocurrencies, at least the good ones, the amount that is printed is known in advance and will never exceed certain boundaries. So even though the greedy people may wish to print more for themselves, they cannot do it because the system will not let them. And right now the system is perfectly happy to let them and fuck everybody else.
It instead gets inflated by crypto exchanges which have no regulations and only exist to make a quick buck.
The big difference, though, is that if a crypto exchange says that there’s more crypto than exists, they have to make good on that promise. Or they, you know, go bankrupt because they don’t actually have the money they say they have. Where would they government? That’s not the case. There are only 21 million Bitcoin available. If a crypto exchange tries to make it sound like there are more than that, then people will pull their money off of that exchange and then exchange will go bankrupt because they can’t produce the money.Also, real crypto people don’t rely on centralized exchanges anyway. They either trade peer to peer or use decentralized exchanges that can’t be manipulated like that.
