this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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Is the government spreading anti-cryptocurrency propaganda or did lemmy got invaded by idiots recently?
No, people just don't like crypto because it's a huge waste of energy that has no use for the average person at the moment and is only used by rich people to get richer without much regulation. Don't get me wrong, it might definitely be useful when used correctly in the future. Not wasting as much energy by ditching proof of work, becoming actually useful for normal transactions, etc. But right now it's just an overhyped technology for obnoxious cryptobros.
I mean...I'll go one further. I know there have been many historical "aged like milk" quotes, like about how much RAM computers need, but I'm still saying this in confidence: I don't think that cryptocurrency or blockchains will ever have a useful purpose. Their design is built to solve societal problems, but introduces worse problems in implementing them. This goes well beyond just taking too much electricity.
They already have a useful purpose. Sending crypto is much easier than sending different currencies into different countries. The services exist, but they are prohibitively expensive if you're sending like $50
Send Monero or something and it's far easier and faster. You can exchange it for your own currency locally or just sit on it.
Just gonna copy/paste this from someone else's comment in this thread: https://www.reuters.com/technology/california-dmv-puts-42-million-car-titles-blockchain-fight-fraud-2024-07-30/
So... whoops. That didn't take long, huh?
Every time one of these articles is posted, I predict a very very short investigation into the technical workings of the project will find that the same could’ve been done with a much simpler central database. Or, that they were actually using a database at the backend and wasting their whole crypto approach.
And we all know technology never changes or improves over time. Good catch.
Technology absolutely improves.
But blockchain is worse. And it's not close.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/california-dmv-puts-42-million-car-titles-blockchain-fight-fraud-2024-07-30/
I can almost see the monk smacking an orphan for holding the spoon in the wrong hand :D
Bitcoin ≠ cryptocurrency.
Ethereum lowered it's power consumption by over 99% after switching to Proof-of-Stake.
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and we don't even fucking know who came up with it.
How about we don't throw away the possibility of 5.1 Surround Sound Blu-Ray Audio, because wax cylinders sound like shit?
"Computers are cool and all, but they take up entire rooms and only do simple calculations! It's a complete waste of time and money to invest in such a technology!"
^That's you
This is actually part of government propaganda to discredit cryptocurrencies.
Lemmy servers consume energy too and half of the content is memes, i don't see anyone complaining about it.
You can't begin to imagine just how much energy cryptocurrencies use. A web server can never come close.
but AI model training can.
Pretty sure people have been shitting on AI pretty heavily as well, partly for those reasons (but also for several others).
I'm sure meta or google energy usage is up there but i've yet to see someone complaining about mr.beast or cristiano ronaldo wasting energy with their videos.
Maybe because people value entertainment more than invisible money that won't help them anyway.
or more like because the government doesn't have problems with people keeping themself busy on entertainment vs them using a decentralized and open currency that can bypass financial institutions
I'm pretty sure the government isn't forcing people to watch YouTube and neither of the people you mentioned are government employees, unless you're concocting some elaborate Alex Jones-level conspiracy theory.
You seem to have same comprehension problems or to be in bad faith. Read carefully what i wrote, it's nothing of what you said.
Trying to label everything as a conspiracy theory is something the government and propaganda have been doing excessively over the past years. You may not like it to hear it but every time cristiano ronaldo appears in state media and gets paid for it they are indeed working for the government. When the government put restrictions on youtube competitors such tiktok or when they use it to broadcast official events, they are indeed forcing you to use youtube.
That's not the point of the discussion anyway: cryptocurrencies aren't controlled by the government and hard to control by design, there lies the government interest to boycott them.
Maybe if it was controlled, it wouldn't constantly fluctuate in value and would actually be worth buying things with without hoping for a day when it's worth more and you're richer.
Countries currency fluctuate in times to.
I can go to the supermarket next week and milk will cost about the same in dollars as it did this week because the value does not change that rapidly.
Not true with Bitcoin.
If you live in america and you are lucky the price of thing stopped increasing perhaps it will cost the same. If you live in any other part of the world that use a different currency the price may be different
I do live in America and why you think milk costs significantly more from one week to the next I don't know. Even if the price rises, we're talking pennies per week. Far less than Bitcoin fluctuates.
I have no idea why you're even trying to argue that the dollar fluctuates as much in value as Bitcoin because that's just demonstrably false. This is the current fluctuation of Bitcoin value. If the value of a dollar changed by one percent in a day, that would be huge. Seven percent? That would be a disaster.
JPY to USD +6.70% (1W)
Cool. You found the one currency the dollar had a lot of fluctuation against in the past week. Good job. Too bad it's the dollar and the euro whose values are the ones that generally match each other and how it's usually measured.
Also too bad I gave you lots of weeks and you gave me one.
Go ahead and let me see your source though. Here's mine:
https://www.investing.com/crypto/bitcoin/historical-data
It's already significantly changed percentagewise since I posted that screenshot from less than an hour ago. It's now +1.9%. Even the dollar vs. the yen did not change that much in less than an hour.
This is a ridiculous hill to die on. This is such a known problem with Bitcoin that stablecoins had to be invented.
Yeah because they have a lot of servers. The problem is each individual web server does not use a lot of energy whereas each individual server running a crypto currency blockchain uses a lot of energy for that one server.
Nah, idiots bring shitty crypto propaganda and pretend it isn't just an unregulated security pretending to be an alternative currency (that isn't usable as a currency for regular people) while using more energy than entire nations, all for a giggle with a shit coin.
Are you sure you are not confusing propaganda with ads?
Cryptocurrencies are quite easy to use, the process to create a cryptocurrency wallet is much easier than the procedure required to create a bank account or a credit card and these days cryptos are widely accepted even as a currency.
Are you sure you are not confusing propaganda with what crypto is actually used for?
I don't care how easy it is to set up a wallet. I cannot take my crypto and go down to the bodega and buy a sandwich. I can't pay my rent with crypto. I can't pay my utilities with crypto.
Crypto is not a usable currency for the vast majority of people.
You can
^(but I admit that 95% of the time there is a payment middleman needed to convert crypto to fiat, just like Visa is a middleman)
So what you are literally stating is you cannot use cryptocurrency to pay you need to convert into some other actually accepted currency...
Also, have you ever been somewhere that is card only?
https://swissmoney.com/who-accepts-bitcoin-as-payment
There are ways. Visa has crypto-linked cards for example.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/visa-crypto-withdrawals-cards-145-countries
Before the government enforced credit cards and made them mandatory it would have been really hard to buy a sandwich in bodega with a credit card too. Not sure where you live but these days in most places if you want you can literally pay with all sort of service, they have these big cash registers with the screen that accepts all soft of payment youtubers advertise for.
There aren't any limits that prevents the majority of people from creating a crypto wallet and using cryptocurrencies
This is why people laugh at you cryptobros. I literally tell you why it's not a usable currency and you tell me it totes is.
Go back to speeding up climate change with your fake currency and stop trying to pretend normal people are using it to for anything other than unregulated securities trading.
cryptocurrencies provides an open alternative to a centralized and rotten financial system that is at the core of consumerism and the speedrun of mankind into oblivion.
Yet it still isn't a usable currency for normal people, and the usage of it is a (gross as well as net) negative to society is directly contributing to, to quote you, the "speedrun of mankind into oblivion."
You practically use the energy output of a nuclear reactor to process transactions. So I think you're the ones pushing the expediation of the human races extinction. What's worse is your been obnoxious while doing it.
You're equating Bitcoin with the entire concept of cryptocurrency. I hate being "that guy" in this thread that seems like a shill for crypto, because I'm really not. I just don't blindly hate it, and I have a nuanced understanding of it. Wild, I know.
Ethereum reduced it's energy consumption by over 99% by switching to Proof-of-Stake.
People need to stop using those two words interchangeably. Bitcoin was the first, and in the realm of technological progress, when has the very first try of anything been the best?
Every piece of modern tech we use on a daily basis, ultimately, originated from some primitive form of that tech; Your smart phone didn't just appear. The airplane you flew in didn't arrive fully formed (Boeing might wish it did).
Computers used to take up entire rooms and could do basically nothing. People used to use horse-drawn carriages for transportation. etc.
Shit, even the concept of currency/trade itself has changed dramatically over the course of human history. Did you know that our money (USD) used to be backed, literally and physically, by blocks of shiny metal? And any person could literally take their dollar notes and trade them for shiny metal if they wanted? Pretty wacky!
Turns out someone realized that the metal was unnecessary. Lots of people like yourself around back then, and they lost their minds: "How could this piece of paper be worth anything if I can't literally trade it for a piece of shiny metal? Even if that metal has no real inherent value beyond what society has ascribed to it?"
How long ago was that? Almost 100 years... I think it turned out OK.
I don't know, just some things to think about I guess.
Every time you pay with your credit card or use an ATM the same thing happen, with the difference that you are not using a decentralized and open source service.
Incorrect. I don't use the output of a small town. You use power but nowhere near what cryptocurrencies require.
I think you are literally using that since ATM are open 24h
Please go look up the power usage of the two things and then come back and actually talk to me rather than just making stuff up because you like it.
An ATM uses a dribble of power compared to a server
This is what the overwhelming majority of people believe. No offense, but were you spending a lot of time on r/Bitcoin?
The majority of people believes what the government makes them believe, so it make sense.
Lots of people on the left don't seem to like crypto on a fundamental level. A lot of the time they seem like they have a tenuous grasp on the concept, at best, and are just parroting what they heard someone else say. Most of the time they're projecting their criticisms of Bitcoin onto the entire concept of digital currency.
I consider myself a progressive, and I got some ETH at a good time a few years ago, but I've been desperate for an exit point in the market for over a year (fomo feels bad man) because the sentiment for crypto among everyone who isn't an an-cap or tech-bro hobbyist has been atrocious for some time now.
To be clear, I don't really care for Bitcoin. It was first, and I appreciate how clever it was, mathematically and such, when it was anonymously put out there. But other than that it's kind of shit. It's like saying that wax cylinders are better than vinyl records, or even CDs, because they came first.
I hate that people seem to only have room in their brains for one word for "digital currency," and it happens to be the one with no real useful functionality, while being an absolute disaster for the environment.
It's not some kind of panacea, but people are writing off (or actively hating on) some very interesting tech. with actual use-cases like Ethereum or Monero (the former of which reduced it's power consumption by over 99% after switching to Proof-of-Stake, and the latter does not use ASIC miners and is significantly less resource intensive than BTC), because they didn't get it perfect on the first try. That said, Monero will never be a good long-term investment because it's too secure and that scares governments. Monero is like what people (at least used to) think Bitcoin is... That is, anonymous, untraceable, etc. No way that succeeds as an investment, and good luck actually using it as a currency with all that volatility.
I think the concept of a digital currency is here to stay whether people like it or not. I think it makes more sense to push for ones that can potentially solve actual issues and aren't a disaster for the environment, so people don't call them all "Bitcoin," like people do for "Q-Tips". Probably too late.
If I had to guess, long term, nations will see the writing on the wall and start using their own tailor-made CBDCs (Central-Bank Digital Currency) and it'll probably suck. They will 100% use it for control and oppression. So that's some fun stuff to look forward to.
This isn't necessarily a good thing, there are many arguments against POS. You shouldn't use non-green energy resources to begin with, if people use these to mine that's not bitcoin fault.