- 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.
I only like two cryptocurrencies.
Nano: free transactions, each wallet runs it’s own blockchain, so it’s got no negative impact on the environment.
Monero: allows for anonymous transfers
I ask this sincerely, what have you personally needed an anonymous currency for?
I use anonymous currency daily without issue. It’s called cash.
You can’t use cash online tho
You just have to fold it really small to poke it down the wires.
It’s a series of tubes, actually. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
True. Although you can put cash on a debit card and spend that online. Pseudo anonymous because there is some degree of traceability.
I used Monero to pay for my domain and VPS while under sanctions and thus failed by the mainstream payment system. And in daily life I use pretty much only cash.
Also the phrasing of this implies some “nothing-to-hide” mentality. Would I be in danger if I paid for my stuff with a KYC method? Not really, I connect to my VPS and request my domain daily from home, their existence is not secret. Do I benefit from the transaction being anonymous? Still yes, the less data you trust the third parties with, the better. Same as to why I encrypt my chats even though they are mundane. Just because they are nobody’s business.
The obvious one is buying drugs. I don’t feel like arguing the morality of doing that but anonymous money is definitely useful for that.
I’ve bought drugs online and in person so don’t worry about judgement. Drugs are fun.
I read somewhere that someone was using anonymous currencies to buy life saving medicine from “non traditional” markets because they were much much cheaper. Let me see if I find the article
Well, that might be the only form of payment they take, and so you’ve got to use it I suppose. But the anonymous part really isn’t a huge factor here.
I would be a little cautious of buying “non traditional” medication from someone who doesn’t want a paper trail.
Unless you mean drugs, and then yes a paper trail is bad haha.
Haha no drugs in that article at least. I can’t find it but I think it was either for diabetes or asthma
I like it as a way to donate to creators without revealing my identity. It comes close to handing over cash.
You could also use it to pay for a VPN, but since the VPN provider sees your original IP address anyways, I don’t think that’s useful.
Another use I can think of is paying for a domain and registering it with fake info. Registrars require pretty sensitive information, and apparently can check if it is real by comparing it to the info tied to a card used to pay, which crypto eliminates.
Wish there were more XMR-accepting registrars though.
What about ETH? It also doesn’t use electricity.
Omg we’re cryptocurrency twins. I hold exactly these two for the same reasons
Hold? Or use?
Mostly holding Nano, used Monero quite often - should probably spend some Nano at one point… But vendors accepting it here are rare
Then you like Bitcoin too, since it pegs them.
No, because I’m not a trader. It’s not all about the exchange rate for me, but about the utility of the coin.
Most coins exist because other coins exist. Nano and Monero not necessarily.
BitCoin was the progenitor of those projects and rapidly gained value after strong usage (aka utility) and the ensuing scarcity. So you like BTC?
No, because one transaction uses as much energy as a normal household in a year. Or something like that.
Right, so fork it and make BTC Lite.
Isn’t Nano the one where they distributed the coins by CAPTCHA, but there was a central party that verified all these CAPTCHAs? They could just have given themselves 51% of the coins for free.
Initial distribution was through a captcha-protected crypto ‘faucet’. The faucet is still up. Did the developers keep a large part of the coins themselves? I’ve never heard that.
There’s no way to audit that.