this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
398 points (94.8% liked)
Technology
59605 readers
4225 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How is bitcoin still a thing? I thought it was a ponzi scheme and a scam that benefits drug dealers or something. Was it not those things all along?
I'm not an expert, just asking based on my mainstream point of view.
And if it's a scam, why is it worth $40,000 when a few years ago it peaked at $20k and crashed to a few thousand dollars each.
Also this article is about electricity use. Who cares about that? Electricity is everywhere. Burning coal to generate electricity, though, is very stupid, given the state of the biosphere. So is the "problem" of bitcoin really just a hat on top of the problem with fossil fuels?
I think my point is that bitcoin has often been compared to beanie babies but nobody's talking about beanie babies anymore so I'm really wondering why are people still talking (and mining) bitcoin? Was it not just a fad after all? Did they find some good use for it?
Edit: why is this comment downvoted? Is it beanie baby fans or what?
It recently got ETF approval by the US government, so hate to break it to you, but this "scam" is here to stay.
If you're wise, you'll buy in now while the price is still relatively cheap.
There will be 21 million coins minted. Ever. That is Bitcoin's fiscal policy. There are 62 million millionaires in the world. There isn't enough Bitcoin for every millionaire in the world to have an entire coin. An entire coin currently costs around $40,000. Y'all do the math.
And for those who don't know: you don't have to buy a whole coin at once. Buy as little or as much as you can afford to put in.
So is it like a status symbol to have 1 BTC? Is that the point of bitcoin now?
I remember years ago it was advertised as a way to "bank the unbanked" and help with remittance payment for migrant laborers and such, seeing as how money transfer services screw you over directly proportionately to how poor you are. Or for people who are cut off from SWIFT to have more financial access.
I'm saying that the transition to a Bitcoin-based economy will be a massive shake-up in global wealth distribution. Where each individual person ends up at the end of it is a factor of how soon they stop calling it a ponzi scheme and instead recognize its value as a currency. We have an opportunity to fix global wealth inequality, particularly the wealth inequality enforced through the dollar the the debt-cycle trap so many countries have fallen into. The dollar is a tool of US imperialism, it's traditional colonialism with a few extra steps. We extract trillions of dollars of value from other countries which rely on the dollar because we print currency which is essentially a tax on the entire world.
There is a fantastic overview of how the US uses the dollar to control other countries and extract trillions of dollars from them while keeping them in a cycle of debt. The Human Rights Foundation https://youtu.be/7qRWurFaUD0?list=PLe0djdakvnFb0T-oZAeF49A-EZChise4n&t=14009 and another one on how France abuses its currency influence in Africa to keep the colonial legacy alive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-u1Pjce4Lg&pp=ygUxaG93IGZyYW5jZSBjb250cm9scyBlbnRpcmUgZWNvbm9taWVzIGZyYW5jb2RvbGxhcg%3D%3D
Bitcoin is still capitalism, it can't fix capitalism's flaws, but it can move us towards a world where the flaws of fiat currency and currency imperialism are fixed. It can move us to a world where the government isn't constantly printing away the value of your hard-earned money, where governments must increase taxes to fund wars. That world looks very different.