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Linux Inventor Says He Doesn’t Believe in Crypto (u.today)

submitted 6 months ago by AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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.

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[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 119 points 6 months ago (20 children)

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.

[–] sudo@programming.dev 39 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (16 children)

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.

[–] iopq@lemmy.world -1 points 6 months ago (3 children)

git is why we can't have nice things

There's many better VCS, but everyone just goes on GitHub and uses git.

I dread ever having to touch it. The CLI is unintuitive, the snapshot system is confusing, and may God have mercy on your soul if you mix merging and rebasing

[–] sudo@programming.dev 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Mercurial or darcs?

[–] iopq@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Pijul, actually

[–] sudo@programming.dev 1 points 6 months ago

darcs_rs

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