Possession of any cryptocurrency should be punished by 5 years in prison. The only use case is paying ransoms to North Korea, and the side effects are destroying our climate
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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I don't even need to read the rest of the thread, this HAS to be the dumbest take. And I think cryptocurrency is inherently a pyramid scheme.
Welcome to Lemmy!
Yeah, I don't get it. We all came here because Reddit, a centralized service, did us dirty and we got pissed and left. We just came out of high inflation and many areas still have high inflation, and it's largely because of central banks doing us dirty, but we're fighting to maintain that status quo.
Yeah, I get it, there are a ton of scams with cryptocurrencies. There are also a lot of fiat scams as well (stock picking, hard money lending, etc). Don't hate the tool scammers use, hate the scams.
It seems many here miss the forest for the trees. Most cryptocurrencies are scams, but there are a handful of interesting ones:
- Bitcoin - the OG; useless as a currency, but the lightning network fixes most of its issues
- Monero - as close as to get to digital cash, which is why criminals like it (both are untraceable); oh, and it's mining resistant, so to won't see big Monero mining farms, just a hobbyist running it while playing games or whatever
- Ethereum - proof of stake instead of proof of work, so it uses way less energy
As long as you don't see it as an investment, it's totally fine. I have never and probably will never "invest" in Bitcoin because it's all hype and I don't think there's any reason to think it'll continue going up.
I hate how much banks and governments snoop on my transactions and sell my data to the highest bidder, and Monero offers a way to recover my privacy. Bitcoin lightning is also pretty good, but its privacy features aren't quite as good.
So don't "invest" in crypto bu do look into it as a currency. If enough people use it, stores will start accepting it (and I've seen a handful that do).
I used to use Bitcoin core for my wallet. But the block chain is just too huge to really make that feasible nowadays. (Also I don't own any crypto now.)
Also see: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG)
WaPo... "The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.
But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages."
More... https://www.cryptomuseum.com/manuf/crypto/index.htm
"In 2014, it came to light – from released documents of the Friedman Collection – that there had been some kind of Gentleman's Agreement between Hagelin and the NSA from 1951 onwards. As part of this deal, Hagelin would not sell secure machines to certain countries. And in February 2020, ZDF, SRF and The Washington Post revealed that in 1970 the company had been secretly purchased by the BND and the CIA, and that from 1994, CIA had been the exclusive owner [12]."
Why must companies feel like they need to be everything to everyone? Proton would be absolutely awesome if it stuck to it's "We're better than GMail" plan and provided stellar email and calendar.
Leave the VPN and cryptowallets and all that "not email related" crap to it's own app/company/environment.
Eh, having a more complete package is how you defeat Gmail. People don't use Gmail because Gmail rocks, they use it because of all the other crap it comes with, like Google Drive and Calendar. So at a minimum, they should provide those with their email. But a lot of customers want VPN, and they already have a bunch of server infra for email and calendar, so why not add VPN?
If you look at their product stack, it reads like a set of alternatives to gsuite. Here are some less obvious ones:
- Pass - alternative to Google single sign-on
- Wallet - crypto alternative to Google Wallet
- VPN - Google One VPN
If they follow this trend, they'll make privacy-friendly alternatives to Meet and Gemini (Scribe AI?). Maybe eventually they'll build/integrate an office suite to compete with Docs and Sheets (maybe OnlyOffice or Collabora).
They want to be privacy-friendly Google, building replacements for anything that can be self-sufficient (i.e. can be sold at a profit).
Their brand has been privacy-focused alternatives to the most important parts of online life.
- Email / identity
- Passwords
- VPN
- Calendar, etc
Now with their crypto and ai products it feels like they're not focusing on regular users any more.
Proton would be absolutely awesome if it stuck to it's "We're better than GMail" plan and provided stellar email and calendar.
You're saying that like those have now gotten worse than they were before.
common proton l
I could see this being better if it supported a variety of currencies. Like Monero. No reason in particular.
~~/hj~~
Time to switch...
I really didn't see anyone asking for this, hopefully it didn't take too many resources to create. Even though I don't understand it being made I'll probably still switch to it, because Exodus feels like it's getting more and more bloated and annoying to use.
edit: I just realized this wallet only seems to support bitcoin? Why on earth would they do that? Most people holding a significant amount of Bitcoin are storing it in a hardware wallet and rarely transferring it. It sucks to use for actual transactions.
Minimal Viable Product. They shiped it with only one coin to avoid having to spend too much time on implementing every possible coin protocol. But they says that they will add more of them in the future, and, maybe, even fiat currencies.
I would prefer a privacy conscious alternative to Google Wallet first, then add the crypto stuff, but that's just me
Problem is, as they said in their bloc post, that to handle real money they have to get the required authorisation from the Swiss bank authority.
What does a privacy conscious version even look like?
Some things simply aren’t legal anymore like buying crypto without identification.
You can still do it, it's just more annoying.
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