this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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I honestly never understood how Lemmy, a privacy and decentralisation focused community, is so vehemently anti-crypto. It's worse than genAI. Every time it is mentioned, everyone goes "crypto is a scam". I don't think I've ever seen any good faith discussion around it, just "scam", "pyramid scheme", and "only criminals use it".
Let's get something out of the way immediately: shitcoins are a literal pyramid scheme and a scam. Anyone can make their own cryptocurrency in an evening, and anyone who throws money at them is either a fool or a gambler.
But I really don't understand what people mean when they say Bitcoin, or Ethereum, or Monero are a scam. Sure they can be used to scam you, just like Amazon gift cards can. Maybe it's about the price volatility, but the price of all 3 mentioned before is up on a day, week, month, 6 months, year, and 5 year scale. It's volatile, but is not a scam. If you bought and sold at two random points in time, it's more likely you made a profit than "got scammed". You know what actually is a scam? Credit scores, overdraft fees, having to pay to check your balance, and so many other fucked up practices in the US banking system.
"Criminals use them" is just the worst fucking argument, especially in a space like this. Are PGP, VPNs and TOR for criminals too? Do you think getting rid of crypto would stop crime?
And yes, proof of work fucking sucks. The energy consumption of Bitcoin mining is a problem. I am not a cryptobro who spends all his time making trades and is here to tell you that crypto is the salvation. They are far from being "good" for everyday use. I just wanted to point out how it seems that critical thought gets shut down at the sight of those 6 letters, and I hope someone can explain to me what they find so terrible about crypto (aside from environmental concerns and shitcoins)
The internet loves to hate, it's that simple.
The entire concept is fundamentally flawed
You are basing a economy with real economic stakes on something that is massively unstable and very resource intensive.
I think the Lemmy userbase is too small and its easy for a few vocal voices to dominate the conversation.
There are often contradicting points that the Lemmy hivemind holds.
Like Lemmy wants to abolish the police but also wants to empower the police to take away people's guns??? (Talking about the US btw)
Lemmy loves their doublethink
Lemmy is quite left-leaning, and the impetus behind creating Bitcoin was right-wing Austrian school economics. Now, it's being pushed by literal fascists.
I can't say I've ever seen fascists pushing Bitcoins, but then again I don't frequent those spaces. I struggle to see how they are ideologically similar though. Doesn't seem like a very authoritarian concept
And can we really say we know what brought about the publication of the bitcoin whitepaper?
Trump, Bukele, Milei, Orban, Thiel, Musk, etc. It's the "Dark Enlightenment" and "Network State" type of fascists that want to replace democratic government with stuff like corporate-controlled city-states, and crazy shit like that. They see it as a means to starve the government so they can run their own corporation-like governments.
The message in the genesis block alludes to the ideology (as that kind of stuff was a major talking point for right-wingers back then), though I guess it's not definitive proof. The early community was definitely Austrian-school adjacent right-wingers though.
The Republicans in US congress just forced through a bunch of pro-crypto crap, if you’re looking for undeniable proof.
I don't know any crypto bros who aren't also MAGA/libertarian/fascist
Many MAGA/libertarian/fascists love ice cream. Does that mean ice cream is bad? We should be able to make up our own minds about things instead of turning everything into a partisan issue. A broken clock is right twice a day.
Crypto is stupid for entirely different reasons that I've enumerated in other threads in this post. I'm just observing a correlation I've noticed here which directly runs counter to another statement.
They aren’t pushing pro-ice cream laws, this is a disingenuous take.
I think we can. Have you not heard of this phrase before?
Satoshi Nakamoto put it in the zeroth block of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Have you noticed that people who work in tech tend to be less excited about cool new flashy tech developments than the average person?
It's similar to how people who have worked in fast food aren't quite as keen on eating out than the average person.
Same as watching your co-worker who hasn't washed his hands after his last shit collect the pieces of a burger that dropped on the dirty floor to sell them to a customer isn't exactly appetizing, knowing what goes on behind the scenes with tech developments doesn't really get you on board for that either.
I think it's because we get excited super early, and by the time it goes mainstream we're tired of seeing it shoved into every place it doesn't belong
And it's probably still not being used for what we looked forward to about it
I think it's because, at least in the case of bitcoin, it has no practical real world use other than hoarding like beanie babies, and therefore no real value. As a currency it's entirely useless.
I have a bit more sympathy for ETH, maybe someday DeFi will produce something truly useful enough to justify the money in crypto, but it hasn't so far.
This is really getting into the weeds of what you define "value" to be. You could equally argue that a banknote also has no practical real world use other than hoarding (and to trade to others).
A banknote is accepted as a means of exchange, ie a currency in a way that bitcoin and other crypto coins are not and cannot ever be due to the fees and delays in the system, not to mention the absurd volatility or lack of liquidity in the smaller coins.
Crypto is also accepted as a means of exchange. There are plenty of merchants willing to accept it as payment, but they are just not geographically concentrated in one location like banknote-accepters are. With a banknote, you have a very high concentration of merchants who will accept that as a means of payment in one geographic area (i.e. the country or region whose central bank issued that banknote), while it is not accepted anywhere else. With most cryptocurrencies, they will be acceptable worldwide, but the concentration of people willing to take it in any given geographic area is low.
It is important to note that you can't take properties of the smaller coins (the ones which you are probably thinking of are derisively referred to as "shitcoins" and most are deserving of that epithet) and apply them to every cryptocurrency. Just like you can't use properties of the Zimbabwean dollar to smear all fiat currencies in general.
Bitcoin transactions on its Lightning Network are typically instantaneous, and fees are lower than most credit cards (usually on the order of 0.1%). An on-chain Bitcoin transaction currently has a fee of about 1 USD, which would make it competitive to credit cards for transactions greater than 40 USD. Bitcoin fees, despite being notorious for being the highest among all cryptos, are actually very competitive with most traditional payment methods. This transaction from the most recent block at the time of writing paid about 117 USD to move over 411 BTC worth 48.5 million USD. That means they paid about 0.00024% in fees and this is the highest-fee transaction in this block (meaning they paid the highest fee rate of any transaction in this block). The going rate for this block was actually much lower; whoever sent this transaction overpaid by about 50 times.
It's accepted almost no where. And the list of issues go on. Crypto is easily stolen, very difficult to secure. Difficult to use for most people. Proof of work crypto is still in the majority and wastes absurd amounts of energy, etc. But the biggest issue is that it doesn't solve any problems that were not solved long ago unless you are conducting criminal activity (which I do have to acknowledge as it's one stand out use case).
The notion that "crypto is easily stolen" is completely false. It's definitely harder to steal than, say, cash in a wallet. That it is "accepted almost nowhere" is also false. Look hard enough, and you can find someone who will sell you almost anything for crypto.
It depends greatly on how it's stored. Most people just keep it in an exchange, which are robbed fairly often. Which wouldn't be a problem with real cash as there are laws in place to protect you. With crypto you have no recourse.
Yes, as everyone knows, if you are mugged in the street, you can just say "no". The robber legally cannot take your money without your consent.
Have you heard of a bank? That's where non criminals tend to keep their money.
You forgot shoes! Criminals use shoes, too! So everyone wearing shoes must be a criminal. Either that, or they were scammed into wearing shoes.
Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme because it only keeps its value as long as people are constantly buying it. If no one wants to buy it, the value of any amount of bitcoin is zero. This is why people who have bitcoin are trying to convince anyone else to keep buying.
Your local government-backed currency does not have this problem, because you get paid with it, you pay taxes with it and vendors in your country have to accept it.
any currency is initially a bank's promissory notes, and then a promise to exchange the paper for some kind of labor. As a person who has experienced at least one default in his life and whose entire toilet is covered with USSR money, I can say that in this regard, no currency is different from bitcoin.
Well, gold might be a little bit different. It derives its value not because of a government mandate but because monkey brain like shiny
The value of gold, silver and platinum is determined by two factors: there is little of it in nature and you cannot take more at will and it does not oxidize, which ensures good storage.
I really don't know about you, but in my country you can't take gold out of the bank. You buy gold from a bank and it stays in the bank longer without the possibility of taking it out. What a joke. Guess what happens to the bank and the gold in it when the economy collapses.
And now look at Bitcoin. there is a little of it, you can't increase it at will, and it's convenient to store. Does it remind you of anything? And it's always with you.
Yes, but the overwhelming majority of the value of gold is because it is shiny. Up until very recently, it had almost no other practical use other than being shiny. Plenty of other objects meet the definition of "rare" and "cannot make more at will" and "doesn't degrade over time". Gold is just the prettiest.
Well, what kind of items are these that are rare, they cannot be made as much as you want, they do not deteriorate over time And allow processing?
For most of human history, salt met this definition. Ever wonder why it's called a salary?
Tungsten is also one of the rarest minerals on Earth despite being relatively cheap.
It's very nice when your wallet is barely keeping afloat and you're left without money because salt gone form wallet... Or do you mean super cheap rock salt?
Well, to be left without money because I got caught in the rain is not still a pleasure.
Good... At a time when gold was still a currency, tungsten was not yet able to be smelted. In addition, when heated, tungsten is reactively oxidized, unlike gold.
After a few cycles people start to realize blah blah blah explanation is really just when is the price going up. We've all heard it all by now. It starts feeling like being sold on a timeshare. We aren't new clients to try to sell this topic too
We already know all the explaination and blockchain crap. We know the spiel and sat through it all through multiple cycles. It's at this point like trying to sell a car to a car salesperson using tactics they already know.
So that's the lack of enthusiasm. We are less likely to be new to this.
But then why still be anti bitcoin?
Because (like genAI) crypto-coin people as a general population will not shut up and it gets annoying to keep hearing the same spiel. And it's an insulting one, about how everyone not on the Bitcoin train is a stupid loser and we'll be kissing their ass and wishing we were them when the whole thing really rockets off. Sometimes that part isn't entirely explicit, but I hear it in almost every pro-Bitcoin rant.
I was excited for Bitcoin but the more I learned and the more the public used it, the more I hated it.
EDIT: FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH IS A BADLY PHRASE EXPLANATION, PLEASE READ MY COMMENT BELOW TO UNDERSTAND MY POINT
Bitcoins timestamp only supports dates up to 2106 because they decided on an UNSIGNED value. You don't need negative values... You know when the network starts, that is 0. Without network, no Bitcoin.
That is how bad it is engineered.
And we are not even talking proof of work or whatever. Crypto is a scam because the creators made it very obvious that they didn't really care about the project and the community is just gambling.
I don't get why using an unsigned value is bad in this context. Like you've said yourself, why would you add support for dates that happened before the creation of the network?
Sorry my phrasing was bad and made it confusing. Let me explain it in detail.
They correctly choose a unsigned int for the time but they based it on Unix time, and Unix time is signed. So they choose a system that would require an conversion from Unix time to Bitcoin time (or the other way around) anyway. But you don't need to be able to have a timestamp for 1970, which their timestamp system supports, because instead of counting from 2008 (the invention of Bitcoin) they count from 1970. Wasting 38 years and as you know Unix time is hitting a limit in 2038, 68 years after its start, Bitcoin time is unsigned and so it gets to 2106. 2106-1970= 136 years. And they are wasting 38 years!!! Why? You need a conversion between both after 2038 anyway. And if they really care for cheap conversion, a signed 64bit value would be much better, because after 2038, that will probably be the standard. So they chose to waste 38 years for compatibility which will break after 2038, instead of choosing compatibility after 2038 for 292 billion years.
And if size was the reason and 64bit timestamps would have been too big, just start counting from 2008 (or better 2009 when the network started) and get all those juicy 136 years instead of 98 years.
It is stupid.
The choice of a
uint32_tfor time saves 4 bytes per transaction. That doesn't sound like much, but with 1.2 billion transactions recorded, it adds up to almost 10 GB of space saved.They could, ultimately, just replace it with a
uint64_tsome time in the 22nd century without much fuss. In the late 2000s when Bitcoin was created, storage space was at a significant cost, but now it is quite cheap and in the 2100s it will undoubtedly be even cheaper.10gb, on a 670gb big Blockchain. Those 10gb are super important.
And again, size would an ok argument if they didn't go for uint32 instead of int32. Because they broke compatible with Unix time for no reason at that moment. Unless they wanted to min/Max every bit and then why did they start with 1970? And not 2008/2009?
It makes no sense.
Also in 2008, 10gb would have cost you around $1. Ofc, each node would have required the 10 additional gb, so each node would be $1 more. Of course, there weren't that many transaction in the chain and it wouldn't actually cost that much, but ok.
or they can simply inherit the UNIXTIME library, in which 0 has shifted from 1970 to 2038, and add one additional "time epoch" flag. Think about what's easier - create your own time library or inherit from unixtime?