Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
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7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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It's not a Ponzi exactly, it's called a pump-and-dump. But yes it's very common and very bad.
I agree that crypto currencies seem to be used much more for cynical investment profiteering, and much less for commerce, that fiat currencies. Probably because they are new. Investors are much faster at exploiting any new thing.
Bitcoin has not failed yet. It might become like company shares, an ostensibly useful thing that in practice is just a money-making game for professional gamblers. Or it might find a real large-scale use in the economy. It depends on so many factors.
The environmental issue really deserves its own discussion. There are several valid ways of looking at it. For example:
Bitcoin's model was simple and robust and successful. But bitcoin's value increased too much, too fast, making mining very profitable. It's a victim of its own success.
It's easily fixed, for example by borrowing Monero's proof-of-work algorithm. But the bitcoin devs need to be given an incentive to change it.
This is capitalism - everything gets exploited for profit until it is devastated. It's not a bitcoin issue it's sick-society issue.
I personally believe that the GPU and electricity crises are being driven by datacentres (collecting human behaviour data) and AI (finding ways to exploit that data for profit and power) but bitcoin is being used as a scapegoat.
And anyway the solution is not just "ban the bad things". There are effective ways to disincentivise people from exploiting electricity.