No, no one is forgetting they’re built on cryptography. It just doesn’t matter. The underlying technology of a thing doesn’t have much bearing on the properties of the thing as far as practical usage goes.
You don’t care what your car is made of as long as it has good fuel efficiency and crash rating. Steel ceramic and aluminum are just tools to that end.
Research into cryptocurrency started long before 2008. Academics and odd crypto enthusiasts have been working on it since the 80s.
The intent from the beginning has been a mix of curiosity, paranoia, and buying drugs.
Bitcoin was hardly a “for the people” project. It was initially used almost entirely for black market purchases, largely via silk road. “The people” did not give a fuck about perfect anonymous digital cash. It solved a problem that most people didn’t and still don’t have.
The adoption order was: Math nerds > drug lords > finance > small investors. It’s still not actually adopted as currency by people.
When you create a thing for the purpose of making monetary transactions untraceable, and your first major users are all using it to hide where their money came from from the government, it’s really fair to say that you created a money laundering tool.
Bitcoin wasn’t taken over by finance people, they’re the reason it didn’t taper out like previous cryptocurrencies, which either fizzled or were shutdown for being nuggets of financial crime.
Sorry, but then by that argument cryptography itself is bad because “pedos use it”? Criminals will always use privacy-preserving technology/techniques/strategies. Should we renounce our right to have secure communication, or a decentralized currency because of that? Hasn’t this argument been done to death already?
The underlying technology of a thing doesn’t have much bearing on the properties of the thing as far as practical usage goes.
Excuse me, what? Of course it does matter if the backup for all your life’s photos is in an hard disk in your living room, or it’s on Google’s server. Of course it matters if the platform we’re talking on is Lemmy, and not Reddit. It does make a difference if the car you’re driving is gas or electric, where it was made, if it shows you ads or not. What are you going on about? It makes all the difference in the world, but that’s on “the backend” and no one remembers that it does matter
You missed the point and heard one that wasn’t being made.
No one said cryptography was bad, or that cryptocurrencies were bad because they were used for drugs and criminals.
I said that the cryptographic underpinnings of things like Bitcoin are irrelevant, and that what matters is the behavior of the system. It’s history as a vessel for laundering drug money speaks to it being a tool for money laundering, as opposed to some populist tool for freedom taken over by fintech bros. The fintech bros where there before any populist usage even started to take root.
The underlying technology of the thing doesn’t matter. Pointing out the properties of things you care about doesn’t contradict that. You care about privacy, reliability, security and all that good stuff. You care that your car is electric because it has lower emissions and lower environmental impact than gas, not just “because it’s electric”.
The means are not the ends.
You went on a rant about how there’s too much in the world that confuses people, but I think it might be you who’s a bit confused.
No, no one is forgetting they’re built on cryptography. It just doesn’t matter. The underlying technology of a thing doesn’t have much bearing on the properties of the thing as far as practical usage goes.
You don’t care what your car is made of as long as it has good fuel efficiency and crash rating. Steel ceramic and aluminum are just tools to that end.
Research into cryptocurrency started long before 2008. Academics and odd crypto enthusiasts have been working on it since the 80s.
The intent from the beginning has been a mix of curiosity, paranoia, and buying drugs.
Bitcoin was hardly a “for the people” project. It was initially used almost entirely for black market purchases, largely via silk road. “The people” did not give a fuck about perfect anonymous digital cash. It solved a problem that most people didn’t and still don’t have.
The adoption order was: Math nerds > drug lords > finance > small investors. It’s still not actually adopted as currency by people.
When you create a thing for the purpose of making monetary transactions untraceable, and your first major users are all using it to hide where their money came from from the government, it’s really fair to say that you created a money laundering tool.
Bitcoin wasn’t taken over by finance people, they’re the reason it didn’t taper out like previous cryptocurrencies, which either fizzled or were shutdown for being nuggets of financial crime.
Sorry, but then by that argument cryptography itself is bad because “pedos use it”? Criminals will always use privacy-preserving technology/techniques/strategies. Should we renounce our right to have secure communication, or a decentralized currency because of that? Hasn’t this argument been done to death already?
Excuse me, what? Of course it does matter if the backup for all your life’s photos is in an hard disk in your living room, or it’s on Google’s server. Of course it matters if the platform we’re talking on is Lemmy, and not Reddit. It does make a difference if the car you’re driving is gas or electric, where it was made, if it shows you ads or not. What are you going on about? It makes all the difference in the world, but that’s on “the backend” and no one remembers that it does matter
You missed the point and heard one that wasn’t being made.
No one said cryptography was bad, or that cryptocurrencies were bad because they were used for drugs and criminals.
I said that the cryptographic underpinnings of things like Bitcoin are irrelevant, and that what matters is the behavior of the system. It’s history as a vessel for laundering drug money speaks to it being a tool for money laundering, as opposed to some populist tool for freedom taken over by fintech bros. The fintech bros where there before any populist usage even started to take root.
The underlying technology of the thing doesn’t matter. Pointing out the properties of things you care about doesn’t contradict that. You care about privacy, reliability, security and all that good stuff. You care that your car is electric because it has lower emissions and lower environmental impact than gas, not just “because it’s electric”.
The means are not the ends.
You went on a rant about how there’s too much in the world that confuses people, but I think it might be you who’s a bit confused.