35 crypto companies got together to make a change dot org petition called “Bitcoin Deserves an Emoji”.
F that
Fuck Emojis
Proprietary money is a scam.
fighting for bitcoin to get an emoji is stupid, but fighting against it might be even stupider. surely there are more important things to spend your time and energy on. it’s a fucking emoji. who cares?
It would create legitimation and that could further increase its popularity
normalizing scams, by laundering their image via standards organizations, pollutes our communications environment. Both an emoji and a petition are symbolic - and our symbols are in fact important.
Bitcoin isn’t a scam. All non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies are scams.
People often hear about stuff like coins that are pre-mined, or proof-of-stake and the schemes and scans that come out of those, and immediately associate Bitcoin with the same thing.
Of course bitcoin is a scam. It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere. It’s only purpose is a pump and dump scheme for early adopters.
It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere
Lol
It’s only purpose is a pump and dump scheme for early adopters.
This is exactly what many alt-coins are but Bitcoin is decidedly not.
You’re confusing “easy to mine” with “early adopter scam”.
It’s a “currency” you can’t spend anywhere.
You could’ve at least pretended to have done some basic research…
That is also not 100% true. There are several altcoins with fantastic utility. Monero and Ethereum come to mind.
I wouldn’t argue with that. I was mostly generalizing.
Ethereum has scam characteristics though. The creator Vitalik gave himself time to mine it alone before giving public access. He secured for himself quite a nice stash
That’s true. I suspect the application programming is the only reason that it actually took off.
Exactly. Most cryptocurrencies are scams, but a handful are fantastic. Ethereum is cool for being proof-of-stake (so no high-energy mining), and Monero is cool for being super privacy-oriented. There are a handful more, but honestly, if you stick with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero, you’ll be fine.
That’s pretty much exactly my thought. I hold a very very small amount in Polygon, but only in order to pay the gas fees for the Polygon network. So I never have more than a few US dollars worth in it at a time.
Yeah, I basically just do Monero, and I use it as a spend account and use it anywhere it’s accepted. I don’t invest in any cryptocurrencies because I don’t think cryptocurrencies have positive expected return (it’s all hype), so I keep the amount of crypto I have small.
millions of people who use emojis would constantly see it. It would slowly start to feel more familiar to them and increase its acceptance. If that works, others would try to do the same and we would have every and any company put their logos in. If it doesnt then it doesnt matter that much, but i dont want to risk yet another avenue for corporations to worm into peoples minds.
Personally i dont care about emojis at all but i do care about general mentalspace.
Cryptocurrency is speedrunning ruining everything. We might as well have a laugh at the cryptobros’ expense in the meantime.
I would rather point my finger at wall street or financial institutions not at the tools that offers a viable option to avoid these
I loved the concept at first, the idea of a decentralized currency all handled by encryption, and transactions permamently stored in a public ledger for all to see.
Then the cryptobros and the scammers caught wind of it and it’s all downhill from there.
If you want the name of a payment techology that isn’t snake oil, isn’t blockchain-based, isn’t a cult, doesn’t claim to be a currency, doesn’t work on proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, but actually does provide certain privacy guarantees for your basic purchasing needs, is cryptographically secure, and can be used with only FOSS, I recommend looking into GNU Taler.
The only downside is that it’s not really supported anywhere at all yet. But I do hope it becomes a real thing some day.
GNU Taller is pretty fragile, though. One bank issues unbacked tokens and the credibility of the whole system goes down the drain. It’s the current financial system, just rebranded. Also, it promotes taxation which automatically makes it a cult & scam.
One bank issues unbacked tokens
- The Taler protocol has bank auditors built-in.
- Your hypothetical would just as much apply to existing debit cards.
- Unbacked tokens. You mean like Tether? (Let alone Terra.)
Also, it promotes taxation which automatically makes it a cult & scam?
The fuck? How does Taler “promote taxation?”
Fuckin’ Libertarians.
Unbacked tokens. You mean like Tether?
Exactly like Tether. USDT was never backed 1:1 by USD. They don’t even try to deny it anymore. They admit it’s backed by “various assets, including BTC”, which smells like a market manipulation.
How does Taler promote taxation?
“Customers can stay anonymous, but merchants can not hide their income through payments with GNU Taler. This helps to avoid tax evasion and money laundering.”
Thank you for being honest about being pro-tax-evasion and pro-money-laundering.
isn’t blockchain-based, doesn’t work on proof-of-work or proof-of-stake
These things weren’t introduced as a gimmick they are used to solve specific problems.
Please describe how I can send the money to my mom in Russia (disconnected from SWIFT) with GNU Taler today. I’ll wait.
I don’t know how I could possibly have been more explicit about it not yet being ready for any real-world use cases than I was.
It will never be ready. It doesn’t even make sense. To transact with real fiat like the US dollar, you’ll have to go through an official on-ramp and an off-ramp of the respective government. And to do an international transaction you’ll have to use one of the widely accepted systems like SWIFT. GNU Taler doesn’t appear to address anything like that. Anyhow, my comment was made with the premise of this whole thread in mind, i.e. “Bitcoin is stupid” or “snake oil”. Yet there’s no alternatives to what crypto provides. So is it that stupid after all?
How wasteful!
Anyhow, today I’m going to resume using a currency backed by oil and nukes, which encourages consumption on purpose. I will then either exploit workers by investing in a for-profit business, or get poorer.
But someday, in the future, economics will work the way I expect them to. That’s when I’ll switch to something better!
Russia has had oil and nukes and it didn’t stop the ruble from collapsing in the 90s
Maybe reexamine your assumptions
lol the downvotes. your mom is clearly evil and doesn’t deserve any money
Exactly. With Monero, she gets it in seconds and no one can stop it.
Thanks, I’ll read on it :)
Yea, that is interesting! I don’t really understand a lot of it though. Wonder how censorship-resistant it can be, and whether the receiver would be able to cash it out anonymously.
I’m not an expert on it, but I’ve done a certain amount of study on it.
I’m pretty sure there are no privacy guarantees for money receivers. Merchants/sellers would still be identifiable by banks and governments and such. So Taler isn’t what anyone selling heroin or doing murder for hire would want to be using as an accepted payment method. (At least not any more so than credit/debit card transactions will help the seller with keeping their doings secret.)
But Taler can keep the buyers’ identity secret. Unless you’re doing things in ways that reveal information about yourself, your bank and your government wouldn’t know you were buying fursuits even if they knew the merchant was selling fursuits.
So all that to say that no, the merchant couldn’t cash out anonymously.
What I don’t understand is whether it is like “Taler is obtained and cashed out only in a bank, but the link between two events is unknown” or if Taler can change hands during said “link”.
If the former - I really hope it gets implemented as a card replacement, but it would need to coexist with something like Monero (which is what I use now) that is more akin to cash. But I really hope that somehow non-blockchain full-on “digital cash” could one day be invented, so wonder if this could be it :)
How I understand it is:
- You go to your bank (or use a webapp or whatever) who knows who you are and get them to initiate a withdrawl from your bank account to your Taler wallet in the amount of, say $100.
- The balance in your Taler wallet goes up by $100. The bank also decrements your bank account by $100 and puts that $100 in an escrow holding intending to pay it to whatever recipient(s) can provide cryptographic proof that you gave them Taler.
- You go to a merchant and pay out of that $100 Taler balance $9 for a cheeseburger and fries.
- The merchant receives $9 in Taler from you and checks with your bank that that $9 hasn’t already been spent previously before concluding the payment process and giving you your receipt and burger.
- You now have a burger and fries and your Taler balance is $91.
- But the merchant doesn’t learn anything about your identity in the process. But they do have proof that your bank has $9 in escrow earmarked for them (the merchant) specifically.
- And your bank doesn’t know which of their customers to which they’ve ever given Taler is the one buying from the merchant in question. They just know that of the total sum of Taler they’ve issued that hasn’t been collected yet, $9 is earmarked for such-and-such merchant/burger joint.
- The merchant can settle up any time, but theoretically the bank can charge per-transaction fees. In order to minimize fees, it behooves the merchant to batch up settlements. The merchant can claim actual USD for every dollar that was used at that establishment by customers via Taler over, say, the last week or whatever in one big settlement batched transaction.
I’m leaving out some details, but that should give you a decent idea of how things work with Taler.
Now, as for this bit:
if Taler can change hands during said “link”.
That, I’m not sure of. It might be that you can transfer Taler from your wallet to someone else’s wallet (that they could then spend) without any identities being revealed, though they wouldn’t be able to get real USD or whatever without working with your bank which would generally insist on confirming their identity. But I’d think in order for the recipient in that situation to know that they actually had real Taler and not Taler that you had already spent and that wouldn’t actually work if they tried to spend it or cash it in, they’d have to make basically an API call to your bank, though unless the bank blocked all traffic from every VPN and traffic anonymizer (like Tor or I2p) in existence, I see no reason why it couldn’t be done in a way that preserved the recipient’s anonymity.
So yeah. Not sure. But even if that bit isn’t a thing, I still want Taler to take off.
Ah, so probably would not work to evade censorship/sanctions. I would REALLY love to use such a thing instead of my card though.
The only downside is that it’s not really supported anywhere at all yet. But I do hope it becomes a real thing some day.
AFAIK there’s a lot of talk about making GNU Taler the basis for the ‘digital Euro’ which is curently being debated at the EU Parliement.
Scammers use the technology because it actually works and does what it says it does. And criminals and scammers and such are generally the first ones to adopt a new technology. Such as bank robbers adopting the automobile in order to get away faster.
I liked the idea for awhile as well. But for me, learning about the “proof of work” underpinning is what changed my mind. That - and the fact that cryptocurrency does not actually have any of the strengths that it claims to have. It’s definitely and interesting idea… but in practice it’s all just scams and incentivised waste.
That’s interesting. I’ve initially written it off as a scam. Until I’ve learned about the proof-of-work.
Did they or did a bunch of media get pushed that told us all what these crypto bros were doing like shitting on beaches and taking our jobs.
Seriously though I’m picking up on a trend that a lot media has a greater influence on opinion then I’ve ever seen before
Bitcoin is over 15 years old now, that’s not a particularly fast speedrun.
Is the government spreading anti-cryptocurrency propaganda or did lemmy got invaded by idiots recently?
Lots of people on the left don’t seem to like crypto on a fundamental level. A lot of the time they seem like they have a tenuous grasp on the concept, at best, and are just parroting what they heard someone else say. Most of the time they’re projecting their criticisms of Bitcoin onto the entire concept of digital currency.
I consider myself a progressive, and I got some ETH at a good time a few years ago, but I’ve been desperate for an exit point in the market for over a year (fomo feels bad man) because the sentiment for crypto among everyone who isn’t an an-cap or tech-bro hobbyist has been atrocious for some time now.
To be clear, I don’t really care for Bitcoin. It was first, and I appreciate how clever it was, mathematically and such, when it was anonymously put out there. But other than that it’s kind of shit. It’s like saying that wax cylinders are better than vinyl records, or even CDs, because they came first.
I hate that people seem to only have room in their brains for one word for “digital currency,” and it happens to be the one with no real useful functionality, while being an absolute disaster for the environment.
It’s not some kind of panacea, but people are writing off (or actively hating on) some very interesting tech. with actual use-cases like Ethereum or Monero (the former of which reduced it’s power consumption by over 99% after switching to Proof-of-Stake, and the latter does not use ASIC miners and is significantly less resource intensive than BTC), because they didn’t get it perfect on the first try. That said, Monero will never be a good long-term investment because it’s too secure and that scares governments. Monero is like what people (at least used to) think Bitcoin is… That is, anonymous, untraceable, etc. No way that succeeds as an investment, and good luck actually using it as a currency with all that volatility.
I think the concept of a digital currency is here to stay whether people like it or not. I think it makes more sense to push for ones that can potentially solve actual issues and aren’t a disaster for the environment, so people don’t call them all “Bitcoin,” like people do for “Q-Tips”. Probably too late.
If I had to guess, long term, nations will see the writing on the wall and start using their own tailor-made CBDCs (Central-Bank Digital Currency) and it’ll probably suck. They will 100% use it for control and oppression. So that’s some fun stuff to look forward to.
the former of which reduced it’s power consumption by over 99% after switching to Proof-of-Stake
This isn’t necessarily a good thing, there are many arguments against POS. You shouldn’t use non-green energy resources to begin with, if people use these to mine that’s not bitcoin fault.
This is what the overwhelming majority of people believe. No offense, but were you spending a lot of time on r/Bitcoin?
The majority of people believes what the government makes them believe, so it make sense.
Nah, idiots bring shitty crypto propaganda and pretend it isn’t just an unregulated security pretending to be an alternative currency (that isn’t usable as a currency for regular people) while using more energy than entire nations, all for a giggle with a shit coin.
Are you sure you are not confusing propaganda with ads?
Cryptocurrencies are quite easy to use, the process to create a cryptocurrency wallet is much easier than the procedure required to create a bank account or a credit card and these days cryptos are widely accepted even as a currency.
Are you sure you are not confusing propaganda with what crypto is actually used for?
I don’t care how easy it is to set up a wallet. I cannot take my crypto and go down to the bodega and buy a sandwich. I can’t pay my rent with crypto. I can’t pay my utilities with crypto.
Crypto is not a usable currency for the vast majority of people.
I cannot take my crypto and go down to the bodega and buy a sandwich.
^(but I admit that 95% of the time there is a payment middleman needed to convert crypto to fiat, just like Visa is a middleman)
So what you are literally stating is you cannot use cryptocurrency to pay you need to convert into some other actually accepted currency…
Also, have you ever been somewhere that is card only?
There are ways. Visa has crypto-linked cards for example.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/visa-crypto-withdrawals-cards-145-countries
Before the government enforced credit cards and made them mandatory it would have been really hard to buy a sandwich in bodega with a credit card too. Not sure where you live but these days in most places if you want you can literally pay with all sort of service, they have these big cash registers with the screen that accepts all soft of payment youtubers advertise for.
Crypto is not a usable currency for the vast majority of people.
There aren’t any limits that prevents the majority of people from creating a crypto wallet and using cryptocurrencies
I don’t care how easy it is to set up a wallet. I cannot take my crypto and go down to the bodega and buy a sandwich. I can’t pay my rent with crypto. I can’t pay my utilities with crypto.
There aren’t any limits that prevents the majority of people from creating a crypto wallet and using cryptocurrencies
This is why people laugh at you cryptobros. I literally tell you why it’s not a usable currency and you tell me it totes is.
Go back to speeding up climate change with your fake currency and stop trying to pretend normal people are using it to for anything other than unregulated securities trading.
Go back to speeding up climate change with your fake currency
cryptocurrencies provides an open alternative to a centralized and rotten financial system that is at the core of consumerism and the speedrun of mankind into oblivion.
Yet it still isn’t a usable currency for normal people, and the usage of it is a (gross as well as net) negative to society is directly contributing to, to quote you, the “speedrun of mankind into oblivion.”
You practically use the energy output of a nuclear reactor to process transactions. So I think you’re the ones pushing the expediation of the human races extinction. What’s worse is your been obnoxious while doing it.
No, people just don’t like crypto because it’s a huge waste of energy that has no use for the average person at the moment and is only used by rich people to get richer without much regulation. Don’t get me wrong, it might definitely be useful when used correctly in the future. Not wasting as much energy by ditching proof of work, becoming actually useful for normal transactions, etc. But right now it’s just an overhyped technology for obnoxious cryptobros.
it might definitely be useful when used correctly in the future
I can almost see the monk smacking an orphan for holding the spoon in the wrong hand :D
no use for the average person at the moment
I mean…I’ll go one further. I know there have been many historical “aged like milk” quotes, like about how much RAM computers need, but I’m still saying this in confidence: I don’t think that cryptocurrency or blockchains will ever have a useful purpose. Their design is built to solve societal problems, but introduces worse problems in implementing them. This goes well beyond just taking too much electricity.
They already have a useful purpose. Sending crypto is much easier than sending different currencies into different countries. The services exist, but they are prohibitively expensive if you’re sending like $50
Send Monero or something and it’s far easier and faster. You can exchange it for your own currency locally or just sit on it.
Just gonna copy/paste this from someone else’s comment in this thread: https://www.reuters.com/technology/california-dmv-puts-42-million-car-titles-blockchain-fight-fraud-2024-07-30/
So… whoops. That didn’t take long, huh?
Every time one of these articles is posted, I predict a very very short investigation into the technical workings of the project will find that the same could’ve been done with a much simpler central database. Or, that they were actually using a database at the backend and wasting their whole crypto approach.
And we all know technology never changes or improves over time. Good catch.
Technology absolutely improves.
But blockchain is worse. And it’s not close.
No, people just don’t like crypto because it’s a huge waste of energy that has no use for the average person
This is actually part of government propaganda to discredit cryptocurrencies.
Lemmy servers consume energy too and half of the content is memes, i don’t see anyone complaining about it.
You can’t begin to imagine just how much energy cryptocurrencies use. A web server can never come close.
A web server can never come close
but AI model training can.
Pretty sure people have been shitting on AI pretty heavily as well, partly for those reasons (but also for several others).
I’m sure meta or google energy usage is up there but i’ve yet to see someone complaining about mr.beast or cristiano ronaldo wasting energy with their videos.
Maybe because people value entertainment more than invisible money that won’t help them anyway.
or more like because the government doesn’t have problems with people keeping themself busy on entertainment vs them using a decentralized and open currency that can bypass financial institutions
I’m pretty sure the government isn’t forcing people to watch YouTube and neither of the people you mentioned are government employees, unless you’re concocting some elaborate Alex Jones-level conspiracy theory.
Yeah because they have a lot of servers. The problem is each individual web server does not use a lot of energy whereas each individual server running a crypto currency blockchain uses a lot of energy for that one server.
Bitcoin ≠ cryptocurrency.
Ethereum lowered it’s power consumption by over 99% after switching to Proof-of-Stake.
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and we don’t even fucking know who came up with it.
How about we don’t throw away the possibility of 5.1 Surround Sound Blu-Ray Audio, because wax cylinders sound like shit?
“Computers are cool and all, but they take up entire rooms and only do simple calculations! It’s a complete waste of time and money to invest in such a technology!”
^That’s you
Suggestion: We do with the Bitcoin emoji what people did with the eggplant emoji. The B stands for butthole. So now we can do [eggplant emoji] [bitcoin emoji].
I’m sure the TOTALLY NOT HOMOPHOBIC tech bros will love it.
We must do this if it happens.
Have you checked your =B=?
I think I should post a 1000 word essay about why I dislike the merman emoji.
Stupid indeed.
If we’re not getting an asshole emoji this will suffice.
It’ll make it easier to filter out spam. If it contains this emoji, delete it.
Can’t believe I wasted brainspace reading that garbage
Does anyone remember when one of Maine’s US Senators lobbied Unicode to create a lobster emoji?
Bitcoin already has a unicode sign, which is plenty. We don’t need an emoji, we need better user access to the full unicode set. (To date, on both mobile and desktop, I have to sometimes websearch specific characters and copy-paste, and not all emoji are displayed on my PC Firefox browser, though it’s better now than last year). Also curiously, the Lemmy website text editor emoji picker only places an emoji at the end of the text, not where the cursor is (and adds a space I don’t want).
The current Emoji library has a frog face, 🐸 not a frog body. That’s a higher priority than a bitcoin. I could see some kind of generic crypto coin, maybe. Maybe.
On a parallel subject, I do think the international community would do well to create a decentralized currency, and I do think blockchain may figure into this, but it needs to be secure and allow for anonymous transactions, and not allow for tampering with the ledger. Bitcoin has failed on all three accounts. We need a better, more robust system, but it seems all current cryptocurrencies are practice, and toys for prospectors and gamblers until we make a robust one.
I absolutely do not want to encourage the ransomware industry.
