- Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, does not believe in cryptocurrencies, calling them a vehicle for scams and a Ponzi scheme.
- Torvalds was once rumored to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, but he clarified it was a joke and denied owning a Bitcoin fortune.
- Torvalds also dismissed the idea of technological singularity as a bedtime story for children, saying continuous exponential growth does not make sense.
It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero. I’m thinking here also of his rant not long ago on social.kernel.org (a kernel devs microblog instance) that was essentially a pretty good anti-anti-leftism tirade in true Torvalds fashion.
EDIT:
Torvalds’s anti-anti-left post (I was curious to read it again):
I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.
Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.
I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?
I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.
And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.
I wonder what direction the Linux kernel will go once he’s gone. Obviously it will continue to go on and Torvalds should get a statue somewhere if he doesn’t already have one.
I don’t follow thinigs closely at all, but I’m under the impression he’s already starting to kinda take his hands off of the wheel? If so, maybe that picture is emerging now, at least behind the scenes.
Linus hasn’t written kernel code in years at this point, however he still is the final gate keeper of what gets merged and an active code reviewer, he manages the entire direction of the project.
As of what will happen when Linus passes, that’s already been decided. The position of projects leader will go to his most trusted project co-maintainer, which we have a good idea of who that is.
I remember this. That was a great day to be on the internet.
It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero.
It’s just that almost everyone else that could do it ended up being fucking ghouls of people.
Torvalds can be… brusque, sure. But he doesn’t support child labor, he doesn’t cheat on his wife, and he isn’t some crazy cult leader waging a war against workers’ rights.
Another interesting thing to consider.
To be clear, he is rich. But he’s not crazy crazy rich, like nowhere near billionaire status.
With that in mind, his kernel is a key component of RedHat’s, SuSE’s and Canonical whole business, with at least two of those being multi billion dollar businesses.
His kernel is a key component of Android phones, which represent over 50 billion a year in hardware spend, and a bunch of software money on top of that.
His kernel is foundational to most hosting/cloud services with just mind blowing billions of revenue quarterly.
It’s used in almost every embedded device on the planet, networking gear, set top boxes, thermostats, televisions, just nearly everything.
People with a fraction of that sort of relevance are billionaires several times over. A number of billionaires owe much of their success to him. Yet he is not among their numbers.
Now there’s more to things than just a kernel to be sure, but across the hundreds of billions of dollars made while running Linux, there was probably plenty of room for him to carve out a few billion for himself were he that sort of person, but he cares about the work more than gaming the dollars. I have a great deal of respect for that.
Means that while he may not always be right, but I at least believe his assessments are sincere and not trying to drive some grift or cover some insecurity about being left behind.
gitis a way more important contribution to the world that the linux kernel IMO. Its basically the assembly line of almost all modern software production. And Linus actually wrote most of the initial code for it. With Linux he organized the project but was almost immediately not a major contributor. He developed git in the process of maintaining the linux repo.I disagree. Git is great but we’d have done fine with Subversion or whatever. Could you imagine the whole internet running on Windows Server though? The thought alone makes my skin crawl.
You probably need to learn a bit more about VCS fundamentals if you think Subversion would’ve been fine.
I’m old enough to remember the SVN days (he’ll, even the CVS and…dare I say it… source safe days).
Git is fantastic. It’s pretty universally uses because it’s the best dvcs out there and it’s free. It wipes the pants with the likes of mercurial.
In certain industries (such as gaming) there’s still a strong hold by perforce but we can ignore that as it’s proprietary and a bit specialised.
Anyway, as great as git is for making things easier and cleaner when dealing with distributed development, it by no means makes something impossible “possible” - it just makes it a hell of a lot easier.
The Linux kernel on the other hand enabled a lot of impossible things. Remember back in the day there wasn’t anything free and open source in the operating system world, it was all proprietary and licensed. If you wanted to create your own operating system, you basically had no option but to spend a fortune either writing your own kernel or licensing someone else’s (and the licensing part means you cannot distribute it for free).
The fact that the FSF has always wanted to write their own OS and never been able to achieve it without the Linux Kernel, in spite of them essentially writing “everything else” that makes up an operating system, shows just how nontrivial this is.
Free software would be just using freebsd or whatever, it wouldn’t be that different
Well, I think Linus Torvalds is one of the rare rich people who actually “deserves” being rich.
I think the main motive behind leftism should be stopping 8 people from owning the 50% of the world’s wealth, not to distribute Linus Torvalds’ 50 million dollars which a well deserved amount of wealth for someone who created the OS which runs the modern world.
Besides, what Linus owns is not even a droplet compared to billionaires like Bezos, Musk or Bill Gates
I think it’s a shining example of the ‘right’ sort of rich. Despite a significance that overwhelmingly exceeds usual billionaire level, he’s not nearly so ‘rich’ and yet he has enough to just not worry about money, but he has earned it.
Its good to see some antileftism once in a while. We need some other perspectives. I didn’t think we’d get it from Linus but here we are.
You might want to re-read that.
Why does the headline say “Crypto” but then snippet says “cryptocurrencies”? Do people not realize these are not the same thing? The inventor of Linux does believe in crypto, that’s why it’s in Linux!
They don’t. Just like “AI” has been co-opoted to mean “algorithm”.
Large groups of humans turn everything they touch into shit.
If after 16 years you still have to be asked if you believe in crypto, then chances are that it is a scam.
For all the reasons that crypto is a scam, every “value” stock - stock which does not now, and never has any intention of ever paying dividends - is also a scam.
Behind a value stock is a profitable company. Behind crypto-tokens is a hilariously inefficient database with no application in real life.
Gamble away your money, I’ll take the stock - or “have fun staying poor” like crypto-token morons like to say.
Good point, I always wondered if there is a way the technology will evolve and somehow find a niche that’s unexpected. But you’re right, 16 years is a long time to be meandering.
It’s such a first-world thing to not understand all the good that crypto has done. There are countless lives that have been financially saved by having a safe place to hold wealth while their countries’ fiat collapsed. It’s just a short matter of time until many first world folks understand this as well.
Sounds like the same shit those rare metal guys are always yapping about but with extra scams…
Then why does the kernel have a crypto API?
Checkmate, Satoshi Torvalds!
Its just a big money laundering scheme
And/or a fucking casino
A bad one, at that. I think the reason many governments are going with it is because it’s far less untraceable than some idiots like to believe.
So you are saying more than the population of the United States as money launderers because somewhere between 400 and 550 million people use cryptocurrency. I kind of doubt they are all money launderers.
Why not? Couldn’t crypto be enabling money laundering on a massive scale?
This one is a bit old, but… https://medium.com/@MUBC/privacy-coins-debunking-myths-about-illegal-usage-9150c49a31a7
I can’t find it at the moment, but I saw a report for 2023 or 2024 that something like 0.4% of all crypto transactions are illicit activity. So that would mean roughly 1.9 million people use it for such activity, which is a far cry from 400 million.
They got to him
Who is ‘they’?
Either you’re dumb or playing dumb. Either way, bad look.
I fucking guarantee that Linus Torvalds DOES believe in cryptography. Stop calling cryptocurrency “crypto”, because “crypto” is short for cryptography, not cryptocurrency.
shut the fuck up, nerd.
Linus creates kernels. Nothing to do with cryptocurrency. Tech is tech, but I wouldn’t necessarily listen to him about other things than kernels and computers. For example, he doesn’t even believe in FOSS, and he openly supports Google because of Android, Chromebooks and ChromeOS using Linux.
I think there was a potential future where cryptocurrency could’ve actually been useful, but it was ruined by scammers, rug pullers, and of course, speculators.
I’ll still hold a little bit of Monero, since it holds the most potential for being a real currency in my opinion. But otherwise, I fully agree with the sentiment.
When the Wild West was around Medicine was used as a scam too. Snake Oil salesmen aren’t very nice people. But that doesn’t mean medicine is a bad idea ya know?
I agree that there are a lot of snake oil sellers in the cryptographic currencies realm. But that world is basically the digital wild west at the moment to me. I too am waiting to see what happens.
The difference is that medicine, as a concept, is useful.
Is not currency, as a concept, useful? How about transfer of value over vast distances instantly? Is that not useful?
Well know you are just using circular logic. The thing is that cryptocurrencies aren’t currencies.
I hear what you’re saying. But USDC is absolutely a token on many different ledgers that represents a currency.
I’ve been deep in decentralized finance for years as an investor and fulltime software dev. I get the whole “hur hur Bitcoin is dum” but you’re really missing the forest focusing on a tree.
USDC is absolutely a token on many different ledgers that represents a currency.
No, it is a speculative investment. If it were a currency it would be something people were using to buy things, accepting for selling things, using to pay taxes and fines, using to invest in something else, etc.
It’s not a currency, it’s at best some kind of intermediate thing used to buy even more speculative “investments”.
Didn’t you repeat what I said? It’s a token on decentralized ledgers that represents a currency. Like a number in the database at your bank. No different than that.
You deposit your currency at a bank, it’s a number in a database. You earn interest on your investment.
Are you saying that is a different concept than usdc deposited into a lending market on a decentralized ledger and earning interest?
Also, usdc is accepted places. In fact Stripe is adding it as a payment method very soon. Would that make it a currency, or does it have to reach some level of acceptance? What about PayPal balance? Currency?
The vast majority of the crypto world failed to understand one key concept, money is not the value for which goods/services are exchanged, it is the value by which they are exchanged. People do not have a use or value for money beyond what it can be exchanged for, if no one is willing to exchange for it, it has no value.
Crypto only had value as a currency if people would accept it for goods or services, and the only thing people ever accepted it as payment for, in any meaningful capacity, were illegal goods and services. The value beyond that was purely based on a speculative ideological assumption that people would abandon the traditional banking system for a new system that they couldn’t buy anything with.
Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, does not believe in cryptocurrencies, calling them a vehicle for scams and a Ponzi scheme.
To be fair, that’s because Crypto is a vehicle for scams, and a Ponzi scheme.
Thank goodness. Such a useless technology.
Scratch that… it’s not useless, because it’s great for scams and fraud. It’s actively harmful.
The modern tech industry needs the old Linus to pay it a visit. Too many grifts
I for one would love for Linus, probably Woz, and a third party yet to be decided(this would be Aaron Schwartz in a better world) to be given free reign to gut the whole industry and rebuild it into something isn’t wholly based on ad revenue and grift
Edit: a bunch of good suggestions of people I need to read about for position three. If anyone can think of a digital equivalent to Marshall McLuhan I think we desperately needs input of that sort
Richard stallman is the only answer.
I really hate everything he says, but so far on a lot enough timescale he has been fucking right about everything
Maybe Cory Doctorow?
Stallman.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Stallman, is in fact, GNU/Stallman, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Stallman. Stallman is not a man unto himself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
I lack the creativity, but someone please come up with a recursive acronym for Stallman.
All you need to do is make the
Sstand for “Stallman”, and you’ll get a stack overflow before ever reaching the other letters (so you don’t need to think of a value for them).Asked ChatGPT
Stallman Tenaciously Advocates Liberation, Leading Movements Against Non-freedom
Crypto means cryptography, stop using it to talk about cryptocurrency.
Is it not clear which definition of Crypto he’s using?
Linus coming out against cryptography seems so unrealistically silly to me that it’s not even worth considering.
The security of Linux 2000 will be based entirely on steganography, Linux founder announces
good luck, I’m sure this comment will change how everyone talks from now on.
Crypto means hidden, stop using it to talk about cryptography.
He is just like me. I don’t mess with the chucky cheese token money.
