Not involved with any fishy crypto fishy business

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I'm told that there are people claiming to "tokenize" my git repositories with my approval.

I just want to clarify that that is not the case. I do not believe in monetizing my repositories.

If you believe crypto-currencies are anything but a scam, I have a bridge to sell you.

But I'm not selling source code.

If you believe crypto-currencies are anything but a scam, I have a bridge to sell you.
This is just pure ignorance, lol, you can skip crypto if you want, and probably 90% of the garbage projects are scam, but claiming anything is scam, is just raw ignorance.

Yo, that's straight-up disrespect to our godfather. Without his work, you wouldn't even have the tech to post this comment. He's not just right, he's been calling it like it is. The real problem in crypto is perception. The tech itself is solid, but people turn it into a scam by chasing quick money, pumping hype coins, and selling false promises. Linus isn't necessarily against crypto itself, he's more likely against the circus around it.

You can have an opinion without offending anyone. The biggest offense is calling all crypto related projects, a scam.

Don't put people in pedestals, everyone makes mistakes, grow up and don't be a fanboy with fallacies. I could criticize that statement here, on X or in person, it does not matter.

If you believe crypto-currencies are anything but a scam, I have a bridge to sell you.

This is just pure ignorance, lol, you can skip crypto if you want, and probably 90% of the garbage projects are scam, but claiming anything is scam, is just raw ignorance.

Note: I am not entirely certain I actually wrote the line above, but I certainly did paraphrase it. Having said that, I should have been more specific. I am not at all challenging the tech behind cryptocurrencies. It is a brilliant idea, and from what I have seen, brilliantly executed. What I am calling a "scam" is the way people are using it.

It is my contention that this entire scenario was created by people who just don't understand what a currency is supposed to be.

As put very succinctly by the Central Bank of Australia in their excellent educational materials ( https://www.rba.gov.au/education/resources/explainers/pdf/what-is-money.pdf ), the standard definition of what makes something "money" (i.e. a currency) is that it is a:

• widely accepted means of payment
• unit of account
• store of value

Let's look at how cryptocurrencies -- the way they are currently implemented -- stack up:

• Widely accepted means of payment: Depends on your threshold, but if I'm lost in a strange city far from home, I'll take a $100 bill in my pocket over any amount of bitcoin. Wouldn't you? FAIL.
• Unit of account: wildly fluctuating values can only mean one answer: FAIL.
• Store of value: again, wildly fluctuating values make this a FAIL.

The original idea behind bitcoin was that it would provide all three of these attributes. It was supposed to be a digital version of cash, meaning that one could enjoy the benefits of cash (anonymity, universal acceptance) while being secure at the same time. Being "secure" means giving a digital unit of currency a comparable security that being a unique physical object gives to a $20 bill.

As I have stated, the technology behind cryptocurrencies is very solid. But, instead of trying to establish bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as a stable means of exchange, that is, an accepted unit of account and a store of value, somehow they became more akin to chips in some sort of bizarro-world gambling casino, a world in which possession of chips has somehow gained a value in and of itself that people pay more and more to have, thus becoming -- in some very important ways -- the opposite of cash.

So why aren't "real" currencies like the U.S. Dollar also a scam, and what gives "real" currencies the attributes of being "money"? It is because they are issued by governments through their central banks, and declared legal forms of tender in their respective countries. But MUCH more importantly, the value of, for example, $1.00 in U.S. dollars, is agreed by all parties before, during, and after all financial transactions using dollars, VOLUNTARILY. If you go to a street vendor in Paris, and offer Euros to pay for a sandwich, there is virtually no chance that the vendor will question the value of these Euros; in fact the vendor almost certainly has published a menu that lists the value of each served food item in Euros. You leave your house in the morning with X number of Euros in your pocket, confident that those Euros will buy you what you need for the day, whether it is a tank of fuel at the nearest filling station, a sandwich from a street vendor, or whatever else.

Imagine trying to do that with any of the current "established" cryptocurrencies. You would have no idea whatsoever what the value of X bitcoin that you have in your pocket will be worth at the end of the day. Street vendors' menus would be a mess because of unpredictable bitcoin value, and what was once a simple, stress-free transaction over lunchtime could very well dissolve into pitted battles of haggling and likely creation of a "black market" using gold, silver, or other materials that have some sort of intrinsic value.

The bottom line is that, in my humble opinion, the lofty ideals of the originators of cryptocurrency technology -- to imbue transactions made with digitally-based units of exchange the stability and trust that physical-world transactions made with physical-world units of exchange such as cash enjoy -- has been completely usurped by people trying to make a quick profit from people who have never understood what a currency is supposed to be.