Why do you think freedom and decentralization is always good? I don’t think bitcoin improves lives and the majority of people view it as gambling rather than currency. Sometimes its useful to get around local regulations or to pay slightly less in fees that would normally go to a bank. Its just a different western union money transfer and yet people on here are talking about it like it represents freedom and the individual spirit or some nonsense. Its main use is to scam people out of money. Its secondary use is to facilitate purchase of illegal goods. A very small fraction of the whole is people using it as an actual currency.
I’ll put it this way, a small fraction of responsible heroin users does not make heroin as a whole a good thing.
Saleh@feddit.org 5 days ago
Well, the decentralization of Bitcoin only lasted so long. Now it is in the hand of a few large “mining” corporations who can afford the hardware and have access to cheap electricity.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
As soon as you could exchange it for real money it just became another tool of capital to move in secret.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 5 days ago
I believe any good thing you can say about crypto will eventually be coopted and controlled by capital.
The same is true for all “disruptive” technology unless it’s built specifically to be hostile to monied interests, like the fediverse - and even then, you have to continue defending it against incursions.
RedditIsDeddit@lemmy.world 5 days ago
That’s oversimplifying things quite a lot. And is also not accurate.
untakenusername@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
As long as those companies have to compete with each other for mining, there is some decentralization. Ofc it could be a ton more, some currencies like Monero use different hash functions that cant have custom chips made for them, making it easier for traditional CPUs to mine it, so large companies cant control vast amounts of the hash rate.