Fun fact: I first bought, mined, and traded Bitcoin in 2011, and I sold some to fund starting Framework. I was and am a believer in individual economic empowerment and decentralization. I am massively disillusioned by the reality of cryptocurrency in 2021: a seemingly never ending series of get-rich-quick schemes that deliberately consume enormous amounts of silicon and energy, at a time when we direly need waste reduction in both.
I’m much more concerned about the energy stolen in the form of inflated away wages and savings by corrupt central banks and governments. Always nice to see someone who benefited enormously from Bitcoin turn around and stab the community in the back.
Good luck copying the mac book. Glad I’m not buying one.
there are some buthurt people in this thread.
To put it out there, paraphrased and all: when someone resorts to attacking an individual as opposed to their argument, they’ve lost.
OP even if you are correct about BTC (which I firmly believe you aren’t) ad hominem attacks are not going to convince anyone you’re anything other than petty. I wish you all the best in your BTC schemes, hopefully you learn to chill the heck out.
Small startup can’t really afford to take payment in a volatile currency like btc.
I mean, imagine you’re trying to scrape together enough money to keep moving while launching your first product. You accept btc on maybe 10% of your orders. The valuation of btc drops 30% in a day because elon musk tweeted a picture of a cat.
It’s just too risky. Big players can gamble like that but FW can’t really.
Also other coins are way better in terms of environmental impact. Eth going PoS instead of PoW is a huge step forward (assuming they ever launch that fork lol)
I am pretty excited by ethereums move to proof of stake. I can see a future where many of the popular currencies move to this, and then the pros and cons of crypto can move away from energy usage, and back to the fundamentals of crypto.
I like this sentiment too but I don’t think BTC will be the one coin to rule them all. Advances made by other coins have made the original Bitcoin outdated and only as practical as the investors that believe it will keep going up and not as an actual currency.
I like what coins like Tezos and ETH PoS are promising (since crypto mining for profit only exists because the coins themselves are inefficient to move around) but that still leaves the problem someone else mentioned about how a quantum computer will one day render the security of these currencies obsolete. Cash remains the king of decentralized transactions for now (until the dollar collapses from all the inflation)
True, but there are people who believe in the fundamentals and there are consensus mechanisms that are efficient. I, for one, hope that the get rich quick schemes will flare out and the real projects will survive. (Declaration: I am working with a bunch of researchers on efficient consensus, and for us, writing a good paper and tech that works scores more than a twitter-driven number rocketing up or down. I always found it depressing when marketing and beat good solid tech.). I have a lot of sympathy for bitcoin, it is fairly decentralised, it inspired a generation of chains, it’s just inefficient. If the BTC community takes that seriously and makes some structural changes it can be fixed. Even now it is a good store of value, but it’s like gold, not like a credit card.
It’s all fun and games until you have a random flash crash like we had yesterday. Yeah, it recovered fairly quickly but holy crap that must have been scary if you have a significant position in crypto.
Yeah, I’d hate to be in that position. The key with all of this that shouldn’t be forgotten by anyone invested in crypto is that just like any investment, you have to diversify. I don’t mean spread it in various cryptocurrencies, I mean spread it between crypto, stocks, bonds, money market, whatever you need to do to limit risk.
Yeah, that was kind of my point with FW before. It’d be a huge gamble for them to accept it outright. I think there are other services where you can use it indirectly, like I put crypto on this card and while i’m paying with crypto, FW is just getting USD instead.
It’s always a gamble and sadly it feels like crypto is more of a pseudo stock than an actual currency at this current moment in time
At the risk of fanning flames, I’m so tired of this type of post. There’s always a reason not to buy a Framework:
Keyboard
Intel CPU
Screen size / aspect ratio
Thunderbolt certification
and now we need to add: butthurt about Bitcoin policies / Not metal enough for your identity politics.
I’d just enjoy it if people who don’t want to buy a Framework just… I dunno… didn’t buy one, and y’know, that’s it.
I guess some people have an inflated sense of ego or believe themselves to be influential in ways that can’t be backed up. Sorry you don’t like the policies, but, I don’t really give two cents (or, Bitcoin) about your opinion.
A better middle ground might be: Slap down some cash, and say “this is yours if you make X”. One offs won’t make it, especially with something that takes lots of engineering effort such as having a decent AMD option (which I personally would love), but if there are enough like minded people that would give builders such as Framework an incentive. Not quite like kickstarter but close. This is a builder community, after all!
@Zax & @M_Murphy: Yeah, to be clearer, when I said “this type of post” I wasn’t referring to legitimate, constructive feedback, but the whining ultimata of the entitled.
While I agree with the general sentiment that these posts are unhelpful, I would describe it in a slightly different way. In my view there’s a clear line between requesting a feature (e.g. "Please add AMD processors! Please add a trackpoint keyboard!) and being judgy about an ultimately unimportant thing. Nobody, by using Intel processors, is committing hate crimes. I haven’t heard of anyone being led to a gulag because their keyboard didn’t have a little trackpoint nipple to browse the web with. These types of features lend themselves to civil discussion very well. For me the issue arises when we forget context.
People need to stop defining themselves and other people by stupid tiny details. There’s for some reason now a social drive to enforce unimportant opinions on everyone else, and pretend they hold the same gravitas as the real issues that genuinely hurt and impact lives. By elevating the meaningless, we are diluting the meaningful. Rage fueled opinions flying as private investigators discover the use of dangerous undisclosed radioactive materials in “health” products: perfectly sensible. Murder metaphors because someone got disillusioned with BTC: unhinged/unproductive.
I agree with NRP. I see so much of the endless new coins nowadays as a consensual ponzi scheme.
Honestly I have bigger disagreements between my best friends than you do with the owner of a laptop company, if you’re waiting for a laptop company that endorses/agrees with all of your philosophical/economic/political views before you make a purchase you will probably be using an abacus for a really long time. I think it is pretty shitty to dangle this like a carrot as if you would’ve bought one if he hadn’t given his opinion on cryptocurrency. Most laptop manufacturers do not have CEOs you can speak with in forums publicly, and likely hold many political, philosophical, and economic worldviews that would run counter to your own.