Was considering purchasing until I saw your Bitcoin statement

Pretty disappointing that Framework would use energy usage fud as a reason for not accepting the most empowering and revolutionary forms of money. Bitcoin is freedom, and decentralization comes from proof of work. Proof of stake / proof of wealth is no different from the monetary system we have today. Sorry, but there’s no free lunch.

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Bitcoin is probably the worst possible currency, a single popular person can tank any cryptocurrency’s value. For example Elon Musk said he was ending his relationship with bitcoin and the value of it drops significantly.

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Who does Bitcoin actually empower in practice? I understand the theory that decentralized currency will empower the people but in practice all it seems to have done is embolden criminal enterprises, drive up the price of GPUs, and use a massive amount of energy. Blockchain is a revolutionary technology but not all revolutions are necessarily positive.

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On the contrary, I don’t believe they could not make that statement and still stick to their original goals. How does a currency that requires massive amounts of power for just 1 coin, NOT wasting energy? Block chain has many useful applications, but I have a hard time not seeing digital currency as some kind of gold rush of this century.

Only just wait until one vulnerability that makes it possible to spoof the currency or somehow steal it, whatever. Then the value of that ‘coin’ plummets to nothing, and the waste is complete.

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bitcoin is not an “empowering” currency, it is a :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:-ing collective delusion, and the sooner the world realizes it, the better. It is designed to be inefficient, which is part of where the supposed value comes from. Besides, nothing is stopping you from just exchanging your bitcoins for something else and using that to buy the laptop. Cry me a river OP. bitcoin. is. a. lie.

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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.

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It’s amazing to know that the owner of framework actually understands that cryptocurrency is delusional

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True, I also think BTC is the worst possible way to represent someone’s credibility. The finland is doing great with ethereum for smart contracts, to give identity to refugees for their work (credit). But BTC has really no purpose, its just a random type of money that increase or decrease based on hype.

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Not to mention all coins based on modern private key cryptography are a ticking time bomb. Watch what happens when your 256 bit key takes a basic quantum computer even days to crack, nevermind minutes. Don’t believe state actors won’t spend time breaking those to destabilize economies on demand, either, it would in all probability be a very effective, especially as we see desperate nations adopting coins officially.

And yes, modern banking systems rely on the same private keys, but at least with typical modern banking systems, they can update their security. That’s not happening in ecoins without a transfer of value to a separate currency. Most coins are just shy of matching the definition for a pyramid scheme, with the sole exception of ones where the work your computer does actually has a side benefit for the work it produces, at which point I’m just describing volunteering your hardware for grid computing.

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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.

Bitcoin sucks.

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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.

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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)

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Crypto is a mirage when all computers are backdoored at the hardware level - and they are.

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In case anyone else is curious what statement OP is talking about, it appears to be a reference to this tweet from May:

Though I’m guessing OP probably saw it on this slightly more recent community post:

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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.

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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)

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Gold is my favorite.

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At least it’s consistent…

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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.

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