Can I buy a pizza with it or pay my bills with it? Can my employer pay me in it? Or is it just an “emperor’s new clothes” thing? I just don’t see the tangible value in it. Rhetorical questions, BTW, I know you can’t buy a pizza with it, at least outside of some edge cases that I’m not aware of.

I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don’t see that with crypto.

  • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    2 months ago

    Please read https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/attack-of-the-50-foot-blockchain-bitcoin-blockchain-ethereum-smart-contracts

    Steam STOPPED taking cryptocurrencies, because of the normal level of criminality in the people drenched in them… “you do NOT want to be doing business with these people”.

    I’d use an Algorand-type blockchain for both accounting-records ( breaking “cooking the books” ) & for currency,

    but then you’ve got monero which is engineered specifically to enforce that money-laundering is unbreakable, so that organized-crime can move money without any accountability ( I’m including criminal-government-entities, including insider-trading, in organized-crime ).

    Nobody’s making the right infrastructure-decisions, … so whatever.

    _ /\ _

      • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        7 days ago

        The owner of Valve, I don’t remember his name, old round guy with a grey beard, stated exactly what I said, on video.

        _ /\ _

        • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
          2·
          7 days ago

          Do you have a link to that video? Until you do I’ll believe the official communication from the company that I linked which has examples on the issues they were facing.

          • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            7 days ago

            I asked gemini to find it…

            Apparently it was in 2 simultaneous interview-publications, by different sites…

            don’t know why I’ve got memory of it being video, instead of text, but here’s the answer I got:

            While Gabe Newell definitely made those blunt remarks, you are actually remembering a text-based print interview rather than a video clip.

            In late February 2022, during the media press tour for the launch of the Steam Deck, Gabe Newell did a series of one-on-one interviews where he addressed Valve’s ban on NFTs and why they stopped accepting Bitcoin back in 2017.

            The specific quote you are thinking of comes from two parallel interviews published on the same day:

            1. The Interview with PC Gamer

            When discussing the nightmare of accepting Bitcoin on Steam, Newell focused heavily on the sheer volume of bad actors:

            “The problem is that a lot of the actors who are in that space are not people you want interacting with your customers. We had problems when we started accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option. 50 per cent of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind-boggling number. These were customers we didn’t want to have.”

            2. The Interview with Rock Paper Shotgun

            In a companion interview published simultaneously, he used almost the exact phrasing from your memory when talking about the NFT and blockchain crowd:

            “The people in the space, though, tend to be involved in a lot of criminal activity and a lot of sketchy behaviours… With the actors that are currently in this NFT space, they’re just not people you really are wanting to be doing business with.”

            Why is there no video?

            Because these outlets sat down with Gabe in private press rooms to gather quotes for written feature articles, no official video or audio of these specific exchanges was broadcast.

            If you remember seeing or hearing it, you likely watched a video from a gaming news channel (like YongYea, Inside Gaming, or IGN) or a TikTok/YouTube Short where a narrator read Gabe’s text quotes out loud over gameplay footage or B-roll of Newell.

            He didn’t hold back, but he did it via the power of the written word!

            So, now you’ve got both explicit-quotes, AND 2 independent sources-for-that-interview.

            I hope that’s good-enough.

            I’m not digging into it any more.

            _ /\ _