this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
429 points (98.4% liked)

People Twitter

6423 readers
1030 users here now

People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.

RULES:

  1. Mark NSFW content.
  2. No doxxing people.
  3. Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
  4. No bullying or international politcs
  5. Be excellent to each other.
  6. Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major figure or a politician.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

I got to be alive before mobile phones and social media.

Worth it!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 36 minutes ago

I seriously wonder how much brain damage I avoided by squeaking in my teenage years before the invention of smart phones.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 48 minutes ago

Honestly I understand better now why old people complained about computers so much. We don't even know what we lost.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 40 minutes ago

FUCK YOU! I understand crypto and STILL have a VHS tape I never returned. pfft. arrogant youth. now where do i push to send this to reddit?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 hour ago

I was born in 1983 and I’m old enough to remember having only 5 tv channels, vcr’s, and you couldn’t get on the internet if your mom was in the phone.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 hour ago

I may be older but I know how to take a selfie without my phone in it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 hours ago

It hasn't been that hard in my experience. Ignore shifts in the social landscape until the yung'ins reach a consensus about it, and always remember that time just before the dotcom crash when a company got venture funding to deliver tuna subs by mail.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 hour ago

Listen here you little shit: you think you’re superior because you rebranded Ponzi schemes with AI merde?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Crypto is an EMP away from being worthless

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I'm against crypto but this logic seems same as money is one fire away from being worthless.

Which is true. We just give worth to things to make it easy for transactions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 57 minutes ago

Also, modern money is also susceptible to an emp, arguably more so than crypto.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Cryptocurrency or cryptography?

The former you don’t really need to understand fully to use, but the latter is vital and indeed brain-melting.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 hours ago

Cryptozoology

[–] [email protected] 87 points 5 hours ago (7 children)

I understand that crypto is a scam that will rob millions of people of money they desperately need.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 hours ago

See, this guy gets it

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Then you don't understand crypto.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I don't think there is one legal use case that can only be solved by a blockchain and not cheaper and faster with a classic database.

Except money laundering, crapto is fantastic for that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago

I am sure scamming people out of their money with crypto is legal in a few jurisdictions.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 hours ago (11 children)

But what you said there is literally the end of my understanding of what crypto is. It has something to do with computers solving math problems, and somehow that’s worth money.

What?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

No, that's basically it.

The reason for all this work is basically the concept of a currency that isn't backed by and dependent upon governments while also being impossible to counterfeit, hence a lot of encryption because it fundamentally says that you can't trust the other computers that you're talking to. Everybody holds a ledger that says that you have $5, so you can't suddenly say that you actually have $10. And all the math is to prevent inflation by limiting the amount of currency that exists at any time. The more currency there is from solving the math, the harder the math gets to slow down the creation of new money.

It all falls apart, though, because the only value that crypto has is what it's worth in traditional fiat currency - the very thing that it's supposed to replace.

So it's just a bunch of computers doing a lot of math to make funny money that's supposedly worth something because...of reasons?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

It's decentralized, so how do you prevent people from making up bullshit lies that didn't happen about where the money is? You do it by incorporating a difficult math problem. Then to incentivize people to actually work on that instead of just using the money, people who solve it get a reward.

I am not pro crypto, just explaining.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Fiat currency is just as silly. As is all money, really.

"I trade numbers for food. The numbers are accessible via a magnetic strip on some plastic in my pocket." or "I trade paper for clothing but the number of papers isn't as important as the number printed ON the papers." Both of these realities are absurd. :)

As a store of value representing labor rendered: neither of those are terrible systems and most people don't understand either of them anyway. Fiat seems "normal" because we grew up with it. That said: I'm no apologist. Popular crypto currencies offer little novelty for the layperson, no true improvement on the concept of currency generally, and cost orders of magnitude more to maintain their required infrastructure. I fail to see the appeal.

There are some projects which focus on the practical utility of decentralized currency (I remember thinking Nano (wikipedia.com) was cool back in the day) but they don't get the same kind of attention as meme coins because they can't be abused as easily. I've heard stories of these kinds of tools facilitating commerce in places where the local currency collapsed. Neat as that may be it isn't revolutionary... Still more convenient than bartering via cigarette though.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (4 children)

the problem with crypto is that when you try to explain it, it sounds so stupid that someone else thinks you have to be explaining it wrong

but if you want explanation, this one is fine https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html and this https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

When I think of crypto I think of that bloke grubbing through landfill for a lost hard drive. I think of Sam Bankman Fried. I think of Trump's meme coin. Yes, I'm sure someone must be explaining it wrong to this old lady.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

It's a speculative asset that fluctuates based on the whims of billionaire hedge funds and early crypto investors. There is zero value in owning it unless you got in early enough. And even then it's a situation of the last man holding the bag. Someone will end up losing their asses.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 58 minutes ago

On average the value of any crypto token is less than 0 because of the high cost to produce and transfer them. Ironically it seems people find the most wasteful tokens more valuable. "It's hard to make so it must be valuable" or some such nonsense.

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

....why is he replying to himself?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

Character limits and/or not being able to edit the tweet to add more thoughts once posted.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

As an elder millennial, I respect gen z and alpha for coping with modern society. It may just be a fond remembrance, but things seemed much simpler then. Creative jobs weren't threatened by AI, the tech didn't exist for corporations to spy on people, the US.. well let's not get into that.

I at least got to experience a decent time in history and built up enough context where I understand what is going on in the world today. That of course leads to irreconcilable sadness with where things are going, but at least I got to experience a wild culture shift.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 hours ago

When I was a kid I always was amazed at things like my grandparents going from no electricity to microwave ovens and VCRs. I often wondered about huge cultural shifts and what that was like, going from preindustrial production to industrial or major shifts in religion that affected whole societies. Now I am experiencing it and it's very uneasy but exciting at the same time. Weirdness.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

It’s not that brain-melting. Taken one day at a time, the shift was very gradual.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 hours ago

Why you gotta do me dirty like that?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 hours ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 24 minutes ago

1971 here, I must be your great grampa.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (3 children)

8th grade teacher got pissed at us on 9/11 because he thought we were laughing at the fact that a plane had hit the WTC. We were laughing because one of the girls didn't know what the WTC was. We turned on the TVs to see the second one get hit.

6th grade we had napster while some of us were still bringing in cases of floppies to play games that'd run on the computers

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

4th grade for me, so barely old enough to understand the significance, but definitely old enough to remember airports without TSA, and being able to go all the way to the gate with whomever was flying.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Yeah, let’s see you write a new autoexec.bat file with whatever text editor came on a DOS3.2 floppy that’s infected the the Stoned virus after you stupidly deleted autoexec.bat from your 386 by going to the library and checking out some books.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 53 minutes ago (1 children)

Umm the rest of us has to write it own autoexec.bat, not because we were idiots that deleted stuff or got viruses, but to change the keyboard language and a few other things to have enough memory to play Doom.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 minutes ago

Don't forget config.sys! Who all here can get a Soundblaster working without disabling anything else? (IRQ 5 typically?)

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›