Hey! If you write a comment about this article online, disclose your stake in cryptocurrency. I will explain why later in this post. For my part, I held <$10,000 USD worth of Bitcoin prior to 2016, plus small amounts of altcoins. I made a modest profit on my holdings. Today my stake in all cryptocurrency is $0. [...] Over the past several months, everyone in the industry who provides any kind of free CPU resources has been dealing with a massive outbreak of abuse for cryptocurrency mining. The industry has been setting up informal working groups to pool knowledge of mitigations, communicate when our platforms are being leveraged against one another, and cumulatively wasting thousands of hours of engineering time implementing measures to deal with this abuse, and responding as attackers find new ways to circumvent them. Cryptocurrency has invented an entirely new category of internet abuse. CI services like mine are not alone in this struggle: JavaScript miners, botnets, and all kinds of other illicit cycles are being spent solving pointless math problems to make money for bad actors. [...] Don’t make the mistake of thinking that these are a bunch of script kiddies. There are large, talented teams of engineers across several organizations working together to combat this abuse, and they’re losing. [...] The integrity and trust of the entire software industry has sharply declined due to cryptocurrency. It sets up perverse incentives for new projects, where developers are no longer trying to convince you to use their software because it’s good, but because they think that if they can convince you it will make them rich. I’ve had to develop a special radar for reading product pages now: a mounting feeling of dread as a promising technology is introduced while I inevitably arrive at the buried lede: it’s more crypto bullshit. [...] Any technology which is not an (alleged) currency and which incorporates blockchain anyway would always work better without it. [..] That’s what cryptocurrency is all about: not novel technology, not empowerment, but making money. [...] And those few failed economies whose people are desperately using cryptocurrency to keep the wheel of their fates spinning? Those make for a good headline, but how about the rural communities whose tax dollars subsidized the power plants which the miners have flocked to? People who are suffering blackouts as their power is siphoned into computing SHA-256 as fast as possible while dumping an entire country worth of CO² into the atmosphere? No, cryptocurrency does not help failed states. It exploits them. [...] Every comment online about cryptocurrency is tainted by the fact that the commenter has probably invested thousands of dollars into a Ponzi scheme and is depending on your agreement to make their money back. [..] Cryptocurrency is one of the worst inventions of the 21st century. I am ashamed to share an industry with this exploitative grift. It has failed to be a useful currency, invented a new class of internet abuse, further enriched the rich, wasted staggering amounts of electricity, hastened climate change, ruined hundreds of otherwise promising projects, provided a climate for hundreds of scams to flourish, created shortages and price hikes for consumer hardware, and injected perverse incentives into technology everywhere. Fuck cryptocurrency. Per una volta, non sono parole mie: https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disaster.html Giacomo Full Disclosure: non ho mai "posseduto" alcuna criptovaluta. (ma di bit ve ne posso dare quanti ne volete lo stesso! :-D)