• orclev@lemmy.world
      2·
      22 days ago

      It isn’t, and it doesn’t need protecting. I say this as someone who was mining bitcoin back when it was still valued at under $1 a coin. The concept of bitcoin was really interesting and I had hoped that it could actually function as a digital currency outside the control of the major credit card processors. The execution however leaves much to be desired. We were promised a federated digital currency, what we got was an unregulated securities market.

      • dragontamer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        20 days ago

        Early cryptocoins had the right kind of nerds who cared about solving problems with a strange new digital… thing.

        After a few years, the community stopped solving problems and focused on money-making instead. Its a distressing and sad thing to watch, but as it became obvious that Crypto was a ponzi / money making scheme, the nerds and problem-solvers disappeared. Its very demoralizing to see your hard work used for… well… evil. Maybe not the biggest evil but wantonly stealing funds through convoluted tricks and supporting literally black market evils is evil. A lesser evil than murder but evil nonetheless.

        There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with BTC. Its just technology. But the cryptocoin world has drawn all the evil people to it, to the point that the well-meaning community has collapsed. You only see assholes with BTC these days.

        • knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social
          3·
          20 days ago

          There is something fundamentally wrong with BTC and cryptocurrency tech in general: it is incapable of actually addressing the problems it is nominally intended to solve.

  • Miles O'Brien@startrek.websiteEnglish
    4·
    21 days ago

    I did a double-take at that title so hard, I think I have ass whiplash.

    I don’t understand the connection between crypto, weed, and black men…

    • x00z@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      21 days ago

      I don’t really see one either, but maybe it’s more about how some cops are abusing laws against weed to systematically target black people?

      • Funderpants @lemmy.ca
        1·
        21 days ago

        The link to black men is pretty clear as far as I’m concerned. Possession is used as an excuse to target black men, to increase sentences, to imprison, it’s no joke.

  • Funderpants @lemmy.ca
    4·
    21 days ago

    Comment sections for this article have some serious “all lives matter” vibes. These policies likely matter to black people, especially black men, because they’re disproportionately impacted by them.

    They’re 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for possession. But almost 10x more likely in some red states.

    https://graphics.aclu.org/marijuana-arrest-report/

    Want to know what’s a big barrier to economic success? A felony like getting busted with cannabis.

    Why Crypto? Well a disproportionate number of Black people don’t trust the banks or financial services in general, and are under serviced by them. There is a generational mistrust of banks due to discriminatory practices in the banking sector. They’re five times more likely to not even have a bank account than white households. This makes loans to start a business harder to get, it increases costs to cash cheques and pushes black people towards less traditional financing or banking services like crypto.

    https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/building-trust-financial-system-key-closing-racial-wealth-gap

    Folks, I’m just saying, we all know that you too are impacted by these things, but it’s not out of line at all to direct messages to those who are impacted the most.

    When a hurricane hits Florida, threads don’t full up with comments “what about Maine?”