Why Vivaldi will never create ThinkCoin

[DoctorG]

Coin mining is the "new" technology to increase more and more the world wide carbon footprint.
Vivaldi should never be part of such system.

[igorditerni]

Great and clear article, as usual.
A browser wallet can be useful only if you can buy something real in a store but now it is not possible in all the most part of stores so it is only a high risk investment and high resources consumption, not needed.

[Pesala]

I think cryptocurrency is potential much more than just a pyramid scheme. It is still in its infancy. Problems like energy use and transaction speed/cost are soluble.

The ₿ Word.

I would never recommend it. In my opinion, is better to invest in TSLA, which has real assets and great potential, with a stated mission of accelerating the transition to sustainable energy. I don't see any better investment, with a good balance between risk and ROI.

This is not investment advice. Do your own due diligence, stock prices can go down as well as up, etc.

[DoctorG]

Investing in *Coin and *Chain is like gambling, with fraud, robbery, tax evasion, vanished wallets and so on.

[Pathduck]

@doctorg said in Why Vivaldi will never create ThinkCoin:

like gambling, with fraud, robbery, tax evasion, vanished wallets and so on.

Just like good ol' regular money then

[nordschatten]

Good to hear Totally agree with you there, its good that Vivaldi is backing sanity.

[Frattaro]

Wow this is a really terrible take.

First, I'm sick of hearing the environmental argument. Ripple, Hedera both use less energy per transaction than VISA.

You want a use case? Remember the financial crisis of 2008? Could have been entirely avoided if distributed ledger technology was available. Why? Because the root cause was short-term liquidity and trust issues -- both solved by DLT.

If you have DLT running property titling, credit scores, and fractionalized NFTs with smart contracts for mortgages, you can get a mortgage same-day in many cases. And with credit scores, you don't need to worry about things like Experian data breaches and identity theft.

As for "the revolution", it does have the potential of restoring the American Dream. That is, a world where those with the lowest incomes see the greatest income growth -- bucking the trend of seeing those with the highest incomes seeing the greatest income growth that's been going on since at least the 1980s.

[jon]

Lately I have been hearing ads on radio here for setting your pension into Crypto. That is one of the uglier cases I have seen. People´s pensions need to be secure. Clearly some people just do not care and as long as they will make a buck, they will do anything.

[NALF]

I registered just to be able to post this: GREAT MOVE! Cryptos are plague so thank you!

[NALF]

@elc00l: Classic argument from coiners: "you don't undertsand". Get lost.

[Mantafirefly]

@frattaro: Yeah- no. The financial crisis was caused by too few regulations and control over a financial system, the last thing it needed was the entire thing run by a completely inscrutable, unregulatable system where you can't even reverse a fraudulent transaction. It would've made everything unimaginably worse as the crisis could've been manipulated to make more money for a few people and there'd have been nothing we could do to stop it.

Cryptocoins is a solution without a problem, and no amount of fantasy scenarios will change that.

[sveino]

Sad to see such a misinformed post. For one, you should separate between Bitcoin and crypto. Yes, there are a lot of scams and pyramide-like schemes in crypto, but Bitcoin is something else. The usual FUD recirculated (pyramide scheme, no value, environmental disaster) is just that, recirculated FUD. I expected more from the people behind Vivaldi.

I will not stop using Vivaldi because of this, but it certainly made me loose some of the respect I've had for the project.

[senja]

@pesala: I see the real market share (the one that deals with real companies) same as Jon sees crypto - a scam, pyramid scheme, or gambling.

There is no way that TSLA is worth that much. They still didn't reach a milion cars a year, and they supposedly worth much more than companies that sell 10 milion cars a year...
Same as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook (Meta) and Google (Alphabet) are not worth as they showed in that scamy market share. I think that is some kind of American scam, where imagine that, only American companies worth so much more than others...

I think same of crypto currencies, at least for more of them. Especially the newer ones.

As I'm concerned, my religion forbids gambling (it's clear why), so I would never gamble with my money that I earned by hard working.

[XmasBug]

I will forgive Vivaldi, because the article is written by that dinosaur that you get when you lose the internet connection.

The dinosaur knows browsers and knows them very well. You should not expect the dinosaur to play with crypto, but with cactuses and prehistoric birds, like Chrome and Edge.

Let's not forget that the dinosaur was once "the crypto" for all those things, starting with the innovation that Opera brought and what Vivaldi has now become.

But that's how the circle of life goes: You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

[DoctorG]

Wow, so much Crypto Funk Buzzards here.
Yes, all these Cryptochainees, Bitcoiners will save the world with Greenwashing and give Everyone the American Dream to get rich. Really!? Or is this the New Internet Socialism made by some pranksters?

PS: I can not participate in the American Dream as i am not a US citizen.

[julien_picalausa]

@sveino: Just to be clear here, this post was not misinformed. The point has been extensively researched by several Vivaldi engineers over the last few years years, myself included. If these points were just FUD, they would have gone away as cryptocurrencies demonstrate that they are indeed useful tech. They have not demonstrated this, the environmental damages are demonstrable and the people who come out in favor of the whole thing own cryptocurrencies themselves, meaning they have a vested interest in them succeeding.

[Cqoicebordel]

I believe blockchains have some value, technologically speaking. But none of their usages as of today add anything of value to the world, solve any problem, or do something we couldn't do with a DB.

Cryptocurrencies are a scam. NFTs are worse. Web3 is the worst.

Thanks Vivaldi for staying away from those things

[thooor]

I agree with you Jon, close to 100% but not quite.
Looking at all those 8000 coins that are available, there are a very modest few that actually have some kind of value, my opinion of course. I am talking about cryptocurrency that rewards science, they are rare but do exist.

The only one I have any experience using and working with is Gridcoin, I shall describe it here every so slightly. Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency that is using Proof of stake as a “baseline” for the ledger etc, but also rewards science that is “performed” by your computer on the BOINC network (more on this down below). Proof of stake rewards you with a little coin as long as you are staking (holding) coins, the icing on the cake are the coins you receive from doing research on the BOINC network.

Using Proof of stake has an extremely low power consumption in comparison with any Proof of work crypto (for instance Bitcoin), we are talking several orders of magnitude lower. On the other hand, when your computer is “performing” scientific research on the BOINC network it is consuming a lot of power. The key difference is that the projects available on BOINC are actual scientific research being conducted by universities, colleges, private companies and so forth. Some of the projects include research on cancer, Covid19, tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS, the Milkyway galaxy, neutron stars using LIGO and a lot of other topics.

In my opinion the electricity used does not go to waste, it serves a scientific purpose. Gridcoin acts as an incentive for people to participate in research for BOINC. If for some reason the coin itself one day is worth nothing, or it becomes meaningless, the research performed for BOINC will always have its value.

Adding this sort of cryptocurrency to the Vivaldi browser would be a nod to scientific research using volunteer computing.

[jon]

@thooor: The story is a big part of a crypto. There is always some reason why this one is better than the others, but in reality there is no reason to include crypto in any of this.

[Kennit]

Funny to see that the team feels it HAS to take position. This fact is already giving crypto some credibility. I don't get why you have to choose such a strong position. Everybody is able to understand there are obviously some scams when there are 8000 different tokens. But there are also some very interesting innovations, beyond the speculative aspect. The large majority of the major projects has been created by some really brilliant people, coming from MIT or other recognized places. I mean check who are Vitalik Butterin or Sergey Nazarov. There are extremely instructive podcasts from Lex Friedman with each one of them. I understand the team doesn't want to add an integrated wallet but please don't put everything in the same bag. We can even actually follow some projects without investing a single dollar, it can actually be very informative. And, eventually, we can imagine that maybe one or several of those projects will be useful. But as any emerging technology or company, it can also been forgotten in a few years (like internet browsers, heh). You could have simply said that the technology is not mature enough and still too associated to scams and you don't see the benefit to add it for now, and maybe reconsider later if necessary. Lots of crypto projects on Ethereum blockchains are privacy related, most of them are 100% open source, organized in DAOs...