There’s a whole field of financial services powered by FOSS, running on blockchains that support smart contracts, like Ethereum. It’s called DeFi (decentralized finance). You can lend money to earn interest, or take a collaterized loan, without having to trust a 3rd party intermediary. Transactions work according to rules defined in public, immutable open source code. Because everything is based on open protocols and code, anyone can create new services on top of pre-existing ones, combining them like unix utilities, except the input/output can be money instead of text. Any service can have multiple independent frontends, even self-hostable, just as anyone can create a new ActivityPub compatible software or a new Lemmy client. Yes crypto and DeFi are full of scams, just as the internet and e-mail are full of scams, but there are also awesome things built on top of these open protocols.
There’s a whole field of financial services powered by FOSS, running on blockchains that support smart contracts, like Ethereum. It’s called DeFi (decentralized finance). You can lend money to earn interest, or take a collaterized loan, without having to trust a 3rd party intermediary. Transactions work according to rules defined in public, immutable open source code. Because everything is based on open protocols and code, anyone can create new services on top of pre-existing ones, combining them like unix utilities, except the input/output can be money instead of text. Any service can have multiple independent frontends, even self-hostable, just as anyone can create a new ActivityPub compatible software or a new Lemmy client. Yes crypto and DeFi are full of scams, just as the internet and e-mail are full of scams, but there are also awesome things built on top of these open protocols.