No one is ever concerned with how much energy is used to feed ads to the entire population of earth 24/7.
Please propose a law or regulation structure for significantly reducing or eliminating advertisements. I’m serious. I fucking hate ads. I just don’t have a reasonable or effective way to get rid of them.
Edit: Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can’t come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
In São Paulo, one of the biggest cities of the world, the municipality forbade by law all billboards and building disfiguring ‘decorations’ some 10 years ago. Since then, the city became much more bearable, aesthetically. Nothing special happened, everybody was happy, except a few bankrupt ads agencies. Maybe, you must be able to imagine that change is possible. However, there is this ideology, Americans seem to be so fond off, that seems to make such things very difficult.
New Jersey also banned billboards. That one is pretty easy and I vote that we should adopt that policy everywhere. It’s much harder to control digital adspace, since you can do things like astroturf campaigns and product placement. Great point though! I like that law.
Ban advertising to minors/for products intended for children
Ban ads/branding visible from roadways to prevent distracted driving
Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can’t come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
Smart TV manufacturers: “Impossible!”
Got a better one: just ban marketing outright
Serve ads inside the ads. It’s more power efficient—kill two birds with one stone?
That’s called product placement in a Disney movie
Where does it stop though? Will TV and super bowl still exist?
What about Facebook, the credit bureaus and Twitter? They’re all a waste of energy too.
I went and did some mafs.
This thing says the world consumes 180k TWh of energy per year.
Apparently, 48% of consumer web traffic is ads.. That is dystopian in itself, that means around half the content floating around the internet is stuff the client does not request but is pushed to them.
That would put the ad industry at 4500 TWh per year. However, this is back of the envelope.
Going off of this, a high estimate for crypto mining is 230 TWh.
That means the ad industry costs us around 20 times the cost of crypto in terms of power. Feel free to check me because I don’t know shit about most of these things.
That said, this does not account for the entire ad industry, just the cost of sending internet ads around the world. Ads are made, ads are displayed in various media other than websites, and most importantly, ads have the sole purpose of driving further consumption, which all contributes to the societal costs of the ad industry.
48%? Fuck i love my adblocker
Tbf most ads are on text news articles, one image can take up thousands of times more data than a few words.
And it’s cached… and there are CDNs… Still way more energy than you want, but not quite as panic inducing as it sounds.
I am. Same loop of crap blasting on 20x massive screens 24/7 at the station.
Every store that keeps light on at night is also an ad.
My hate for them is one of the main drivers behind my radicalization.
My grandfather worked in the ad industry and couldn’t stand ads. He’s always mute the TV when they came on and we sat in uncomfortable silence.
What do you mean ‘uncomfortable’?
Well I was like 25 when I took care of him for two weeks and a pretty hard partier so silence wasn’t really my thing at the time. I’m in my 40s with 4 kids so I’ll I love silence now. I’ll even stare at walls.
Lets do an advertising tax 10% of all add revenue.
Unironically this.
Same with porn. But I’m building a shake-power generator for fleshlites so it should balance out the power it pulls. Saving the earth one jack-off at a time.
Charging a hybrid car battery only takes 253.4 jerks. Pretty soon we will be expanding our charging service to parking lots across America and Canada! Most of them already have people willing to do it for you already …they were doing it there anyway… Win/win.
Powerjerk ™, we make perverts work for you!
Just roll up and say “Hey Jagoff, I need to get to x!” And you’ll promptly be taken care of.*
*Do not give them drugs to speed up the process. We are serious about our drug-free workplace.
Edit: steal my idea and I’ll find you
Porn is more beneficial for humanity than imaginary ownership.
Energy isn’t free. More power captured from jerking will increase food consumed, meaning more energy used in farming. You’ll have to brand this as either a carbon
capturefapture system or as a weight loss programI have an ancient hermetic method of getting off that requires neither computer or phone. Enquire within if you seek this ancient knowledge.
Please elaborate
For only $99 USD all will be explained via a one on one Webinar.
What a deal! I can’t lose!
Most people aren’t loudly in favour of that, especially not the ones concerned with the power usage of blockchain
Perhaps, but you also never hear them complain about it anywhere near as loudly as people complaining about blockchains.
Yes, they’ll grumble about ads being annoying or YouTube blocking people who block ads, but the amount of power that gets wasted on this never even crosses anyone’s mind, meaning on some level, there exists agreement that advertisement are a necessary and responsible use of electricity while blockchains are not.
That’s because ad serving doesn’t set a lower bound on the electricity price. The value of crypto and the value of electricity are linked.
For the sake of simplicity I’ll just say Bitcoin.
If the price of Bitcoin stays constant (big if), and the rate of Bitcoin per watt does too, then everyone would start mining until the demand for power is so high that the price increases until it’s as high as the Bitcoin per watt.
Sure, they are unrealistic assumptions, but it’s easier to see this way that the value of Bitcoin is (almost) the same as electricity. If it were lower, noone would mine it, if higher, people would buy electricity with bitcoin for a profit until the 2 equalize.
Electricity will never be much cheaper than Bitcoin, market forces will make sure of that, causing a huge environmental impact. Ads, however, only use as much electricity as they need to operate, their amount is not decided based on how much electricity they waste.
Honestly, it never fails to surprise me when on a presumable anticapitalist forum such as this one, someone makes a passionate argument in favor of some of the most ghastly corporate practices known to man, but sure, let’s put that premise to the test, shall we?
Here’s a good article on the power consumption of Bitcoin, which estimates around 110 TWh/yr.
Here’s one on the electricity use of online advertising, which estimates somewhere between 6.5 GWh - 131 TWh/yr.
Shall we call it a draw? Keep in mind that online advertising is a fast growing industry (and likely to continue to grow in the future), whereas Bitcoin’s power use isn’t likely to grow too much, as the above article explains. Also keep in mind that this is JUST online advertising, and completely ignores print, TV, and those digital billboards that are spreading everywhere from Times Square to your local grocery store. Think about neon store signs, illuminated billboards, etc.
Also, that’s just the cost of delivering ads to people (i.e. it doesn’t even include the cost of producing them). Think about how many people work in advertising – all the offices they occupy, the computers, cameras, and whatever other equipment they use, business flights, what have you – and I’m pretty sure the carbon footprint of the entire industry far outstrips that of crypto.
But sure, crypto is the real problem.
I see you completely ignored my comment. The problem is not the amount of electricity used in itself, which the estimate of 6GWh-130TWh is as precise as shooting a dart at the moon.
Crypto uses energy for the sake of using energy. The value of crypto is based on the amount of energy used to create it. It’s not valuable to society. That’s what people is upset about. Crypto provides even less value to society than ads do.
Even you said it, ads spend energy because they employ people, those people generate value.
That’s like saying we should stop heating homes because it consumes more energy than crypto mining. Hose heating improves the quality of life of people. Crypto does not.
Yes but what about this whataboutism? And honestly I am fairly certain it ain’t as much as Bitcoin. People usually focus on 1 thing to get it done because moving to the next. I bet you try to do that at work too.
No way ads consume less power than bitcoin. Just the lights for ads probably consume more than bitcoin, not even talking about creating ads, which I assume consumes a double digit percentage of the global work force.
You assume wrong. In the UK, about 0.3-0.5% of people work in marketing or advertising, and that’s one of the most extremely financialised service economies in the whole world. No way is the number anywhere near even that high in countries where people actually work for a living.
Thanks for the correction. Slightly overestimated 😁
Yeah, I mean it’s still an insanely high amount IMO, you’re not wrong in the sense that it’s “way too many people”
Yes, but it’s almost certainly a multitude less electricity than bitcoin.
Yea the rally against block chain tech is stupid as fuck. It consumes nothing in the grand scale…do people not realize a lot of large enterprises have ~200k nodes give or take? Bigger companies can have in the million range. 200k machines is a joke.
Edit: I can see a lot of people just hate block chain tech without understanding anything tech wise lol
The nodes aren’t the issue. It’s the fact that those nodes have to expend at least the same amount of energy every single time a record is added and the larger the ledger, the more energy is needed. Blockchain is somewhat unique in that regard.
You do understand what a DB is right? Like there’s millions of them…hell right now typing out this comment has one marking it. And then you’re downloading it to read it… that’s a transaction. Except there are millions of people reading comments constantly on all social media platforms.
My comment here has more bits in it than a single transaction.
DBs are not the same as a blockchain. A DB doesn’t have to hash all previous data before it every time the DB is written to. You can read and write to a specific spot in a DB without ever knowing anything else about the DB. With blockchain, inserts have to be successive and they have to reference every previous insert to validate that the entry series is unbroken. On top of that, for things like Bitcoin, every other client also has to validate it since the ledger is shared.
There’s a reason blockchain is significant. Otherwise, why didn’t stuff like Bitcoin exist prior to it? Databases, in some for or another, have existed for decades. Blockchains are immutable, that’s why. The order of entries matters and validation is a requirement.
DBs still update their tables every time someone writes to it. And there are millions of DBs being written to every second. It’s absolutely comparable.
We’re not comparing millions of DBs to a single blockchain. We’re comparing 1 DB to 1 blockchain instance. If you had millions of blockchains, you would use exponentially more energy for the same data vs. a normal database. Updating tables is not the same thing as hashing and validating every prior entry in the table.
There aren’t millions of block chains…lol your argument is bullshit.
You don’t even understand blockchain so I’m not sure what your edit is all about. You’re comparing blockchain to a database in your replies as if they’re comparable.
When it comes to power…it absolutely is comparable…but most of you have no clue how much compute we use daily in terms of power. Acting like the block chain sucks down anywhere near the amount of power we use on even in the corporate world is hilarious…you know a lot of colos have their own sub stations right?
The only person here who doesn’t know what they’re talking about is you. If you took a standard DB (MySQL or Postgres, for example) and took that same information and stored it on a blockchain instead, you’d use far more energy on the blockchain and the issue would only get exponentially worse as the chain got bigger. Normal DBs don’t need to hash new entries or validate them against previous entries that are also hashed.
Yes because there are millions and millions of block chains…lol don’t fool yourself into knowing what your talking about.
And yes DBs are only one DB no one ever has HA stacks or redundancy built in…lol
Are you dense, man? No one said that. They’re saying that one blockchain would take several hundred DBs to equal its energy use. You’re wrong and doubling down for some reason and it’s just making you look silly.
I said that genius…go check my posts…the fuck you arguing about? I literally said that the amount of DBs we have make the miniscule amount of large block chains out there look like nothing. Then you show up and say one DB isn’t comparable to one large fucking blockchain…no shit.
Yeah, people tend hate what they don’t understand. Especially when most people think think every blockchain performs exactly like bitcoin (which is proof of work). Bitcoin is slow and power hungry and would never actually be usable by the masses for everyday transactions. But it was the first and will likely be a “digital gold” for a long time
But it’s not the only one and in time everyone will be using blockchain technology. It’s so much more convenient and useful than most realize. The Solana blockchain has secured a big partnership with Visa that can be read up on if anyone is interested.
Or that tumble dryers in the USA alone use more energy than Bitcoin.
Distributed hashed linked list is so yesteryear. These days we’re into text autocompletion instead.
Hey, it’s not just fancy autocomplete!
Thanks to years of innovation, it’s now copyright infringement as well.
I wish copyrights will die to this technology! <3
The thing is its only the copyrights of individual artists and creators that will die to this.
The big corpos will find a way to protect their value, just you wait.
They will steal from every single creative in the world and then sue them to hell and back if they use anything they them selves “own”
This is not a threat to the copyrights that you want to die.
You are a fool if you think copyrights can protect anyone but the big corporations.
Copyright are a cancer for mankind, they should disappear.
…and, hear me out, that will be perfect for keeping messages untraceable by the government. Every single of those 200,000 computers will have full copies of all the messages ever transmitted, unencrypted, but they’ll never be able to tell who wrote them and who they were for.
No one who understands bitcoin ever thought it was untraceable.
In the early days it was really common to place messages in the chain.
There are literal marriage proposals among these message.
I even considered the main benefit to be that it was super traceable.
I once tracked some stolen crypto trough multiple Wallets and exchanges to find the one wallet where those hackers where keeping all the spoils.
Granted the owners of a wallet aren’t public and thats a form of anonymity but surely intelligence agencies can figure it out.
Monero entered the chat.
privacy or secrecy from the government isn’t a goal of Bitcoin - the protocol doesn’t even use encryption.
the goal is protection from (government or other) control
The real charlatans were the “the technology has promise” people. No, the technology was dumb.
He says on a decentralized platform that became popular because the centralized equivalent became hostile towards their users.
“Blockchain” and “decentralised” are not interchangeable words
Yes, in the same way that federated and decentralized aren’t interchangeable.
You’re dodging the point that being in favour of decentralising doesn’t mean being a blockchain bro
So are you pushing a non-blockchain based decentralised ledger solution then, or did the point they were dodging actually just go over your head?
I’m not pushing anything, but yeah, anything other than blockchain
Well, it’s been about 15 years, and everything else we’ve found so far has been shitter. So just, give up on decentralisation I guess?
I don’t think Lemmy counts as popular yet.
Or, you could just pick one computer, have it do the work and punish it by taking its money if it screws up (ETH).
But yeah you’re not wrong about minable coins.
At first I read “200.000” as a particularly precise float, and laughed at the absurdity. Then I realized he meant “two hundred thousand” and it came full-circle from comedy to tragedy. :(
This is revolutionary
This is de-evolutionary!
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Sure, but what real-world problem does a trustless solve? I thought this was all very interesting years ago but now that we’ve had blockchain for years it seems it’s only good for illegal or morally questionable transactions.
I was hoping it would help me save on international transfer fees when I was an overseas postdoc, but it would have actually cost more between the exchange fees and my time setting up all the exchanges in various countries, meanwhile also introducing risk in me being robbed of said money and screwing something up and introducing myself to some sort of tax liability. Needless to say, I continued to just pay for the bank transfers
That’s really the thing, isn’t it? In my experience cryptocurrency fees are quite high. I bet there’s a way to find a lower fee but then I’d have to do a ton of research and hope it’s accurate. I’d rather just pay a bank that requires me to do no research.
It cannot be cheaper, other than by avoiding taxes and regulation.
Consider sending money from US Dollar to Euro:
Sane way: An intermediary (IE a bank) handles this. You give them USD and they give the receiver Euros. This involves some service costs and 2 bank transfers.
Because people exchange money in both ways, the banks need not run out of either Euro or USD. In the background there is the currency market, on which the proper exchange rate is haggled out, which takes care of imbalances in cash flow.
Crypto way: You give a crypto exchange (an intermediary) USD and they give you crypto. This already involves 2 transfers and service costs. One of those 2 transfers is a crypto transfer, which is much more expensive (IE uses more resources) than a bank transfer.
This is already more expensive and then you have to do the same thing again to cash out.
And then we are still not done. Say there is an imbalance in that more people transfer money from USD to Euro than vice versa. That means that crypto becomes more expensive in USD and cheaper in Euro. There’s more demand in terms of USD and more supply for Euro, right?.
That creates an arbitrage opportunity. You can exchange USD for Euro, and then buy crypto for Euro to sell for USD. This closes the circle and puts everything back to the initial state. But to do that, we still have to exchange the real currencies. So now the markets bake the cost of exchanging currency into the crypto prices. At a guess, for some currencies (probably not so much Euro/USD), that would have a significant effect. I’m thinking smaller, poorer countries that send many migrant workers, who send money back home. These workers would not only end up paying the insane overhead of the crypto system, but also, still, most of the normal, direct exchange costs (if they relied on crypto).
There’s a case to be made for a currency that facilitates illegal transactions, or transactions that corporations object to. Just because something is legal in your country doesn’t mean it might not be unjustly restricted. Or could just be unjustly illegal in your country or another country. The problem of course is that distributed currency also facilitates things that should be illegal.
But WikiLeaks is a good example - their legacy is a little mixed now, but when they first came on the scene they were doing work which was a valuable service to the public. If you wanted to donate money to support wikileaks you couldn’t because the credit card processors shut them off. Blockchain lets you get around that.
Likewise it’s the combination of distance and direct - I can give $5 in cash to my local leaking consortium, but I can’t give $5 to the leaking consortium on the other side of the world without relying on the knowledge and consent of third parties.
You totally can give cash anywhere in the world. You post it as a letter
This was common before electronic transfer
It will also get there faster.
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See I think more nuanced takes like this are good. I’m not familiar with the Chinese banking issue that you are describing, but it sounds like deposit insurance (like the FDIC) might be a better solution than cryptocurrency, and it’s definitely better understood. Since the real world value of cryptocurrencies are so volatile they are a questionable store of value, and taking a risk on a poorly regulated bank might be better than taking a risk on storing your money in a volatile and unregulated security like cryptocurrency. Honestly it’s hard to know which is the better risk. So it could be better or it could be worse.
I agree with your point about transferring money internationally, and even within the US transferring money used to be a real pain. So I’m still interested to see if cryptocurrency can be a better medium of exchange or medium of transfer than traditional ways, or at least give traditional systems incentive to improve. But again the volatility is a concern so for most people the best move is probably to get in and out of the crypto market as quickly as possible or else risk getting a vastly different amount of money out of it than you put in. Admittedly it could appreciate, but when I’m transferring money to someone I don’t want that to simultaneously be an investment. The few times I have used Bitcoin to purchase something the whole process has taken hours, and there’s no guarantee there won’t be price swings — a lot could happen in those hours.
I appreciate the brutal honesty about cryptocurrency not being for the average Joe. It’s not that long since many cryptocurrency boosters were hoping it would replace fiat currency, but now that I think about it I haven’t heard as much about that recently. In its current state it is really not for the average Joe.
Since the real world value of cryptocurrencies are so volatile they are a questionable store of value
It will not be so volatile if it’s primary means of transaction for everyone(obviously not yet). Value of thoose cryptos are just like the values of normal money in different countries.
For example, if you can buy an apple for 10 shitcoins, instead of buying it in USD, then the value is not volatile. The problem arises when the apple is 5 USD and you have to transfer the shitcoin amount which is equal to the exchange rate of 5USD at that time.
This is true, but it’s hard to see why we would ever move from fiat currency to cryptocurrency as the primary means of exchange. Currently cryptocurrency’s advantages are modest and its disadvantages are substantial, and I haven’t seen a lot of movement toward fixing that balance. I’d like to give traditional finance channels some competition to reduce fees, lock-in, and inconvenience, but cryptocurrency is going to have to get a lot better for average people if it’s going to be a real alternative.
Advantages of cryptos is that they are decentralised. Just like lemmy is decentralised, no single entity or government control the money. Transaction happen from peer to peer. No middlemen involved. I don’t understand the disadvantages yet except environmental concerns. I heard coins like ethereum switched to proof of stake model which is more environmental friendly.
I don’t understand the disadvantages yet except environmental concerns.
As you point out, PoS basically solves the environmental concerns. (Some people might say it still consumes too much power but I disagree, I think power consumption under PoS is acceptable).
This is just my opinion, but I think the big disadvantage is cryptocurrencies are a pain in the ass to use. Lengthy story about what a pain it’s been to use them in Spoiler tag. I think this story is a bit of an outlier since I hit all of these issues, but the fact that a technically inclined person who is just getting back into cryptocurrency after a long hiatus can have this much trouble with it does not speak well use ability or safety.
::: I have a few coins I mined back in the day (before switching all my computing power to BOINC), and I saved off my wallet.dat from those wallets. I wanted to use them recently, so I reinstalled the wallet software. That worked, but then I had to download the entire chain again, so I had to wait more than a day to actually use the coins. Putting cash in a bank is faster if I’m already a customer of the bank. If I’m a new customer I might have to wait, but the point is cryptocurrency doesn’t have a clear advantage here.
The coins I had weren’t Bitcoin, but the shop I wanted to buy from only accepts Bitcoin. So then I had to exchange mine for Bitcoin and pay transaction fees. I guess you could say it’s my own fault for holding a less-popular coin but I’m not sure cryptocurrency is living up to its own hype if there’s exactly one or two coins that you have to use, just like how in the US there’s no real alternative to USD.
I found a no-account exchange, and I had to carefully enter keys and figure out amounts of coin > BTC. And I had to trust the exchange to give me what I wanted. If the no-account exchange didn’t exist, I would have to create a whole new account on a website I don’t entirely trust just to exchange one coin for Bitcoin. That’s a layer of trust in a “trustless” system. I also don’t like creating yet another account with my info in it — yet another way that cryptocurrency is not better than traditional finance.
Then not only did it cost transaction fees, it took hours for the transaction to go through. I could pay more for it to go faster, but now we’re talking about fees that far exceed those of credit cards or regular money transfers. Then I had to send the Bitcoin to the online store and wait for that transaction to clear. More time and more transaction fees. The purchase worked without a hitch, but it wasn’t any better than using a credit card.
I had to buy extra BTC because it’s really difficult to know exactly how much you’re going to pay including transaction fees, so after the transaction went through I tried to turn my remaining Bitcoins (I think it was worth ~$13?) back into the kind of coins I keep, but I set my transaction fee too low and the trade I set up expired before my coins went through. Luckily I had given the exchange a refund account, but that meant I had to wait over 24 hours before my transaction actually happened, and then the exchange had to send back my Bitcoin, incurring fees at each step.
While waiting I tried to cancel this Bitcoin transaction, but the software I used didn’t support that. So then I tried to extract my private key to enter into another piece of software, and that was surprisingly difficult. I thought cryptocurrency was supposed to put me in control, but without a LOT of technical knowledge I was just as powerless as I’d be with a bank that froze a transfer. I asked for help on a few forums and some people tried to help but the whole thing was confusing and eventually I had to give up and just wait for the transaction to go through.
Then I had to do the BTC > mycoin transaction again, and this time I think the fees were 5-10% of the amount I was transferring. That’s way more than Venmo’s immediate transfer fee or even credit card fees (I think those are around 3%?).
I will say that during this process I discovered the Electrum wallet, which is very good and works on a lot of platforms. Some of the issues I had would not have happened if I had used that all along. But there are so many wallets out there it’s hard to know which one is best and obviously when I started this process no one told me it was the best. And maybe it’s not and that just my opinion.
In summary, I’m interested in cryptocurrency and kind of enjoyed using it in the way learning new things can be fun. But it was slower, less convenient, and more expensive than regular currency. Cryptocurrency boosters are going to have to improve all of these problems before it’s competitive with regular currency, and I don’t see a lot of discussion about how much these pain points suck and how to improve.
:::
Also, the unbanked.
Also, privacy and anonymity (to an extent).
Also, complete predictability in the system (its at least domain constrained).
the unbanked
Can the unbanked still benefits from crypto these days though? How can you cash your crypto without doing KYC? Even localbitcoin got folded due to increased regulation. If you can pass KYC, then you’re probably not the unbanked. Less and less business accept crypto these days, it’s hard purchase daily necessities without cashing out your crypto (except probably in venezuela).
There’s no privacy, it’s an open ledger, only anonymity
It’s a bad way of hiding money if you’re about to be investigated for crime
Trusting Humans is literally a security flaw. Any system with trust you can find examples with fraud and abuse from those who held power by holding that trust.
We trusted bankers to invest our money, and some short sold the housing market with that money
I could go on, but trust really is a security issue. Decentralization has its efficiency issues, but saying “Bitcoin uses as much power as the 90th largest nation” is peanuts when you consider the energy inequality that America spends and compare what Bitcoin delivers with that energy versus how much energy centralized banks need to deliver a system that’s easier to fraud
Ah yes Bitcoin, famously free of fraud and abuse.
More seriously, every system can be used for fraud. The question is whether the solution is actually better overall. We could prevent all wire fraud by returning to a cash-only economy. But that would be hugely inconvenient and therefore create a huge drag on the economy compared to a world where we can do electronic transfers even though electronic transfers open us up to wire fraud. Returning to cash-only is not worth the increase in security, and it opens us up to other issues (e.g., bank runs and someone stealing all the money under my mattress).
And while power use is a problem with Proof of Work coins, it’s not my biggest concern about cryptocurrency because Proof of Stake can fix that issue. It’s a shame that the biggest coin now is PoW but hopefully that will change. The bigger issue is “is cryptocurrency better than traditional currency?” So far it hasn’t proven to be better except in extremely limited circumstances. And a lot of the ways cryptocurrency is better will go away if governments start regulating it like other forms of finance. Having your money in cryptocurrency won’t protect you from the police and courts.
We trusted bankers to invest our money, and some short sold the housing market with that money
Okay? You could do that with cryptocurrency if traders started accepting cryptocurrency for shorts. The only reason you can’t do that today is traders won’t accept cryptocurrency for shorts, and that’s basically security through obscurity.
Sure, drugs and fraud surround Bitcoin, but drugs, fraud, and banking imperialism surround the petrodollar
I didn’t say cryptocurrency was any better or worse for fraud and abuse than regular currencies. Honestly I have no idea which one is better or worse for fraud and abuse. I’m just saying it’s not clear that the particular way that cryptocurrency is more secure than regular banking is actually beneficial.
Trusting Humans is literally a security flaw.
Exactly, and using Bitcoin does not solve that because you still have to transact with humans. If you buy something with Bitcoin and the seller never sends you anything, you’re out of luck. Your money is gone.
If you use a regulated financial system you have some options. If you paid with credit card you can charge back and dispute the charge. Your money in the bank is backed by insurance that is guaranteed by the government.
Bitcoin only cuts out the middleman. Every other issue of trust with the recipient still exists, and those are the problems regulation solves, and the reason fraudsters love Bitcoin so much.
Amen, exactly.
TPS metrics of the most popular blockchains
Blockchain TPS Max TPS Ethereum 13.15 57.91 Bitcoin 7.35 9.87 Algorand 6.99 221.01 Optimism 4.74 20.66 As a global payments network Visa has the capacity to execute more than 65,000 transactions per second.
Oh nice, that’s how high Solana’s TPS has gone in testing (in practice it hovers around 5-10k TPS). There’s also newer chains like Aptos that claim to be able to handle 150k TPS with subsecond finality. Of course, neither of these chains are very decentralised, but at least they aren’t fully permissioned and centralised. Especially on a network belonging to a partisan, anti-competitive, anti-trust law-breaking, Wikileaks funding thieving Israel supporters like Visa.
General question, because I don’t give a shit about blockchain to research it.
Does it have a way to quickly and effectively handle fraud? And don’t tell me “there’s no way to commit fraud” because people can steal wallet passwords no fucking problem. With most banks they will actively track fraud, cancel those transactions, and restore your funds and possibly shut down the card automatically while still allowing the account to exist so you can access your money. Is that the case with blockchain?
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It depends on whether you’re interacting with the blockchain directly, or via a custodial solution more appropriate for end consumers. Same like how you don’t get a refund if you operate a western union branch and fuck up the wire.
And of course we can rest assured that nobody profiting off bitcoin is morally questionable
Ah yes, Bitcoin bad because some people that use it are bad, how did I never think of that
I’m not saying that, rather I’m saying that I don’t see how either thing is clearly morally superior.
Bitcoin is open-source software, a network of nodes running Bitcoin core, the source code for which you can find here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
Morals are a consequence of free will, which Bitcoin does not have. There are valid moralistic concerns about Bitcoin, but they are related to the impact of Bitcoin, rather than whether it is a moral system.
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Isn’t that still an order of magnitude less than what Visa can do? Or is there some extra math involved that I don’t know about
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Yes but 65000 TPS for Bitcoin would likely have the planet glowing much brighter in the infrared… possibly even the visible, for all the heat we’d need to dump.
A rich, warm, and sterilized world!
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However, correct me if I’m wrong here because I’m not that much invested in bitcoin as a tech or investment, but isn’t almost half of the energy used on bitcoin generated from renewables? I could swear I saw an article about it somewhere.
It’s still wasted energy. If it wasn’t used on bitcoins, it would have been used on other things - some of which had to be powered by fossil fuels.
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How does that even make sense? Renewable is cheaper than burning petrol, of course there’s a shortage.
It may very well be renewable. I’m really more referring to the inefficient way in which the sums are calculated. Those data centers get warmish.
And yeah, AI is just the next thing we decided to punish our GPUs with. Crazy how we’ve used that part of the computer these last few decades…
I’m more engaged in a chat gpt session that I am staying up till 4 am watching line graphs of crypto prices, guilty as charged 😁. Not sure what comment it makes about society other than “we seem pretty lonely, everything ok?”
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Where are you getting the TPS report for the Lightning Network? I thought its theoretical max TPS was in the millions.
there’s the small issue of proof of stake being subjective…
But if you’re using layer 2 solutions, then you’re not actually using the blockchain directly, right? Might as well use credit card then?
All transactions are still eventually commited to Layer 1 though, so you’re still using the Blockchain when using L2s.
No, just the final state. And you are changing into trusting a centralised node, which makes no difference compared to existing systems
The blockchain is better than the stock market, that’s for damn sure.
All the assholes saying crypto is bad for the environment are completely silent about the amount of power that CBDCs will consume or the amount of power consumed by the stock market.
It doesn’t require that much computing power, that’s just a variable that gets set.
If the difficulty were set lower, one average computer could easily handle it.
Oh sweet. Let’s just set the difficulty lower, then.
But then every jabrony would be able to make money.
So, in other words, it does require that much computing power.
You too can learn this secret of the ages! You just need to be able pay for my one hour Webinar and Goon on camera for at least three!
One variable, on 200 000 computers simultaneously.
Every time a transaction is made.
Which also means that the more blockchain gets used, the more expensive, slow and power hungry it becomes. It is doomed to fail and never be in worldwide use.
Compare it to something like AI, which gets exponentially better the more people use it. The same trajectory as the internet.
Lot of comments don’t seem to understand that these words are not interchangeable
Wow, I thought I was back on reddit with the tech fear mongering.
A single Ethereum transaction now uses only 0.02 kWh of electrical energy and has a carbon footprint of 0.01 kgCO2, which is much lower than the average values for a debit transaction or PayPal.
…which is much lower than the average values for a debit transaction or PayPal
[citation needed]
A quick search gives me .0015 kWh per card transaction, but that could be wrong.
Crypto =/= blockchain.
If you can’t see the utility of blockchain with regards to things like actual, verifiable digital ownership, then I don’t know what to tell you.
I want to see what you mean in practical terms, because the only other example that I know besides questionable crypto currencies is NFTs and that was an epic lesson on what not to do. 😅
There are other uses. Like making a system that is interconnected and resistant to hacking. For example an interconnected traffic light system that can prioritize transit/emergency vehicles could be managed by a block chain to ensure the system stays in sync with itself for traffic flow/prioirty while being resistant to hacking or malicious activity.
How does adding more computers, more points of failure, make infrastructure less prone to exploitation?
Because it’s a trustless system. In order to override the system you have to take over 50% of the nodes, and in large enough systems it’s infeasible to get that much compute power. This means that no one person or organization can actually control the destiny of the system, only the consensus can.
I can’t believe that here, in the fediverse of all places, we need to have a discussion about the benefits of having a system that corporations can’t control.
Ok explain to me the advantages of a decentralized traffic light system that controls public traffic on public streets?
What advantages does a blockchain traffic light system have over a centralized server controlled by those who are responsible for maintaining the physical hardware?
Nah that one makes perfect sense to be centralized. I’m saying in general you’d want a system to be decentralized if you want it trustless.
Who controls the streetlight blockchain in your idea? You think the government is going to responsibly manage a system that is large enough to be impractical to alter? My local government is barely responsibly enough to manage basic utility maintenance, we’ve had 3 water main bursts in a month and it hasn’t even been below freezing that whole time.
I can’t believe a human being living in the world doesn’t see that any implementation of a secure blockchain requires massive funding for infrastructure. That money comes from 1 of 2 places, illegal enterprises that maintain control for security and manipulation, and legal corporations that will maintain control for financial security and manipulation. Modern governments don’t run projects like this anymore, they contract them out to corporations.
Keep in mind that the only practical use of blockchain that anyone has found so far, has been as a currency that requires no ID. The most famous use of these currencies was by John Mccaffee, who used crypto currencies to help him evade authorities for nearly a decade. So I don’t have much faith in a technology that has only shown a benefit to criminals with so much money that cash becomes impractical. Nor do I have to remind you that wealthy private individuals have been able to manipulate crypto markets with hilarious ease, like how Musk pumped and dumped Doge Coin years ago with a single tweet and most likely made millions in private, untraceable money.
Just because something sounds cool on paper, and makes it seem like it skirts governments and corporations, doesn’t mean it works in practice. Large entities inherently have more resources, and are primed to steal new technologies for their own use, especially when implementing that technology requires huge funding for infrastructure.
Yeah I realize now I responded to a thread about traffic lights instead of systems in general. Obviously centralized systems are far superior for that.
This is a classic solution in search of a problem. The problem with stop lights isn’t that corporations control them, the problem with stop lights is that the general population thinks that cars are the only way to get around and demand that city officials optimize street and roads for cars. Adding a bunch of crazy verification steps will not solve this problem.
This is another social problem that technology just can’t solve.
No, NFTs do have good uses, but things like image NFTs are just a misappropriation, like SPAM is to email.
One use case, is clear, independently verifiable ownership of non-tangible things, like Intellectual Property rights. Movie rights for a book adaptation for instance moving between companies in IP sales and mergers/acquisitions.
IP rights is not a problem that needs solving. In fact, the existing legal system has ways of punishing copyright violations whereas the Blockchain does not.
Supply chain validation is also an example of the block chain “in action”. But the people that are entering the data on the Blockchain are the same people that were typing it in an email yesterday.
I used to be a fan of the technology as well but so far it hasn’t show itself to be useful. A solution in search of a problem.
No, NFTs do have good uses
I hear that now since 12 Years. Its not going to happen.
Without really having an opinion on the matter - I think there’s a difference in having a use and being adopted.
Something can be absolutely awesome in theory but useless if no one is using it.
Yeah I think a lot of people don’t understand that “good for x problem”, “better than existing solution”, and “switching to this solution is better than staying with the existing solution” are three vastly different things
Blockchain fails because switching to it is consistently worse than sticking with current solutions, and often it fails at being better than current solutions in the abstract
The perfect use case is tickets to live events. One entity creates one NFT for each seat or spot available and can initially sell them. The owner of that NFT (ticket) can then do whatever they want with it without the need for a third party (Ticketmaster) to scalp the shit out of any subsequent transactions.
Proof of ownership of a single ticket at the time of the event is the end goal, which is what NFTs do.
Why this hasn’t been done is pretty baffling to me.
What’s better, is if artists want to provide a subset of tickets that are not resellable they can. Those tickets will only be accepted if a single transaction has taken place.
The owner of that NFT (ticket) can then do whatever they want with it without the need for a third party (Ticketmaster) to scalp the shit out of any subsequent transactions.
How is that supposed to prevent scalping, exactly?
Proof of ownership of a single ticket at the time of the event is the end goal, which is what NFTs do.
And that’s better than physical tickets, because…?
What’s better, is if artists want to provide a subset of tickets that are not resellable they can.
That’s also already a solved problem: write a name on a ticket and validate that name with an ID.
Just responding to the “scalping” quote. It absolutely wouldn’t stop scalping, what I HOPE op was trying to say was that it could be used to prevent Ticketmaster, or any entity like it, from charging fees on every exchange of said ticket.
Would it? Or would Ticketmaster just buy all the NFTs and then have even less regulation on their scalping?
And that’s better than physical tickets, because…?
paper tickets are relatively easy to counterfeit, especially for the purposes of selling the counterfeits as scalped/unwanted tickets.
Again: that’s a solved problem with holograms.
The sounds like scalpers paradise. They can buy multiple tickets and sell it without thinking about any authorization (id card or something) when using that tickets
That’s not a perfect use case for it. That’s a central authority (venue) selling tickets to anyone who wants to buy them. But instead of using a local database and approving transfers from person to person and losing the ability to reverse transactions due to fraud, it’s hosted in the wild west of crypto.
There’s nothing stopping a venue from offering your perfect use case in a centralized system, but they outsource it to Ticketmaster (namely because Ticketmaster owns like 80% of music venues or something) so they don’t have to deal with it.
Your scenario outsources it to the block chain, who will charge gas for the transactions instead of ticketmaster charging fees.
Why this hasn’t been done is pretty baffling to me.
Because the blockchain needs an incentive. Who is going to be taking part in the blockchain if there is nothing in it for them? That’s why these tokens are often tied to crypto currencies, as mining is the incentive.
I don’t know the value in a decentralized IP rights system. If the key holder gets phished, you can lose your rights to a TV series you’ve been working on. (Like Seth Greene)
He wouldn’t have lost it and had to pay back the ransom in a traditional contract. Having a contract centralized and enforced by the legal system has many perks and I can’t ever see how a decentralized rights platform can enforce itself.
One use case, is clear, independently verifiable ownership of non-tangible things, like Intellectual Property rights.
Why is your system better than the existing one?
There is, for example, the first-owner problem in a public blockchain. What happens if I make an NFT saying I own you property? Without an external system, how can you prove your NFT is real and mine isn’t? And if there’s an external system, why not use that instead?
I thought of that problem the moment when they started explaining their use case. I had no idea there is a name for it, kinda cool. If the blockchain people have a real solution for it, it would be a pretty big deal
It’s a term from copyright. The First Owner of a work is usually the person who makes a work, and they can then do all sorts of things with that.
And it’s ALWAYS the same problem. You can have all the lists you want. A central authority has to recognize and enforce that list. At which point, the structure of your list is completely irrelevant. It could be ANY list. What matters is that it’s chosen to be enforced. And currently, most power structures are happy with plain old databases. Or pen and paper.
A plain old database also has ways of dealing with theft.
If someone steals your crypto keys and sends your assets to themselves, they have no legal ownership over those assets but they’re listed as the owner in the blockchain, so blockchain isn’t even any good at being an accurate, verifiable record of ownership.
Yes, you can’t make changes to the blockchain, but that also means you can never fix anything. So you actually can’t rely on the blockchain to be accurate.
Digital ownership on one (1) blockchain. Not really that great when you put it like that. What makes one Blockchain more authoritative than another? Even in a closed system, if you think the admins of these chains don’t keep a kill switch in their back pocket specifically for their advantage in ownership conflicts then you should probably read about Ethereum Classic. Even if they don’t want to hard fork, if a chain is controlled entirely by a company, then they can edit it however they want regardless since it’s not really decentralized. The idea that Blockchains will empower the customer with digital ownership is silly to me.
Is a chain is controlled by a single entity then it’s not a blockchain, it’s a linked list with extra steps.
The whole point of a blockchain is that it’s independently verifiable/validated by all its users. Anything else is a literal scam.
A Blockchain is already just a linked list with extra steps.
It’s no surprise you don’t know what to tell us. It’s hard to get a mark to buy into a scam once they’ve realized what is was.
?
How about first we see a version that isn’t a scam? We’ve seen plenty of scam versions so far.
I love how one man created arguably the most complex puzzle in the history of mankind and people shit on it just because it’s literally hard to solve (aka “uses energy”) and the solutions have value.
Y’all prefer to have the government and banks in charge of money instead? seriously?
What I don’t want in charge, is a shadowy cabal of a few rich people only bound to the maximization of their own profit.
I’m not paying extra to remove what little democratic control there is in the existing system.
the shadowy cabal of a few rich people is called the Fed, it’s privately owned by all the banks. there is no democracy in the existing system
For me: probably. Either way, transactions cost money. Either pay the block chain fees or just use cash/credit card.
I’m ok with credit and cash.
yeah they’ve done great with inflation so far! lol
