Blockchain: the wave of the future
Blockchain: the wave of the future
343 comments
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No one is ever concerned with how much energy is used to feed ads to the entire population of earth 24/7.
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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!
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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.
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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!"
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ads don't go unless capitalism goes
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Make sending unrequested data like ads and trackers to web clients a crime akin to gaining unrestricted access to computers. No need for a new law, just a new interpretation on an older one.
Most jurisdictions prohibit unauthorized access to computer systems. What if we just say, "running Javascript code that implements functionality not specifically requested by the user is unauthorized tampering".
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Got a better one: just ban marketing outright
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Are we all here because somebody “advertised” Lemmy on reddit?
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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 (tm), 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
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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.
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Most people aren't loudly in favour of that, especially not the ones concerned with the power usage of blockchain
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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.
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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.
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Lets do an advertising tax 10% of all add revenue.
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Unironically this.
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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.
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How much does facebook, the banking system Google search need and does it even make sense to compare this against a small country?
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That's such a great point wtf
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That is why I only block ads when I'm on a plane 👍
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Exactly! Blockchain and PoW are terrible but id really like to know how much time and electricity is consumed to serve ads, cool servers, train and educate people to effectively become ad engineers.
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Or that tumble dryers in the USA alone use more energy than Bitcoin.
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Instead of actually talking about it you're lazily using it to deflect criticism of unsustainable cryptocurrencies. Your input was worthless.
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Yes, but it's almost certainly a multitude less electricity than bitcoin.
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it's almost certainly not
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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
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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.
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Distributed hashed linked list is so yesteryear. These days we're into text autocompletion instead.
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Autocomplete is the most important thing in your life.
That sentence was brought to you by autocomplete. Autocomplete, you know it and you can do whatever you need.
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This is revolutionary
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This is de-evolutionary!
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The real charlatans were the “the technology has promise” people. No, the technology was dumb.
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...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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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I'm still 90% convinced it was either invented by the CIA or the NSA for "reasons". The US military invented the dark web and they even claim to have invented it, so it's not a far stretch that another US gov. agency invented Bitcoin.
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Probably invented as a way to more discreetly fund black sites...
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Monero entered the chat.
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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. :(
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Consensus algorithms lie at the foundation for a great many of the backend systems our internet depends on, massive scaling would be a near impossibility without them. -- me, a 25 year backed engineer
It makes absolute sense that a massively scalable trustless system involving money would use a consensus algorithm with a large number of nodes.
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massive scaling
Uh, yeah, after guzzling electricity like a small country, I'm sure bitcoin has massive scaling. Ability to process 9 transactions per seconds counts as massive scalability, right?
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I assume you're speaking Bitcoin, cryptocurrency that uses Proof-of-Work consensus.
Proof-of-Work is very secure, super decentralized, but it's the culprit behind mining and subsequent electricity drain.
There are other consensus mechanisms, like Proof-of-Stake, to which Ethereum, Solana and many many others have migrated to or were based on to begin with.
Proof-of-Stake requires about 100x less electricity, is reasonably secure and is the default option for modern cryptocurrencies. Thereby the energy argument gets less and less relevant, while the fuss around it is only gaining speed.
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And of course, the dollar, and Wall St. use no electricity whatsoever!
Also, your comment demonstrates your lack of knowledge on even the basics on this topic.
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It makes absolute sense that a massively scalable trustless system involving money would use a consensus algorithm with a large number of nodes.
Whoa whoa whoa. I suppose you didn't get the memo:
,but the rule is to blindly hate any kind of technology that any one has used in insalubrious ways, in-spite of its potential for liberation and independence.
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In-spite of its potential for liberation and independence.
When it shows that potential, maybe more people will get on board. Until then there are a host of problems that make a ton of people not want to touch it including but not limited to:
- Capitalists and scammers are already exploiting it the way they do with traditional currencies, except in sometimes new creative ways because of either the lack of regulations or because the technology inherently makes it impossible to trace.
- I don't see the involvement of predatory capitalists or financial institutions changing in a fully crypto world either, because people are always going to need financial services like loans and insurance on their savings and the financial institutions will always have the imbalance of power.
- The currencies mostly benefit people with a ton of capital to handle consensus, which further entrenches the power imbalance found in (1) and (2).
- Insane amounts of resources are needed to reach consensus in a way that is not good at all for the environment, whether that be electricity, computer hardware, or whatever other resource. Sure we already use a lot of power to make our society run. But crypto is asking for more ON TOP of that, compounding the issues. Saying the financial industry already uses a lot of power is not a good argument when I don't think anyone is reasonably convinced that they're going away even after crypto were to take over, and now you're adding an insane power or pollution requirement to run the world's currency system.
- Relying solely on crypto leaves people destitute if their wallets got hacked, unless they decide to utilize traditional banking with insurance (hint: people like stability and a lot of people will choose to do this over having their life savings wiped out).
- Chucklefucks are using the technology to commodify and break the best part of the digital world which is the ability to have bit for bit reproducible copies of information.
I'm serious. Fix all of that and you absolutely would get people on board. Not even kidding. Crypto would be taken seriously. But I have yet to hear compelling solutions by cryptobros.
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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.
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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.
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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. 😅
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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.
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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.
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Maybe it would be a good thing for the digital world to be free from the concept of ownership.
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”Digital property is theft, comrade”
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Reminds me of a device I heard about that just copies a music file and then deletes the copy and counts how many times that file has been copied as a commentary on the dialogue surrounding piracy
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How about first we see a version that isn't a scam? We've seen plenty of scam versions so far.
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Imagine if you will... the dollar (cash) was invented today, up until now all there was was long-established crypto currency.
Suddenly there's all sorts of scams where crooks trick people out of their dollars. Others are getting straight robbed and have no recourse to get their cash back. Cops often don't believe you as you have little evidence of the $1000 you just had. Yet others are getting scammed by "banks" that disappear soon after accepting deposits as there is no state regulation.
What you're seeing is not a problem inherent in crypto-currency or blockchains, it's a new tool. Many new tools are used most effectively by "the bad guys" first. Even look at Mp3s, the first 5 years of their existence their purpose was basically to rob record companies. Are mp3s a scam?
Don't let banks and authorities convince you that one of the most effective weapons against them is a scam against you. You don't think the banks are telling you the truth.. this time.. right?
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IMO, blockchain technology is good for one use case: illegal transactions.
I think all else can be achieved more efficiently by using a trusted third party write-only database, such as the ones available on AWS, and you’d also have the benefit of being able to go to court to seek relief. Some blockchain markets are basically reinventing banking systems and preexisting financial law - systems that have been built over centuries and have quite a bit of knowledge baked in.
I do like the shift to proof of stake from proof of work, but this tech is silly to me.
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Proof of stake, while better for the environment compared to electricity-guzzling proof of work, actually shift the power of consensus to capital owners. In proof of work, any bloke with some computing power can participate in the swarm even if they don't own any crypto. In proof of stake, only those who own some crypto can participate in the swarm, and those who own more have more say.
You can say that proof of works also requires capital to buy computing power, but with the shift to proof of stake, the bar to participate has been raised. If can't just use a spare computer to join now, you actually need some capital to buy some stake before you can participate. It's a big boy club now, a tool to help the rich get richer.
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IMO, blockchain technology is good for one use case: illegal transactions.
YES!!!!!
The only thing you're not getting quite right is what it means to be "illegal" and whether the groups making this decision have anyone's interest in mind except their own.
When doing right is or becomes illegal because our country is run by a fascist, that "illegal" money will save lives.
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I know of one use case that seems viable, there is a digital housing market service in my country (called Dias). It uses blockchain to verify transactions related to selling and buying houses. That includes proof of sales, ownership, bank transaction status etc. The blockchain is operated by all the major banks. Their incentive is that it increases the security of the transactions thanks to the immutable digital trail, and also the fact that no single entity owns the "database" so no entity can alter it, or skim service fees etc from the others.
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IMO, blockchain technology is good for one use case: illegal transactions.
If the friction of translating your fiat money into cryptocurrencies and back is low enough it can be a very good method for collecting digital donations. Potentially no fees to send/receive money, no real national restrictions to speak of and then its stored as a value that the recipient can use however they want, plus donors can trace where the money goes if the person they donated to then turns around and donates a portion to another person receiving donations on the blockchain.
Basically the exact same benefits as the use case of illegal transactions, but at least for good rather than usually-not-good
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A blockchain is only as secure as the amount of work (= processing power) that goes into it. Anyone with 51% of the processing power invested in a blockchain can attack it and essentially steal from other people. For cryptocurrencies it’s a problem that solves itself, because every person that possesses some of the cryptocurrency is incentivized to mine to keep it secure (and to earn some at the same time). The more your cryptocurrency is valuable, the more people will want to mine it and the more secure it will be.
For anything other than cryptocurrencies, you can’t incentivize a huge number of people to commit computing power to secure your blockchain. So you have to protect it some other way, for example only allowing you and some trusted people to write on it. But then it doesn’t really need to be a blockchain anymore, just a write-only database (which will perform better and occupy less space).
If it requires no work to generate a block at the end of your blockchain, any attacker can generate malicious ones.
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In which cases is this actually useful, as opposed to having a centralized database? Blockchain doesn't provide the enforcement of ownership, which is the real problem.
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actual, verifiable digital ownership... using a distributed database technology that is designed to require a massive amount of computing resources to update.
I think where some of us who work in spaces using databases to verify something in critical business processes get stuck in accepting that blockchain has value is that our jobs have always been to verify "ownership" as quickly and efficiently as possible. We typically do this by defining a canonical source of truth and our success is judged on how many milliseconds transactions take and the datacener or cloud costs.
Saying that everything about blockchain is "dumb" isn't a very nuanced analysis... but it's a understandable reaction to hearing the hype that blockchain is going to change everything for years.
I've never seen anyone argue that the massively distributed nature or the public read access of blockchain technologies aren't interesting. It's the tradeoff that has to be made in speed and costs that make it hard for many of us to see any value in the approach for most applications.
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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.
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the problem that bitcoin "solves" is mathematically unsolvable. The only reason it kind of works is because participants are human, and therefore are able to assign arbitrary value to the currency, and therefore can act greedily to try to maximize (and protect) their coins. Participants are only incentivized to participate in mining because the thing they're rewarded with is a "currency" (something they value, as humans).
For anything but a currency, what is the incentive of miners using their resources to handle your transactions?
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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.
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?
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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.
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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.
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Do we have a buttcoin on Lemmy? We need a buttcoin
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How old is the one on Reddit?
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Lot of comments don't seem to understand that these words are not interchangeable
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Then some massive org like the NSA creates/captures 51% of the nodes and takes everyone's money overnight.
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NSA isn't hurting for money. They're just going to monitor those transactions for suspicious activities. As long as you're not doing business with a terrorist, you have nothing to worry about. If you are doing business with a terrorist... is that a Reaper drone I hear?
It's only guys like SBF you gotta worry about ripping you off.
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NSA isn’t hurting for money
If you can figure out how to teach those sorts of people to say "no, I think I've actually got enough already" then please let me know, because I've been wracking my brain trying to solve that one for a while now.
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that's... not how that works. all you can do with 51% is possibly double-spend whatever coins you already have. or undo some transactions.
so you submit a transaction, then use your extra 1% of hash power to mine a new block that says you didn't actually spend it. at the same time you need to trick somebody else into believing you actually did send the coins, and take their stuff you "paid for." then after you have the stuff, you can submit the block that doesn't have your transaction in it. Voila, free stuff and you didn't spend your coins.
it does not enable you to mess with other's balances. other than possibly reversing some transactions. you would need the private keys to their wallets to take their money. and if you have those, you don’t need 51% of the hash power, you can just take the coins with 0% hash power.
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It's obviously not a comprehensive guide on how to cheat the system. I'm making the point that computers will never be secure under the current paradigm when there are massive and powerful actors with vastly greater resources than the average person. I strongly suspect that an org like the DoD (which had exclusive access to integrated circuit technology for three years before anyone else) could probably capture/spoof virtually the entire network if they wanted too.
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You can do the same with a big enough botnet
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That's what I meant by "capture."
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Or an army
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The coins can only be stolen for as long as the 51% attack stays live.
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In a trustless environment...
You're handing over your valuables at gunpoint, nerd.
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I think you meant to reply to a comment and instead replied to the post.
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No, I'm just mocking Blockchain idiots in general.
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Setting the difficulty to use mode power level now below 50% the earth is saved
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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.
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...which is much lower than the average values for a debit transaction or PayPal
[citation needed]
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A quick search gives me .0015 kWh per card transaction, but that could be wrong.
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I was hoping for the same thing
That still seems like an insane amount of power for one transaction.
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Y'all prefer to have the government and banks in charge of money instead? seriously?
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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.
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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.
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yeah they've done great with inflation so far! lol
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Yes I want my democratically elected representatives ("the gobernment") in charge
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For anyone who's interested, Holochain solves this problem while fulfilling the decentralization promises of Blockchain.
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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.
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