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.
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!”
Ban advertising to minors/for products intended for children
Ban ads/branding visible from roadways to prevent distracted driving
Yes, those two are the most important and shouldn’t even be that hard to push. There are many laws that were pushed “to protect the children”, we might as well finally make some that actually do protect them.
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
Didn’t go too well with The Marvels lmao
Actually I don’t know if there was any product placement in The Marvels because like the rest of the world, I’ve not seen it either.
ads don’t go unless capitalism goes
Removed by mod
Got a better one: just ban marketing outright
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”.
Are we all here because somebody “advertised” Lemmy on reddit?
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.
Removed by mod
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
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 program1 kilowatt hour is about 870kCal.
Humans are incredibly inefficient power generators. I can buy 1kWh of electricity from the grid for about 18 cents (generation…transmission is extra).
I don’t think I can buy 870kCal of food for 18 cents. Certainly not a healthy source. And that’s even assuming 100% efficiency. Any high school physics student will tell you that won’t happen.
Drinking one gallon of gasoline has enough calories to keep you alive for the rest of your life.
Join our team of Jerks. We have a stiff sign on bonus.
By chance are you good at “shooting ropes”? Our clients love ropes.
The new Weight Loss Jerkoff System could solve part of that
The studs at the local Blue Oyster don’t call me Spider Man for no reason.
Porn is more beneficial for humanity than imaginary ownership.
Capitalism is based on imaginary ownership.
Nailed it.
Bur, what if they prematurely finish and my car isn’t charged yet?
Fired!
I have one word for you:
Service Level Agreement.
deleted by creator
I 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!
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.
At least lighting has become more efficient than 20-30 years ago.
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.
I did a back of the envelope a few comments up. How it looks to me, just sending internet ads around the world consumes 20 times as much as all crypto mining combined.
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”
What are you on about?
Lets do an advertising tax 10% of all add revenue.
Unironically this.
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.
Damn, I knew the numbers would be crazy, but that’s absolutely bonkers.
Or how much is spent on the global banking industry…
deleted by creator
That’s such a great point wtf
How much does facebook, the banking system Google search need and does it even make sense to compare this against a small country?
That is why I only block ads when I’m on a plane 👍
Or that tumble dryers in the USA alone use more energy than Bitcoin.
Instead of actually talking about it you’re lazily using it to deflect criticism of unsustainable cryptocurrencies. Your input was worthless.
Yes, but it’s almost certainly a multitude less electricity than bitcoin.
it’s almost certainly not
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.
It really feels like SOMEWHERE there was a legitimate use for this for very mission-critical stuff that might need to be immutable once published and kept for posterity…
…but then it just became yet another speculative asset to make magic money that fueled stupid monkey jpegs.
The pursuit of profit benefits mankind only by the occasional anomalous accident.
100%. Capitalism is great until it reaches a peak where people who provide no value except in the wealth they’ve amassed are the ones who gain the most from it. You can succeed simply by being born with wealth and having no other value because other people who do have value will need you.
The point in OP is that “blockchain” was not a new thing. The Merkle Tree was patented in 1979, meaning that it has been free for decades. Most programmers might never have a use for it but they still encounter it every time they use git (which is older than bitcoin).
So, if you’re not aware of this, that’s because it is very technical and nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.
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.
With the electricity used to validate a single crypto transaction you could do thousands or even millions of DB queries.
Yes, everything uses electricity. That’s like saying that it’s fine if you kill one cow per day to eat its ear and throw the rest because hundreds of them are killed every day in farms.
Wasting so much electricity in such a non efficient manner so a decentralization cult member can have his wet dream of using non-government money makes no sense.
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.
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.
I can’t help but agree.
I hate things like patenting game mechanics and the RIAA throwing people in prison over mp3s, and everything Disney does.
But as an artist I’d also feel kinda, no, REALLY, shitty, if the second I put my human soul into something that got any kind of attention, it was (now legally) ripped off and everyone but me would make bank off of it.
Tshirts, plushies, videogames, a major corpo making a bugillion dollar movie. . .and very quickly nobody would even know I did it. But we still have bills to pay and all the rip-off sandfleas dropshipping my intellectual labor would say “Get a real job then lmao.”
How many games has Facebook or Zynga ripped off of small time creators and shoved them into obscurity just because they have the money and visibility?
Imagine how much it sucks to hear people describe your 5 year old work as “Oh that’s like a clone of that 2 month old Facebook game.”
Talk about punishing creativity. Everything would be like it is with AAA games and Hollywood now but worse: Trapped in a time-bubble of rip off fanfic of whatever hyper-consumer “fandom” that generation grew up with.
I think the people sincerely pushing this “eliminate copyright entirely” idea are the same “idea guys” that think prompting a robot will allow them to finally “tell their story” with the most minimal of efforts.
They’re fine with intellectual theft because the burden of forming one’s own personality not defined by consumption has already proven too great to bear.
…and their masterpiece will belong on the infinite trash heap of everyone else’s story that did the same thing…
TL;DR: Keep copyright. Fix public domain laws. Tighten the leash on corpos.
You are a fool if you think copyrights can protect anyone but the big corporations.
Copyright are a cancer for mankind, they should disappear.
Well they do… But only barely and less so in the US lately.
There are still cases of small artists getting compensation for big business using their images or music without consent. But sadly it is far from the norm.
I agree with your core sentiment. Copyright is not working how it was intended and it is being abused by corporations.
It might be because I’m not American, or because I am a musician and songwriter myself. but I still see a point to having some laws protecting the rights of the creative mind behind something.
Removing copyright completely will only make it even more easy for the guys with the money and resources to exploit the small independent creators.
But (American) copyright is severely broken. This is true.
A starting point would be that the right is only tied to the specific creative(s) actually involved in the creation of something.
While I understand where you’re coming from and the hope you may have in copyright, we don’t agree. I firmly believe copyrights are a cancer, an aberration that can only worsen things, especially in the age of Internet.
The paternity right (that’s how what’s you referring to in your last sentence is called in France) may not be completely harmful, but history proves it’s useless imo.
Well I’ll be a little more enthused if that would ever apply to regular people as well, rather than just people with several billion in VC money to buy lawyers.
You are a fool if you believe copyright would ever protect anyone but mega corporation and rich bourgeoisie. It never ever protected the poor artists and creators, save for those one or two examples you will certainly provide to counter my argument.
I completely agree.
The philosophy behind modern copyright is completely out to lunch.
You don’t hate copyright.
You hate that entertainment megacorps have set up a massive toll booth between creators and audiences, thwarting their ability to connect and collaborate, and crippling the average person’s ability to meaningfully participate in culture unless it happens to be profitable for those in charge.
And soon you will hate that AI megacorps have set up a massive toll booth between creators and audiences, thwarting their ability to connect and collaborate, and crippling the average person’s ability to meaningfully participate in culture unless it happens to be profitable for those in charge.
What they did to us by forcing us to obey copyright, they will now do by disregarding copyright.
You can be pro-piracy because it distributes power, and be anti-AI because it consolidates it, without legitimizing copyright as a fundamental principle of ethics.
You are mistaken. I do hate copyrights like the plague they are, because they are chains for knowledge and culture. And I do not hate AI, but I hate corporations for taking technology, progress and their benefit to themselves and to oppress society, and this thanks to the secret they keep and copyrights.
Sharing of knowledge and culture is the solution, not the problem.
Clearly we see the word “copyright” very differently, so I’m wondering if it’s maybe a useless term for us here. I’ll get more specific about what I see as being valuable, and maybe we’ll see that we agree on some of it.
I like that the law, by default, obliges people to attribute works accurately. It helps me find the stuff I like, or to fact-check sources.
I like that the law, by default, obliges copies to remain faithful to the original. This is the other half of attribution. Attribution isn’t worth much if it’s not exactly what the original creator meant. That was a big problem in the period immediately following the printing press, and we already see it cropping up again with reactions/stitches/duets, and it’ll probably escalate with AI.
I like that I can eagerly share all of the shitty code that I write, slap a non-commercial share-alike clause on there, and know that it’s illegal (not that it doesn’t happen anyway) for a megacorp to shunt it off into a for-profit, closed-source venture. If I couldn’t do that, I might just not share it at all.
I like that I can – or at least, I used to be able to – find the person who made a thing I like, because the search results didn’t used to be an endless flood of copies/reposts of it.
I don’t like that the primary employment model for artists and inventors is to have them instantly assign all rights to their creations over to some holding company that doesn’t have a creative bone in its corporate body.
I don’t like that they often can’t even produce derivative work on their own dime in order to engage with the fanbase that they themselves built.
I don’t like the trend of “reaction videos” where a media group with clout and deep pockets can scoop the work of a no-name creator, say “lol” a few times or just leave a livecam of an empty chair, and rake in mad dollars while the person who did the hard work gets a mere trickle of support from the 0.0001% of viewers who bother finding the original.
I don’t like that a holding company can just sit on an IP and do nothing with it. I also don’t like that they can sell it to another company that will disrespect the creation as they milk it for every last dollar.
I don’t like that fans are often shot down or prosecuted when they try to make remixes or tributes to the stuff they love.
I don’t like that people who can’t afford to pay – or are just geographically in the “wrong” location – are cut off from accessing knowledge and participating in culture.
–
I don’t like tech bros treating culture like a raw material to be mined and refined, with no respect for the fertility of the soil in which it grew.
The stuff that I like… I don’t just like it because of what it is, but also because of who made it, and where they were in their life when they made it.
The fact that their viewpoint, at that moment, is inseparable from the artifact that’s a mere shadow of that moment… is part of what makes life worth living, to me.
What is “Fate of the Animals” without the wild story of Franz Marc’s fever dream, his subsequent death, the inscription on the back, the warehouse fire, and his friend’s restoration? Just pixels? The pixels are just the reference point. They’re the SHA256 of that story. Disconnecting the story, seeing just the hash… It does some kind of damage to humanity as an enterprise.
Copyrights don’t do shit for controlling sources and trust on Internet. You are mistakening things. Copyright is a framework of laws to enforce rarity and property on immaterial things. Patent is another way to it much more reasonably. Trademark is a third way. None of those is worth anything.
Imposing rarity and property on things that can be copied and transfered freely is a cancer for mankind.
Now there is what in France is called paternity of a work. Unfortunately it’s tied to copyrights in the law, but it’s still its own thing. I don’t care much for it. It didn’t existed for ages and it didn’t prevented mankind from creating all kind of stuff.
Removed by mod
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.
This is revolutionary
This is de-evolutionary!
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.
…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.
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
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.
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.
Probably invented as a way to more discreetly fund black sites…
Monero entered the chat.
deleted by creator
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. :(
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.
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?
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.
Ethereum doesn’t seem to have great TPS either ( ~15 transaction/s ), and talks about improving TPS seems to have quiet down.
I think most eth-based transactions happen on different layers and then get settled on the main layer periodically. Same with Bitcoin, come to think of it. TPS doesn’t seem like a particularly useful number these days.
You have something like Nano that hits around 50 TPS and also uses proof of stake. Transactions are basically instant and it has no fees. It was always my favourite in terms of crypto personally.
Ethereum is a Layer-1, which is focused on super ironclad security and eternal preservation. It’s more of a catalogue than a practical way to transact. Now, Layer-2’s on the backbone of Ethereum (Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, etc.) are able to handle thousands of transactions per second.
For example, Polygon has a capacity to conduct up to 7200 TPS (while practically being used to the tune of 50 TPS simply because people don’t actually need that much currently).
If you want Layer-1 that is focused on speed, there’s Solana, for example, with 300.000 TPS tested and potential for 710.000.
This problem is essentially solved for everyday applications. The reason Bitcoin and Ethereum has such a low TPS is that they’ve never focused on TPS to begin with, instead opting for the most hyper-secure networks people store value in. I’m not saying Polygon or Solana aren’t safe - they’re perfectly fine - it’s just that Bitcoin and Ethereum have laser-focused on that aspect, making compromising the blockchain even by biggest of institutions entirely off the table.
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.
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.
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.
Fix all of that and you surely would get people on board but I have yet to hear compelling solutions by cryptobros.
I actually completely agree with all of your points. I also hold out hope for the decentralization of power, which is something I still think block chain and crypto have a role in. Its the same hope I have for the fediverse, that we can all ‘own’ or be a part of a broader solution through self hosting, development, and funding the projects we care about or think will make a difference.
I thought crypto had that potential, but because its looked at as ‘money’, the worst of the worst kinds of people steered its coarse. I still think the principals have this potential, and in more mature versions, I expect them to be realized. And arguably, they are being realized. In-spite of all of the shitcoins and scamcoins, bitcoin, the OG, is still extremely strong. I have no reason to believe that a bitcoin purchase made today wouldn’t still be considered as good of an investment as SPY was 8 years ago. I also think the generally dismissive tone of the case against digital currencies as scam is a little hilarious, considering that literately 90%+ of stocks admitted to the NYSE end up with a similar if not worse fate than the majority of (major) coins from the big boom we saw through 2020. A few stocks stay valuable throughout time, but that’s rare. Most end up valueless and eventually are delisted.
I think criticisms of digital currencies, especially decentralized ones, need to be put into the broader context of all financial vehicles that exist and are available. Likewise, crypto has potential outside of just digital currencies, and the insistence that its bad for the environment, well that’s largely solved outside of bitcoin, and likely will never be solved for bitcoin. I still think its a neat technology with some interesting use cases. I’ve enjoyed watching it evolve and grow so far and I’m excited to by the belief that there is some potential for interesting things to come from that space in the future, especially if they support a more decentralized, anonymous, and democratic internet in the future.
-
Oh good Lord, I was partially inclined to agree but using generative Ai to make this point tells me everything I need to know.
If that’s your make or break, go ahead and break. No real loss if that’s your breaking point.
Couldn’t even be assed to fix the text of the main focus of the picture?
I’m working bruh, how much time do you expect me to put into a throw away meme?
More that the barest minimum, at least.
Fine, Dad.
There I fixed it.
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.
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. 😅
An NFT is a deed. Do you see any uses for a deed that is not in control of a central authority?
Not really, no. Who’s going to honor the deed? There’s your central authority that can control it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
That just sounds like you’re describing me.
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
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.
Yeah why would ticketmaster, who makes a killing having their ticket monopoly and control, develop a system where they lose control?
That is an absolutely TERRIBLE use case because it is by definition centralized. The venue already has ample control over who tf gets in and there is little problem with counterfeit tickets.
Duranium-on-the-Mohs-scale hard pass. Tickets work fine.
What’s baffling to me is the ramping up of the 21st century penchant for mindless wheel-re-inventing.
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.
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.
"Intellectual Property[sic]" is dishonest loaded language, but yes, I agree with you that blockchain could be a good way for a copyright holder to prove their monopoly. 'Course, that’s also what registering your copyright with the Library of Congress is for, so…
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.
It’s almost like different types of systems have different requirements, and a communication platform benefits from decentralization, where traffic lights and vehicle routing does not.
deleted by creator
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.
Maybe it would be a good thing for the digital world to be free from the concept of ownership.
”Digital property is theft, comrade”
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
How about first we see a version that isn’t a scam? We’ve seen plenty of scam versions so far.
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?
I’m looking at the current evidence, not “what banks are telling me”.
Of course! You have access to actual evidence and not articles directly or indirectly funded by those who would be harmed by moving away from the current system. And of course you’ve considered it without bias or influence from that group. You are not being propagandized to, no way.
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.
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.
To add: mining profits are minimized with difficulty adjustment, but there’s no such mechanism with staking - profits are maximized instead.
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.
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.
But if you have any conflict with it, you have to get a lawyer involved right? It doesn’t seem like it provides value to a real estate transaction, just seems like a use case for block chain
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who do you think controls ETC? IOHK? It’s an open-source project.
It had some 51% attacks a few years ago, is that what you are referring to?
I’m honestly just curious what you mean
No, I’m referring to how ETC came about as the result of a huge scam that caused the whole Ethereum project to be forked. The original Ethereum was supposed to be immutable, but this conflict clearly showed that wasn’t true, and there were still people pulling the strings who were too big to fail.
Not anything new to someone who’s very familiar with the project, but emblematic of the promise of crypto vs the actual product.
Then I guess you misunderstand that the hard fork resulting from the DAO hack was the result of consensus of the network participants, not a unilateral action taken by the Ethereum foundation. Indeed, the protocol facilitated that’s the only way it could happen.
The historic source code is still hosted, if you think ETH devs have the ability to ‘edit whatever they want’ then you should be able to point to the lines of code where that ability is afforded to them. Or someone should, 8 years should have been enough time to have a flick through.
Your anti-ETH comment came across as an anti-ETC comment to me, that’s why I responded. I stand with you in disagreement with the 2016 hard fork. Mostly because many people would lose money anyway, and did. ETH corrected 50+%.
ETC is literally the original chain, sans Ethereum foundation’s branding (which is why your reference to it confused me). Founding members left and continued to support ETC, and went on to found other foundations with a basis in academic rigor, which formed the fundamental basis of the ideological disagreement between participants.
You said this showed ETH/ETC devs have a ‘kill switch in their back pocket’, but the part of Ethereum that was ‘killed’ is alive and much larger than it was in 2016.
My point wasn’t for or against any particular chain. It was just pointing out that crypto isn’t really immutable when applied to real use cases, and is only as decentralized and democratic as power brokers in the space want it to be.
I’m pointing out that the DAO hack transactions are not muted on ETC, they still exist as transactions in a validated block on that chain. Whether its state of mutability exists in binary or on a spectrum, ETC is shown to be immutable using your criteria, further showing that it’s not as simple as “crypto isn’t really immutable”. Different chains, even directly originating from the same project, have different characteristics with respect to mutability. It’s not to say that ETH is worse and/or better than ETC, or that either of them are good, it’s just what’s been observed as a matter of record, contrary to your depiction
My point is that in a mass-adoption scenario where blockchains are controlled by large entities, they will absolutely use these characteristics to their advantage, and because of how crypto is structured it will be much more oppressive and favored towards existing powers than more traditional methods that allow for greater flexibility and a more diverse set of use cases. That’s why some of the biggest holders of crypto are the same corporations that caused the '08 subprime loan crash.
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.
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?
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.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Which is why people are so horny for chains using proof of stake instead of proof of work
How does proof of stake not become more expensive, slow, and power hungry the more people use it?
In PoS the constraint on mining is proportional to the amount of tokens you own. Not the electricity/computational power you have.
Tokens are confiscated if you mine dishonestly.
The more people who use proof of stake blockchains the more power it will require, same as the more people who visit CNN.com or the more people who turn on a light bulb, but it’s not nearly as much as proof of work.
The difference between proof of work and proof of stake is that the first one in order to function requires showing that someone did a bunch of processing on their computer. By attaching a financial cost (literally expending energy) to mining new coins, PoW helps avoid someone fraudulently taking over the network and issuing as many new coins as they want.
Proof of stake works by people who already hold coins putting some of them up as a kind of collateral, so it’s nowhere near as processing intensive.
Do we have a buttcoin on Lemmy? We need a buttcoin
How old is the one on Reddit?
deleted by creator
Then some massive org like the NSA creates/captures 51% of the nodes and takes everyone’s money overnight.
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.
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.
You can do the same with a big enough botnet
Or an army
That’s what I meant by “capture.”
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.
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.
By spending billions of dollars in order for them to dupe a transaction worth a couple million at most. Once. Before the entire network realizes what happens and a fork is made. It’s just idiotic enough to work!
The coins can only be stolen for as long as the 51% attack stays live.
Ignoring the fact they definitely have the resources to sustain it, how many people will continue to run a node after losing everything to such an attack? How will anyone reclaim real world value if they exchange the coins for something else?
Coin holders would only lose everything for as long as the attack occurred. The validated chain would still correctly record their claims.
The people receiving the fake coins transfered during the attack are the ones that will be pissed. Any goods or services exchanged during that attack period may not be compensated.
Again, how many ordinary people will continue to run a node for a network where they have nothing for an extended period? Even if they do, will the value of the coins remain even after such an event proves the weakness of the system?
Empirically after a 51% attack, 75% of people stopped mining.
will the value of the coins remain
Eth classic is currently $25.
In a trustless environment…
You’re handing over your valuables at gunpoint, nerd.
I think you meant to reply to a comment and instead replied to the post.
No, I’m just mocking Blockchain idiots in general.
Setting the difficulty to use mode power level now below 50% the earth is saved
