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
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
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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”.
Got a better one: just ban marketing outright
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.
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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 ™, 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.
The new Weight Loss Jerkoff System could solve part of that
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 studs at the local Blue Oyster don’t call me Spider Man for no reason.
Porn is more beneficial for humanity than imaginary ownership.
Bur, what if they prematurely finish and my car isn’t charged yet?
Fired!
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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.
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”
Yes but what about this whataboutism?
Blockchain user.
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…
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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?
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.
That is why I only block ads when I’m on a plane 👍
That’s such a great point wtf
Instead of actually talking about it you’re lazily using it to deflect criticism of unsustainable cryptocurrencies. Your input was worthless.
Or that tumble dryers in the USA alone use more energy than Bitcoin.
Distributed hashed linked list is so yesteryear. These days we’re into text autocompletion instead.
Hey, it’s not just fancy autocomplete!
Thanks to years of innovation, it’s now copyright infringement as well.
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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.
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
I don’t think Lemmy counts as popular yet.
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Sure, but what real-world problem does a trustless solve? I thought this was all very interesting years ago but now that we’ve had blockchain for years it seems it’s only good for illegal or morally questionable transactions.
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See I think more nuanced takes like this are good. I’m not familiar with the Chinese banking issue that you are describing, but it sounds like deposit insurance (like the FDIC) might be a better solution than cryptocurrency, and it’s definitely better understood. Since the real world value of cryptocurrencies are so volatile they are a questionable store of value, and taking a risk on a poorly regulated bank might be better than taking a risk on storing your money in a volatile and unregulated security like cryptocurrency. Honestly it’s hard to know which is the better risk. So it could be better or it could be worse.
I agree with your point about transferring money internationally, and even within the US transferring money used to be a real pain. So I’m still interested to see if cryptocurrency can be a better medium of exchange or medium of transfer than traditional ways, or at least give traditional systems incentive to improve. But again the volatility is a concern so for most people the best move is probably to get in and out of the crypto market as quickly as possible or else risk getting a vastly different amount of money out of it than you put in. Admittedly it could appreciate, but when I’m transferring money to someone I don’t want that to simultaneously be an investment. The few times I have used Bitcoin to purchase something the whole process has taken hours, and there’s no guarantee there won’t be price swings — a lot could happen in those hours.
I appreciate the brutal honesty about cryptocurrency not being for the average Joe. It’s not that long since many cryptocurrency boosters were hoping it would replace fiat currency, but now that I think about it I haven’t heard as much about that recently. In its current state it is really not for the average Joe.
Legal money transfers are not a use case. Crypto is simply much more expensive to maintain. All these mining rigs and all that electricity must be paid for.
If it seemed cheaper, then either:
the banks were charging inflated fees. That can be fixed only once. (And it should have been fixed by government).ETA: Doesn’t work, after all. It can only be the other 2.- It was masked by price fluctuations. Eventually, someone else must pick up the tab. Can’t work long-term.
- Costly regulations/taxes were dodged.
Under the spoiler is something I wrote recently to explain how crypto is not like stocks.
spoiler
Let’s look at how stocks get their value.
A company sells shares to get funding. Say, you want to make microwave dinners. You need to hire people, an industrial kitchen, packaging and packaging machines, ingredients, and probably a whole lot more. The company takes in revenue from selling the dinners, which pay for the running costs. Anything above that may be reinvested or turns into profit. The profit is paid to the stock-owners to pay them for their investment.
Now the question is: What is the value of a stock?
Imagine you take out a loan. That gives you money right now, in the present. You pay back the loan with the money that you get from your stocks; your share in the profit. Now imagine that the company goes out of business (and the value of the stock becomes $0) right as you are done paying back the loan + interest. Then that loan was the present value of the stock.
In theory, the value of a share is the present value of the future money that you get paid. Of course, one cannot know how much that is, so this is useless for actual investing. Still, the market price of a share should be the best guess of people with money. If the stock is trading higher than someone’s guess, they sell. If it’s lower, they buy. So the market cap should reflect the future profits.
But what’s the value of a crypto-coin like bitcoin?
Let’s start by thinking only about a coin being used to transfer money. And to make it easier, let’s say that coins are only exchanged for money once a day.
Say people want to transfer 10 million USD each day. The senders buy coins for 10 million USD. They don’t care how many coins that gets them, only that the coins represent 10 million USD. If there are 2 million coins being sold on the market, then each coin must transport 5 USD and that will be the market value.
New coins are constantly being “mined” to pay for the upkeep of the system. Let’s say that’s 100,000 coins per day.
The intended receivers of the 10 million USD sell their coins to get the money. The miners also sell their coins to pay their bills. So the next day you have 2 million + 100,000 coins on the market. The senders again want to transport 10 million USD, so they buy the 2,100,000 coins on the market. The market value of a coin is now ~4.76 USD. Adding more coins lowered the value of the coins. That is inflation. The “missing” money goes to the miners to keep the system running. That’s not a problem for senders and receivers. Transferring money costs money, however you do it. (That crypto is an extremely expensive way to do this, is one underlying reason why it has no adoption as a payment system in the normal economy.)
So far, you wouldn’t expect anyone to store or “hodl” coins. The value is just going down. But obviously, this is only true as long as the amount of USD to be transferred stays constant. If the system is more widely adopted and more money is transferred (outpacing the inflationary effect of the newly mined coins), then each coin has to transport more USD and the “value” goes up.
Now, if you believe that adoption continues to grow, it becomes a reasonable strategy to stash some coins to sell them later at a higher “value”. Maybe the problem is already obvious, but let’s continue to take it slow.
So, let’s say, it’s a bit later. There are 15 million coins and they are to transfer 100 million USD. The market price of a coin is now $6.67. (Let’s also say that there are no more coins being mined and the upkeep is paid some other way.) Now we bring in some venture capitalists. One day, they buy coins for an additional $50 million. Now the coins trade at $10 per coin. 15 million coins bought for $100 million + $50 million, right?
The VCs now have 5 million coins. But note where the money went. It went to the transfer receivers when they sold the 15 million coins for $10 each. They got a windfall profit. That’s how it goes in crypto. All the money that people “invested” by buying coins is gone. It was either used to pay miners/for the system upkeep, or early adopters took it and ran. It’s all gone. That’s the big difference to shares.
If the VCs sell their coins again, they lose. Because when there is only 100 million USD in the market for 15 million coins, they would only get 6.67 USD per coin. The money that they spent is gone. If they want to make a profit, new money has to come from somewhere. There are only 2 ways to achieve this.
One is continuing adoption. If more money were to be transferred, with the same number of coins, the price goes up. They can siphon off some of that money by selling into that market. But that lowers the price again, so that only yields a profit if adoption increases enough.
The other is that someone else also removes coins from the market. If there are fewer coins for the same (or a decreasing!) amount of money being transferred, then the market price will also go up. (In this scenario, too, they would be siphoning off money that other people are trying to transfer. The cost of transferring money would be increased for no very good reason; not a great feature in a payment system.) But note that this, too, lowers the price again. That only yields a profit, if “hodlers” sequester the coins sold by the VCs for a higher price than the VCs paid.
I’m not saying this is a Ponzi scheme because everyone has heard that already.
So that’s it. If you want to know the effect of 50k bitcoin on price, you need to look at the trading volume (minus wash trades): How many bitcoin are actually “in use”? You also need to know how many of these coins will be promptly removed from the market by “hodlers”.
Legal money transfers are not a use case. Crypto is simply much more expensive to maintain. All these mining rigs and all that electricity must be paid for.
Various currencies are moving away from the proof-of-work model, FWIW. Ethereum was mentioned in this comment chain as one of them.
Which doesn’t solve the economic problem. (Good for the environment, though)
Ethereum has proof of stake. That means someone has to deposit Ethereum, tying it up. It could be exchanged for money and invested in stocks or bonds, yielding a return. This is only economically feasible if the stake yields the same return as a comparable investment. This profit has to come from the users.
A competing payment system, based on sensible, modern technology also needs computers and the internet but not a stake. It must be cheaper.
The stake is supposed to keep people honest, because it can be taken if fraud is detected. Normally, fraud is dealt with by putting the perpetrators in jail. Being known by name is proof of stake.
Users have to pay extra just so that some kingpins in the back can remain anonymous. Do you want to for that?
It also doesn’t solve the other deal-breaker (in the spoiler). Whenever you transfer money through crypto, you risk that some “investor” siphons off some of it.
Since the real world value of cryptocurrencies are so volatile they are a questionable store of value
It will not be so volatile if it’s primary means of transaction for everyone(obviously not yet). Value of thoose cryptos are just like the values of normal money in different countries.
For example, if you can buy an apple for 10 shitcoins, instead of buying it in USD, then the value is not volatile. The problem arises when the apple is 5 USD and you have to transfer the shitcoin amount which is equal to the exchange rate of 5USD at that time.
This is true, but it’s hard to see why we would ever move from fiat currency to cryptocurrency as the primary means of exchange. Currently cryptocurrency’s advantages are modest and its disadvantages are substantial, and I haven’t seen a lot of movement toward fixing that balance. I’d like to give traditional finance channels some competition to reduce fees, lock-in, and inconvenience, but cryptocurrency is going to have to get a lot better for average people if it’s going to be a real alternative.
Advantages of cryptos is that they are decentralised. Just like lemmy is decentralised, no single entity or government control the money. Transaction happen from peer to peer. No middlemen involved. I don’t understand the disadvantages yet except environmental concerns. I heard coins like ethereum switched to proof of stake model which is more environmental friendly.
I don’t understand the disadvantages yet except environmental concerns.
As you point out, PoS basically solves the environmental concerns. (Some people might say it still consumes too much power but I disagree, I think power consumption under PoS is acceptable).
This is just my opinion, but I think the big disadvantage is cryptocurrencies are a pain in the ass to use. Lengthy story about what a pain it’s been to use them in Spoiler tag. I think this story is a bit of an outlier since I hit all of these issues, but the fact that a technically inclined person who is just getting back into cryptocurrency after a long hiatus can have this much trouble with it does not speak well use ability or safety.
::: I have a few coins I mined back in the day (before switching all my computing power to BOINC), and I saved off my wallet.dat from those wallets. I wanted to use them recently, so I reinstalled the wallet software. That worked, but then I had to download the entire chain again, so I had to wait more than a day to actually use the coins. Putting cash in a bank is faster if I’m already a customer of the bank. If I’m a new customer I might have to wait, but the point is cryptocurrency doesn’t have a clear advantage here.
The coins I had weren’t Bitcoin, but the shop I wanted to buy from only accepts Bitcoin. So then I had to exchange mine for Bitcoin and pay transaction fees. I guess you could say it’s my own fault for holding a less-popular coin but I’m not sure cryptocurrency is living up to its own hype if there’s exactly one or two coins that you have to use, just like how in the US there’s no real alternative to USD.
I found a no-account exchange, and I had to carefully enter keys and figure out amounts of coin > BTC. And I had to trust the exchange to give me what I wanted. If the no-account exchange didn’t exist, I would have to create a whole new account on a website I don’t entirely trust just to exchange one coin for Bitcoin. That’s a layer of trust in a “trustless” system. I also don’t like creating yet another account with my info in it — yet another way that cryptocurrency is not better than traditional finance.
Then not only did it cost transaction fees, it took hours for the transaction to go through. I could pay more for it to go faster, but now we’re talking about fees that far exceed those of credit cards or regular money transfers. Then I had to send the Bitcoin to the online store and wait for that transaction to clear. More time and more transaction fees. The purchase worked without a hitch, but it wasn’t any better than using a credit card.
I had to buy extra BTC because it’s really difficult to know exactly how much you’re going to pay including transaction fees, so after the transaction went through I tried to turn my remaining Bitcoins (I think it was worth ~$13?) back into the kind of coins I keep, but I set my transaction fee too low and the trade I set up expired before my coins went through. Luckily I had given the exchange a refund account, but that meant I had to wait over 24 hours before my transaction actually happened, and then the exchange had to send back my Bitcoin, incurring fees at each step.
While waiting I tried to cancel this Bitcoin transaction, but the software I used didn’t support that. So then I tried to extract my private key to enter into another piece of software, and that was surprisingly difficult. I thought cryptocurrency was supposed to put me in control, but without a LOT of technical knowledge I was just as powerless as I’d be with a bank that froze a transfer. I asked for help on a few forums and some people tried to help but the whole thing was confusing and eventually I had to give up and just wait for the transaction to go through.
Then I had to do the BTC > mycoin transaction again, and this time I think the fees were 5-10% of the amount I was transferring. That’s way more than Venmo’s immediate transfer fee or even credit card fees (I think those are around 3%?).
I will say that during this process I discovered the Electrum wallet, which is very good and works on a lot of platforms. Some of the issues I had would not have happened if I had used that all along. But there are so many wallets out there it’s hard to know which one is best and obviously when I started this process no one told me it was the best. And maybe it’s not and that just my opinion.
In summary, I’m interested in cryptocurrency and kind of enjoyed using it in the way learning new things can be fun. But it was slower, less convenient, and more expensive than regular currency. Cryptocurrency boosters are going to have to improve all of these problems before it’s competitive with regular currency, and I don’t see a lot of discussion about how much these pain points suck and how to improve.
:::
There’s a case to be made for a currency that facilitates illegal transactions, or transactions that corporations object to. Just because something is legal in your country doesn’t mean it might not be unjustly restricted. Or could just be unjustly illegal in your country or another country. The problem of course is that distributed currency also facilitates things that should be illegal.
But WikiLeaks is a good example - their legacy is a little mixed now, but when they first came on the scene they were doing work which was a valuable service to the public. If you wanted to donate money to support wikileaks you couldn’t because the credit card processors shut them off. Blockchain lets you get around that.
Likewise it’s the combination of distance and direct - I can give $5 in cash to my local leaking consortium, but I can’t give $5 to the leaking consortium on the other side of the world without relying on the knowledge and consent of third parties.
I agree there’s something to be said for this — If you have a above-board business that credit card companies don’t want to service because they think it makes them look bad, that should not shut you out of electronic payments yet that’s basically where we are at least in the US.
This is a little hard to balance with the fact that the same things that let you circumvent gatekeepers like credit card companies also make it attractive for genuinely immoral things, but that’s a trade-off. Every currency can be used for immoral things and just because cryptocurrency might make it a little easier doesn’t mean it’s inherently immoral.
You totally can give cash anywhere in the world. You post it as a letter
This was common before electronic transfer
Mailing someone cash means you need to know their address, you have to wait however long for the mail to arrive, you can’t prove they received the cash, it’s possible the cash was stolen en route and anyone who might wish you harm like an adversary government can observe the transaction.
With crypto you face similar problems. You need an address, waiting is shortr, rugpulls and other scams are one of the biggest use cases so getting crypto stolen seems common. You might be able to verify that crypto was revceved but as with any trustless paymet solutions the issue is that getting the item you ordered is the part where trust is needed the most. Good luck asking back money when you get an empty box.
You’re right about ordering goods and not having a recourse if they’re not delivered. Of course in the case of supporting an organization that will be less of a consideration.
In the case of needing to know an address it’s much different to give out an arbitrary string of numbers as an address than information which represents your physical location.
No disagreement that there are myriad examples of problematic uses for crypto. My first comment was in response to the question about what are valid use cases. It seems clear there are some, even if it’s not as universal as some true believers claim.
It will also get there faster.
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Maybe in your country
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On account of it being so in yours?
Australia Post says they reject any liability if you do
The UK says you should use their premium service to do so
India says you can’t. It at least quora says you can’t in India
Quora says you can in Canada
I wonder why the UK and Australian searches landed on the national postal carriers and the others landed on fora
I was hoping it would help me save on international transfer fees when I was an overseas postdoc, but it would have actually cost more between the exchange fees and my time setting up all the exchanges in various countries, meanwhile also introducing risk in me being robbed of said money and screwing something up and introducing myself to some sort of tax liability. Needless to say, I continued to just pay for the bank transfers
That’s really the thing, isn’t it? In my experience cryptocurrency fees are quite high. I bet there’s a way to find a lower fee but then I’d have to do a ton of research and hope it’s accurate. I’d rather just pay a bank that requires me to do no research.
It cannot be cheaper, other than by avoiding taxes and regulation.
Consider sending money from US Dollar to Euro:
Sane way: An intermediary (IE a bank) handles this. You give them USD and they give the receiver Euros. This involves some service costs and 2 bank transfers.
Because people exchange money in both ways, the banks need not run out of either Euro or USD. In the background there is the currency market, on which the proper exchange rate is haggled out, which takes care of imbalances in cash flow.
Crypto way: You give a crypto exchange (an intermediary) USD and they give you crypto. This already involves 2 transfers and service costs. One of those 2 transfers is a crypto transfer, which is much more expensive (IE uses more resources) than a bank transfer.
This is already more expensive and then you have to do the same thing again to cash out.
And then we are still not done. Say there is an imbalance in that more people transfer money from USD to Euro than vice versa. That means that crypto becomes more expensive in USD and cheaper in Euro. There’s more demand in terms of USD and more supply for Euro, right?.
That creates an arbitrage opportunity. You can exchange USD for Euro, and then buy crypto for Euro to sell for USD. This closes the circle and puts everything back to the initial state. But to do that, we still have to exchange the real currencies. So now the markets bake the cost of exchanging currency into the crypto prices. At a guess, for some currencies (probably not so much Euro/USD), that would have a significant effect. I’m thinking smaller, poorer countries that send many migrant workers, who send money back home. These workers would not only end up paying the insane overhead of the crypto system, but also, still, most of the normal, direct exchange costs (if they relied on crypto).
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it’s only good for illegal or morally questionable transactions.
Good thing laws are always just and everyone agrees that following every law is the most important thing a human being can aspire to do in their lifetime.
^^/s
Seriously though, I’m someone that uses credit for 90% of my purchases, but I also enjoy consuming cannabis and I’m well aware how horrible it would be if it wasn’t possible to make “illegal or morally questionable transactions.”
Trusting Humans is literally a security flaw. Any system with trust you can find examples with fraud and abuse from those who held power by holding that trust.
We trusted bankers to invest our money, and some short sold the housing market with that money
I could go on, but trust really is a security issue. Decentralization has its efficiency issues, but saying “Bitcoin uses as much power as the 90th largest nation” is peanuts when you consider the energy inequality that America spends and compare what Bitcoin delivers with that energy versus how much energy centralized banks need to deliver a system that’s easier to fraud
Trusting Humans is literally a security flaw.
Exactly, and using Bitcoin does not solve that because you still have to transact with humans. If you buy something with Bitcoin and the seller never sends you anything, you’re out of luck. Your money is gone.
If you use a regulated financial system you have some options. If you paid with credit card you can charge back and dispute the charge. Your money in the bank is backed by insurance that is guaranteed by the government.
Bitcoin only cuts out the middleman. Every other issue of trust with the recipient still exists, and those are the problems regulation solves, and the reason fraudsters love Bitcoin so much.
Amen, exactly.
Ah yes Bitcoin, famously free of fraud and abuse.
More seriously, every system can be used for fraud. The question is whether the solution is actually better overall. We could prevent all wire fraud by returning to a cash-only economy. But that would be hugely inconvenient and therefore create a huge drag on the economy compared to a world where we can do electronic transfers even though electronic transfers open us up to wire fraud. Returning to cash-only is not worth the increase in security, and it opens us up to other issues (e.g., bank runs and someone stealing all the money under my mattress).
And while power use is a problem with Proof of Work coins, it’s not my biggest concern about cryptocurrency because Proof of Stake can fix that issue. It’s a shame that the biggest coin now is PoW but hopefully that will change. The bigger issue is “is cryptocurrency better than traditional currency?” So far it hasn’t proven to be better except in extremely limited circumstances. And a lot of the ways cryptocurrency is better will go away if governments start regulating it like other forms of finance. Having your money in cryptocurrency won’t protect you from the police and courts.
We trusted bankers to invest our money, and some short sold the housing market with that money
Okay? You could do that with cryptocurrency if traders started accepting cryptocurrency for shorts. The only reason you can’t do that today is traders won’t accept cryptocurrency for shorts, and that’s basically security through obscurity.
Sure, drugs and fraud surround Bitcoin, but drugs, fraud, and banking imperialism surround the petrodollar
I didn’t say cryptocurrency was any better or worse for fraud and abuse than regular currencies. Honestly I have no idea which one is better or worse for fraud and abuse. I’m just saying it’s not clear that the particular way that cryptocurrency is more secure than regular banking is actually beneficial.
Bingo. Capitalism has thus far rejected the blockchain, which is generally evidence that it doesn’t solve an important problem either efficiently, safely or cheaply.
Capitalism rejects solutions to climate change as well
To be fair, there are plenty of other reasons capitalism might have rejected blockchain: market failure, interference by government, etc.
I’m not saying that to defend cryptocurrency, by the way, but rather to point out that capitalism isn’t perfect at allocating resources in every situation.
capitalism is generally terrible at allocating ressources. It will always win to externalize costs, and if the people footing the bill cannot participate in the market, like for instance future generations, the result is always a self destructive system.
Isn’t one of its goals to be free from government influence? That’s not a valid excuse.
Blockchain is just a technology. It doesn’t have “goals.”
If a government explicitly blocks it and tries to find and punish trading off or in cryptocurrencies that will cause interference.
that is talking about blockchain as a technology for cryptocurrencies.
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They put money in Bitcoin, but not the tech behind it. To them it’s just stocks to be manipulated in order to get a profit.
I don’t know why this is surprising. Capitalism is an economic system where the goal is profit. So, why would capital do anything other than seek profit? Nearly all technological advances have occurred through government or institutional investments, then capital flocks to it when someone finds a way to profit from it.
Thinking block chain is a solution to anything is naive. It does nothing to change the underlying system, or the incentives that drive our economy. Like any system, the interconnections between the things that make up the system, and the goal of the system must change otherwise everything will just settle back to the status quo.
For example: media streaming is becoming cable tv again. Nothing fundamentally changed about the system of delivering media, or the goal of the system which is to drive profit. Thus, we are moving quickly back to the same model of paying for media (renting it really) and watching ads to increase the revenue of the provider
With all the information available at your fingertips being ignorant is a choice.
“this parallel financial system can also serve a tangible social good, offering an onramp to the financial system for people who would otherwise be left out. In countries where the vast majority of the population is unbanked, national currencies are no longer a safe store of value, remittances comprise a hefty portion of GDP, and international sanctions complicate connections to the global economy, a virtual currency that doesn’t require an intermediary to approve transactions can be a vital lifeline for survival”
Bitcoin is poised to blow up Africa’s $86 billion banking system
This isn’t Reddit, you don’t have to turn every discussion into a fight. I’m genuinely interested in cryptocurrency for reasons such as the article you linked: there are areas where traditional finance genuinely has failed to meet people’s needs. Providing a medium of exchange for the unbanked is a great example of something it could possibly help with, and I think that’s a good thing if it happens. But we should also be able to talk about the problems with cryptocurrencies and the cases where it doesn’t work as well as traditional finance. And if this prediction doesn’t pan out and cryptocurrency doesn’t become a major way of banking the unbanked, we should be able to consider what could accomplish that goal. It might be a different cryptocurrency, or a new thing inspired by cryptocurrency, or something that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. After all, cryptocurrency is not a goal in itself.
I’ve never been in Reddit so I can’t talk about it but I wouldn’t have been so harsh if you hadn’t already stated that it seems only useful for illegal and immoral activities when it’s so easy to find, if you are “genuinely interested”, that it’s not the case.
TPS metrics of the most popular blockchains
Blockchain TPS Max TPS Ethereum 13.15 57.91 Bitcoin 7.35 9.87 Algorand 6.99 221.01 Optimism 4.74 20.66 As a global payments network Visa has the capacity to execute more than 65,000 transactions per second.
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Yes but 65000 TPS for Bitcoin would likely have the planet glowing much brighter in the infrared… possibly even the visible, for all the heat we’d need to dump.
A rich, warm, and sterilized world!
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However, correct me if I’m wrong here because I’m not that much invested in bitcoin as a tech or investment, but isn’t almost half of the energy used on bitcoin generated from renewables? I could swear I saw an article about it somewhere.
It’s still wasted energy. If it wasn’t used on bitcoins, it would have been used on other things - some of which had to be powered by fossil fuels.
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How does that even make sense? Renewable is cheaper than burning petrol, of course there’s a shortage.
It may very well be renewable. I’m really more referring to the inefficient way in which the sums are calculated. Those data centers get warmish.
And yeah, AI is just the next thing we decided to punish our GPUs with. Crazy how we’ve used that part of the computer these last few decades…
I’m more engaged in a chat gpt session that I am staying up till 4 am watching line graphs of crypto prices, guilty as charged 😁. Not sure what comment it makes about society other than “we seem pretty lonely, everything ok?”
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Isn’t that still an order of magnitude less than what Visa can do? Or is there some extra math involved that I don’t know about
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Where are you getting the TPS report for the Lightning Network? I thought its theoretical max TPS was in the millions.
Oh nice, that’s how high Solana’s TPS has gone in testing (in practice it hovers around 5-10k TPS). There’s also newer chains like Aptos that claim to be able to handle 150k TPS with subsecond finality. Of course, neither of these chains are very decentralised, but at least they aren’t fully permissioned and centralised. Especially on a network belonging to a partisan, anti-competitive, anti-trust law-breaking, Wikileaks funding thieving Israel supporters like Visa.
And of course we can rest assured that nobody profiting off bitcoin is morally questionable
Ah yes, Bitcoin bad because some people that use it are bad, how did I never think of that
I’m not saying that, rather I’m saying that I don’t see how either thing is clearly morally superior.
Bitcoin is open-source software, a network of nodes running Bitcoin core, the source code for which you can find here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
Morals are a consequence of free will, which Bitcoin does not have. There are valid moralistic concerns about Bitcoin, but they are related to the impact of Bitcoin, rather than whether it is a moral system.
General question, because I don’t give a shit about blockchain to research it.
Does it have a way to quickly and effectively handle fraud? And don’t tell me “there’s no way to commit fraud” because people can steal wallet passwords no fucking problem. With most banks they will actively track fraud, cancel those transactions, and restore your funds and possibly shut down the card automatically while still allowing the account to exist so you can access your money. Is that the case with blockchain?
It depends on whether you’re interacting with the blockchain directly, or via a custodial solution more appropriate for end consumers. Same like how you don’t get a refund if you operate a western union branch and fuck up the wire.
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there’s the small issue of proof of stake being subjective…
But if you’re using layer 2 solutions, then you’re not actually using the blockchain directly, right? Might as well use credit card then?
All transactions are still eventually commited to Layer 1 though, so you’re still using the Blockchain when using L2s.
No, just the final state. And you are changing into trusting a centralised node, which makes no difference compared to existing systems
…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
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…
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Monero entered the chat.
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. :(
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.
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.
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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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?
Lot of comments don’t seem to understand that these words are not interchangeable
Then some massive org like the NSA creates/captures 51% of the nodes and takes everyone’s money overnight.
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!
You can do the same with a big enough botnet
Or an army
That’s what I meant by “capture.”
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
Wow, I thought I was back on reddit with the tech fear mongering.
A single Ethereum transaction now uses only 0.02 kWh of electrical energy and has a carbon footprint of 0.01 kgCO2, which is much lower than the average values for a debit transaction or PayPal.
…which is much lower than the average values for a debit transaction or PayPal
[citation needed]
A quick search gives me .0015 kWh per card transaction, but that could be wrong.
I was hoping for the same thing
That still seems like an insane amount of power for one transaction.
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