Blockchain: the wave of the future

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.

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?

ads don't go unless capitalism goes

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".

What about this, if you buy a product, you no longer have to watch their ads. Anywhere.

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.

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 capture fapture system or as a weight loss program

Porn is more beneficial for humanity than imaginary ownership.

Bur, what if they prematurely finish and my car isn't charged yet?

I have an ancient hermetic method of getting off that requires neither computer or phone. Enquire within if you seek this ancient knowledge.

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.

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.

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.

Yes but what about this whataboutism?

Blockchain user.

What are you on about?

Unironically this.

48%? Fuck i love my adblocker

Damn, I knew the numbers would be crazy, but that's absolutely bonkers.

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The nodes aren’t the issue. It’s the fact that those nodes have to expend at least the same amount of energy every single time a record is added and the larger the ledger, the more energy is needed. Blockchain is somewhat unique in that regard.

You 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.

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.

I wish copyrights will die to this technology! <3

Call it whatever you like, it's a pretty damn powerful tool.

"Blockchain" and "decentralised" are not interchangeable words

I don't think Lemmy counts as popular yet.

Would you trust your money with a bank in China? It was only a year ago that people lost their savings and couldn't withdraw money for food after a major bank was on the brink of bankruptcy due to the Evergrande scheme.

I guess you can call it questionable, but if I buy a VPN, I'm not going to pay with a credit card linked to my name. I use Monero. If I want to transfer money to my family in another country, crypto is faster, cheaper, and has no restrictions. I can't even pay my student loans from my home country because my current bank blocks foreign credit card transactions, even if they are important.

This is very niche and not something an average Joe needs, but cryptocurrency isn't for the average Joe to begin with.

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 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

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

Also, the unbanked.

Also, privacy and anonymity (to an extent).

Also, complete predictability in the system (its at least domain constrained).

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."

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.

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

13.15 is the average number of transactions per second. Max TPS (57.91) is the largest recorded TPS, not the capacity of the blockchain. Max TPS will rise as more people use layer 2. Layer 2 solutions can handle 2,000-4,000 TPS, and there are 24 commonly known ones that can do these transactions in parallel.

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.

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All transactions are still eventually commited to Layer 1 though, so you're still using the Blockchain when using L2s.

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.

Probably invented as a way to more discreetly fund black sites...

I assume you're speaking Bitcoin, cryptocurrency that uses Proof-of-Work consensus.

Proof-of-Work is very secure, super decentralized, but it's the culprit behind mining and subsequent electricity drain.

There are other consensus mechanisms, like Proof-of-Stake, to which Ethereum, Solana and many many others have migrated to or were based on to begin with.

Proof-of-Stake requires about 100x less electricity, is reasonably secure and is the default option for modern cryptocurrencies. Thereby the energy argument gets less and less relevant, while the fuss around it is only gaining speed.

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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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. The currencies mostly benefit people with a ton of capital to handle consensus, which further entrenches the power imbalance found in (1) and (2).

4. 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.

5. 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).

6. 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.

Oh good Lord, I was partially inclined to agree but using generative Ai to make this point tells me everything I need to know.

Couldn't even be assed to fix the text of the main focus of the picture?

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No, NFTs do have good uses, but things like image NFTs are just a misappropriation, like SPAM is to email.

One use case, is clear, independently verifiable ownership of non-tangible things, like Intellectual Property rights. Movie rights for a book adaptation for instance moving between companies in IP sales and mergers/acquisitions.

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.

”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

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Proof of stake, while better for the environment compared to electricity-guzzling proof of work, actually shift the power of consensus to capital owners. In proof of work, any bloke with some computing power can participate in the swarm even if they don't own any crypto. In proof of stake, only those who own some crypto can participate in the swarm, and those who own more have more say.

You can say that proof of works also requires capital to buy computing power, but with the shift to proof of stake, the bar to participate has been raised. If can't just use a spare computer to join now, you actually need some capital to buy some stake before you can participate. It's a big boy club now, a tool to help the rich get richer.

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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.

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

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

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.

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But then every jabrony would be able to make money.

Compare it to something like AI

Probably good not to reveal how little you know about technology when making an argument regarding technology. I can't stand these prompt kiddies thinking they know left from right.

Which is why people are so horny for chains using proof of stake instead of proof of work

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.

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.

Or an army

That's what I meant by "capture."

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?

No, I'm just mocking Blockchain idiots in general.