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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
I love how one man created arguably the most complex puzzle in the history of mankind and people shit on it just because it's literally hard to solve (aka "uses energy") and the solutions have value.
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.
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.
The blockchain is better than the stock market, that's for damn sure.
All the assholes saying crypto is bad for the environment are completely silent about the amount of power that CBDCs will consume or the amount of power consumed by the stock market.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 doesn’t need to be. My argument is not bullshit, you just don’t understand the differences between blockchain and a standard database and are pretending you do which makes the argument impossible for you to understand.
Lol no I do, you clearly don't have a clue what you're talking about. The amount of DBs we have alone, that's not counting any other compute servers or even WS dwarfs all the block chain out there. This article is a nothing burger and is complete bullshit. Even the study they referenced doesn't know the exact amount...as it points out .6 to 2.2% is their estimated use...but this shit article went with the higher numbers because it's great for people like you who hate any tech that you clearly don't understand.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
Well I was like 25 when I took care of him for two weeks and a pretty hard partier so silence wasn’t really my thing at the time. I’m in my 40s with 4 kids so I’ll I love silence now. I’ll even stare at walls.
Well, we weren't very keen on talking in the family when I grew up. I can't remember if we sometimes talked while TV was muted because of ads, but when we didn't talk it didn't feel awkward. If anything, it felt awkward to ever talk to each other. Not the healthiest upbringing in my mind ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
Same with porn. But I'm building a shake-power generator for fleshlites so it should balance out the power it pulls. Saving the earth one jack-off at a time.
Charging a hybrid car battery only takes 253.4 jerks. Pretty soon we will be expanding our charging service to parking lots across America and Canada! Most of them already have people willing to do it for you already ...they were doing it there anyway... Win/win.
Powerjerk (tm), we make perverts work for you!
Just roll up and say "Hey Jagoff, I need to get to x!" And you'll promptly be taken care of.*
*Do not give them drugs to speed up the process. We are serious about our drug-free workplace.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
