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Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#211

Post by randomhodler84 »

8note wrote: post #163
randomhodler84 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a fan of the fossil power plants coming online, but this is one small example. Many fossil fuel plants actually increased production during the pandemic too. Nuclear plants were taken offline too. But this is not cryptocurrency to blame. The fundamental disconnect here is that you want to tell people how they can and can’t use energy. That’s authoritarian nonsense and I reject your wishes. I am saying use it…

Green and crypto are incompatible ideas. You don't waste for the sake of wasting when you're looking to be green.

Disagree. Waste is subjective, and ultimately not for you to decide. If the miners do not find it wasteful, who are you, the non-economic participant to say it is?

Green and crypto are quite different things, supply and demand — green is about production, the only important part. How we generate energy in a clean and sustainable way.

Crypto is about consumption, and you have no business telling others how they should spend energy. You can however incentivize the consumers to do it cleanly. You can be green and also pro-energy usage.

Being green doesn’t mean being a bully and telling people what they can and can’t do.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#212

Post by lukeramsden »

dagmx wrote: post #139
colordrops wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are suggesting that there is an alternative. What perchance might that be? Some authority figure or organization that decides whether something is useful?

The alternative is to say something of actual substance instead of an empty statement saying it's useful because it's useful.

The same can be applied to your comment of "Crypto doesn't really solve a problem that needed solving". That's not an axiom, thats a subjective opinion, saying its not useful because it's not useful. Plenty of people will, and have, argued otherwise.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#213

Post by twic »

lui8906 wrote: post #186
yed wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps to think about this more clearly if you forget the NFT bit and think about just doing this with standard tech. What stops developers today from implementing publicly documented formats for in-game elements? What stops other developers from writing code to import these elements from one game to another? All an NFT adds is a verifiable signature and a pubic database. The signature bit seems completely irreleva…

You have a credibly neutral place to store the items, publicly accessible to any other developer to leverage without having to maintain you're own endpoints and documentation. Baked in royalties. Sounds... much easier than the convoluted solution you propose with standard tech.

Steam already has an inventory service, trusted by millions of players to store billions of items. There is already machinery for users to authorise applications to see their inventory. If a game developer wanted to allow use of another game's inventory in their own game, they could already do this.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#214

Post by ethbr0 »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #201
ethbr0 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burning electrical power is the most globally available version of burning universal value. The thermodynamic direction is less important than the fact that people didn't want to do it. But proof of work was always a transitory, bootstrapping phase. Even among the crypto evangelists, I can't believe anyone saw a long-term future in that.

Slinging double SHA256 til the heat death of the universe is my long term vision. POW as a bootstrap phase is ethereum pos wishful nonsense. Many see the long term future of PoW. Many believe it is the only way.

In your view, what's the long term solution between environmental efficiency vs attack resistance? The two seem mutually-exclusive in PoW.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#215

Post by dspillett »

jasongi wrote: post #159
Slartie wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd add ransomware payments to the list, but otherwise your take "the problem was found back in 2011 - it's just that nobody wants to admit it" is spot-on! An interesting tangent of your BitTorrent analogy is that, for BitTorrent the protocol, an actually legal use case was found later: it is now used to create powerful ad-hoc CDNs for limited use cases with the novel property of gaining bandwidth automatically as mo…

I would consider ransomware under the umbrella of black markets. Perhaps "anything illegal" would have been a better description. Nice point about BitTorrent. I'm sure crypto will have some niche adoptions in the future too. Apparently P2P game updates ended up being disabled though. Probably a good thing too - imagine the absolute carnage on ISPs if places like netflix decided to outsource their CDN to everyone's ho…

> Apparently P2P game updates ended up being disabled though. Probably a good thing too - imagine the absolute carnage on ISPs if places like netflix decided to outsource their CDN to everyone's home internet.

Given how asymmetric many home connections are, and were more so further back, and that using the whole upstream will effectively throttle downstream & there is no reliable way to detect at what throughput you will become a problem, I never saw P2P game updates as a good idea in general. Excellent for those behind the same bottleneck though - two PCs in the same student digs updating the same huge game for instance, saving a second slow download using the orders-of-magnitude faster local LAN - but I don't think that is a common enough use case to be worth the implementation effort.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#216

Post by mattdesl »

thenoblesunfish wrote: post #199

The author states without very specific evidence that "proof of stake" demonstrably works, and thus quickly dismisses the energy costs of cryptocurrency. I'd personally be very interested to hear more about that, since there is a lot of hand waving around proof of stake. The cynic in me says that it would already be broadly used, if there weren't fundamental problems with it. It does, however, seem like a handy way t…

many of todays popular chains that are not BTC and ETH are currently using PoS, especially those interacting with web dApps and smart contracts. See Tezos for a real world example that “currently works.” ETH (the devs and community) is also heavily committed to PoS—most of the value and rewards now locked in the $33B staking contract cannot even be withdrawn before a successful merge of PoS occurs (likely some time in the next several months, but let’s wait and see).

The idea that crypto is inherently wasteful is inaccurate. PoW is extremely energy intensive, especially without L2s, but it need not be the only consensus mechanism for the future of these protocols.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#217

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

Would somebody maybe explain to me what an NFT is? I have good understanding of Bitcoin and Blockchain technology (not deep but sound). But I fail to see how an NFT could be applied to a video clip in a meaningful way. To me it sounds like an NFT is a signature signed with a key of the rightful owner for a digital object like a video clip and that signature is then integrated into a blockchain and associated there with that rightful owner in a verifiable way via that rightful owners public key. Is that it? I mean, I assume no b/c that whole process is meaningless as you may just change one bit in that video file and its no longer associated with that rightful owner - so I suppose I'm missing something here.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#218

Post by rvz »

nbzso wrote: post #172

I don’t know. This hype-crypto-machine is not catching up with my “feelings” about the future of the Web. Maybe I am getting old, but aside from some communication protocol usage and some form of authenticity (which is questionable), I don’t see web3. I would go out on a limb and say that if this is web3, I don’t want to have anything to do with it. This is an outrageous waste of resources and energy with awful envir…

OK. I am convinced. The entire cryptocurrency industry is a scam.

So rather than saying the same thing over and over on every HN thread about it being a 'scam', let's do something about it then? How do we ban it all to save the planet and stop the scams everywhere then?

Or are we going to complain on the next HN thread about cryptocurrencies and web3 once again?

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#219

Post by mmcnl »

jasongi wrote: post #115

I don't understand how any take on crypto can not mention that it is now the de-facto currency of online black markets, from pornhub to silk road 9.0 or whatever version we're up to. This is crypto's utility and the only thing I've seen crypto being used for seriously that isn't speculation. Cryptocurrency is disrupting the black markets the same way amazon/ebay/online shopping disrupted the retail markets. Crypto is…

That's what I'm always saying too. Crypto is used for two things: criminal activities and convincing others to buy into your crypto so your crypto portfolio increases in value. The second thing can also be considered a criminal activity because it is _literally_ a pyramid scheme. Not "almost" or "something like", but by definition it is a pyramid scheme.

The second thing is that crypto or "defi" enthusiasts go on raving about the decentralized structure. Anyone older than 25 should know that decentralization/centralization is a continuous cycle in which neither one is inherently better than the other. However, decentralization by itself is always used as an argument for crypto without further explanation. Red flag to me.

Why a red flag? First, crypto is not decentralized, contrary to popular belief. In the case of smart contracts as the author of the article points out, everything runs on the network (Ethereum for example). That is _extreme_ centralization. Everything has to happen within the boundaries of the network. Sure the execution is decentralized, but there is one and only one protocol that everyone should use. Imagine a world where every messaging app has to use the SMS protocol.

Second, centralization has enormous advantages, which is why we have so much centralization. Do you trust yourself to safely store the key to your life savings or artistic portfolio? I absolutely don't. I don't even trust myself to backup my holiday photos.

You could then argue that there are identity/access services for that, like Coinbase (or whatever equivalent in the future). But as soon as you use a service like that, you are basically creating the crypto equivalent of Facebook/Google/Twitter for single sign-on. To me we are then exactly right back where we started in 2005: building centralized services on top of a decentralized infrastructure. What have we gained? Nothing. Except that some VCs got to execute web 2.0 all over again and get rich from the gains, which they apparently missed out on in the previous cycle.

I have thought so much about this subject, and maybe I'm just too dumb or know to little about it, but honestly everything about crypto is repulsive to me.

Re: Crypto: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

#220

Post by meheleventyone »

mantenpanther wrote: post #178
saberience wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFT technology doesn't add anything for games that isn't already available using guess what, a database! Using a MySQL or whatever database allows single use only items, one-off items that only player can have, multi-use items, any possible combination of items is possible using simple SQL. It's not rocket science, the only difference (which doesn't really add any utility to games) is the idea of this database being…

Because of ownership and the idea of digital property. In a MySQL the provider owns all data, with an NFT the key holder owns the data.

Well no they don't because the NFT only has meaning in the game world which is still owned and operated by the game company. NFTs in their current incarnation merely move the receipt from a centralized private DB to a decentralized public one and make the entire thing much more expensive.
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