261–270 of 338 posts
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1% of ALL energy generated just to operate a part of the world economy is a massive amount though...
food waste generates 60x more emissions than Bitcoin, yet nobody is freaking out about that, which makes me think people are just riding the ESG bandwagon
>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blacklisted countries. Hang on a second. Just to be clear about this example, this example is walking through how Ethereum has been designed specifically to allow North Korea to transact Ethereum, and more than that, prevent anyone who dissents. Like, I mean ok, I get t…
You should understand that this is a very USA centred opinion. There’s a whole big world of different cultures and politics, and it is possible to believe there are other approaches where we reject violence and authority. It’s the usual “you’re helping drug dealers/terrorists/North Korea, but what about the children?!” state simping that ignores the violence of the existing systems, and ignores the billions of people…
>Let’s walk through a couple theoretical scenarios where a subset of malicious validators wants to censor transactions, say those originating in FATF-blacklisted countries. Hang on a second. Just to be clear about this example, this example is walking through how Ethereum has been designed specifically to allow North Korea to transact Ethereum, and more than that, prevent anyone who dissents. Like, I mean ok, I get t…
When we have a system that could prevent transactions, you'd think the most common use case is to prevent criminals to transact dirty money. But the most common use case is most likely China freezing dissidents' assets and blocking all alternative ways for them to safely emigrate.
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Proof of Work is the same, just with more steps.
That's weird, it's almost like the basic premise of cryptocurrency was flawed from the beginning.
Cryptocurrencies might not be perfectly immune to centralization, but even with their problems they're far less prone to centralization than any other sort of currency short of reverting to gold coins or seashells - and you can't exactly use gold coins and seashells for online payments.
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PoS does not give you any power to change the rules of the system, it only makes sure that those who are invested in the system get (slightly) rewarded for good behavior and (heavily) penalized for bad behavior.
This is the prevailing theory but in practice I'm not sure it will work. Ethereum forked early on due to someone stealing some money from The DAO. In reality the exchanges/large corporate owners will be the ones doing network validation, and they will be the ones most easily leaned on by their respective governments. If a government(s) says "you need to veer off this version of Ethereum and run your own", the chain w…
There are other proof-of-stake blockchains other than Ethereum, and for those it has indeed worked quite well in practice.
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The decentralization of PoS depends entirely on initial token distribution.
How would you distribute tokens fairly? Give 1 to every person in the world? What about the next generation?
2. Mint NFTs representing land parcels and persons
3. Collect land value tax from all holders of parcel NFTs
4. Disburse dividends to all holders of personhood NFTs
5. Bask in the glory of Crypto-Georgism
(Disclaimer: I have no idea how practical this is, but it sounds fuckin' rad.)
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Generally we've described this sort of research as "review resistant", rather than being secure in some classical sense. How Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies actually work is often eagerly explained but completely unfathomable on closer inspection. Concerns raised are fixed with additional complexity repeatedly until the reviewer grows weary of attempting to piece it together. Consequently there's sufficient confl…
How can this argument be made in good faith? The spec is open source, all the clients are open source. Furthermore, it's implemented and running. You could argue that someone in particular has made a poor or incomplete explanation of how it works but not that they way it works is unfathomable or being patched as your speak. It's already implemented, go look at the code if you don't want to believe what anyone says.
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To be fair though, those are all Western-aligned countries dependent on US force. They'll typically go along with whatever the US says. They're not exactly vassal states but close enough. NK is just another tiny country caught in a proxy war between imperialists. Look at China, which I think is bigger (or nearly so) than all those countries combined, and they don't have nearly as big a problem with NK as we do. I'm n…
"They're not exactly vassal states but close enough." This is a comical overstatement. If you followed the ins and out of international relations you'd know this is far from true. The health of those relationships (and any security arrangements included) is constantly debated up and down, and there are periodic crises of various magnitudes that kick up conversation of security arrangements ending. If you think those…