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Blockchain. Most of the people who have this hate don't know how it works in even the most gross sense, believe that it and cryptocurrencies are the same thing, and have a visceral, knee-jerk reaction when they're mentioned, without being able to explain why.
Cryptocurrency, too, although there are far more examples of bad actors in that space. But the concept of an economy that works across the internet entirely outside the control of 5-eyes surveillance states? Yes, please.
It gets hate because usually when blockchain is mentioned it is followed by a really dumb idea.
Quick question: isnt blockchain also very harsh on the environment bc of ever-elongating sequences to calculate?
There are a few different types of blockchain, differing by how they stop you just making up your own alternative chain and saying that is the real history:
- Proof of Work - prove you wasted lots of energy to add to the chain, making it prohibitively expensive to make your fake alternative chain - but also causing lots of emissions / wasting lots of energy.
- Proof of Stake - adding to the chain requires participation of the people with the most total coins in the cryptocurrency already. Essentially 'one dollar, one vote', and 'the rich get richer' brought to crypo.
- Proof of Humanity / Proof of Personhood / Proof of Identity - adding to the chain requires the participation of the most people. Attempts to bring "One person, one vote", and Universal Basic Income to crypto. There are various attempts - some require submission of photos and videos, and have an adjudication scheme built in to detect duplicates (which might fall to AI-generated faces relatively soon). Others (see Worldcoin) require a trusted central party to produce hardware which scans faces and verifies they are real and unique (and have already had data leaks from participants involved in verification). The other option is to trust governments / other existing infrastructure to verify identities (which is probably the most sensible option if you are trying to genuinely just disrupt banking, but many crypto people hate because they also have a cyberpunk fantasy of accelerating crypto-anarchy, and actually want crypto to be used for tax evasion and without the cooperation of governments).
So there are alternatives to environmental impact, but there is currently no perfect crypto. Stack that on top of the number of scammers out there riding the crypto buzz, and it is certainly not that hard to see the reasons behind the hate.
Sounds like you're thinking of proof of work cryptocurrencies. They use blockchains, but are not blockchains themselves. The blockchains part is trivially cheap to compute.
No. No more than, say, Lemmy. It's just a cryptographically verifiable audit log.
This is not aimed at you; you asked a reasonable question. The height of ignorant hypocracy is people complaining about environmental impact (which is resource use) while using streaming movies, music, and online video games. Watching a Youtube video rant about the evils of Bitcoin uses more resources than syncing a day's backlog of the Bitcoin blockchain. Most popular web sites these days are so packed with Javascript, they compete with shitcoin blockchain resource use.
I'm sure there's technological value in a write-only distributed database. I cannot come up with any good suggestions, but I'm sure that distributing links to ugly monkey pictures is probably not it.
itβs not blockchain itself, itβs how over-hyped it is for what is a data structure with a very limited and specific use-case.
Itβs the fact that βblockchain companiesβ exist while there are no βbinary search treeβ companies or βweighted directional graphβ companies.
Yeah, I completely agree. For a while there, it was the new "cloud." What made it worse, I think, is that blockchain is a relatively simple concept ane a fu& programming exercise. And once you've written your first, you look side-eye at Bitcoin prices and the temptation is too much for some people.
It's painful, because cryptocurrency - if done well, without POW - does address a number of capitalism problem spaces; and blockchain has applications in secure digital voting and other data integrity areas. Cryptobros do seem to be a rather unsavory lot, I'll admit. The majority give off greasy libertarian vibes, and I mostly keep quiet about the topic for fear of being associated with them.
The issue is that cryptocurrency doesn't really work without proof of work though, right? That's the fundamental basis of how the Blockchain ensures correctness.
Proof of work has nothing to do with blockchain itself. In Bitcoin, POW is how new blocks are found, but blocks are just payloads stored in the chain. Other, non-currency data can (and is) be stored in the Bitcoin blockchain, and this data does't necessarily require POW.
Bitcoin POW chunks might as well be new prime numbers; you spend a bunch of processing to calculate new primes, then you digitally sign the data and store those on the public blockchain and now you have digital currency. A blockchain block itself is no more CPU intensive than what it "costs" to set up a new SSL connection to whatever porn site you're browsing. It's literally just a chain of blocks of data hashes (even cheaper than your SSL connection) than include a previous block's hash, and which are signed.
POW is part of the cryptocoin part; blockchain is entirely unrelated - it's just a publically verifiable audit log (in this case also encapsulating the signed data).
There even exist cryptocurrencies which are not based on POW and the entire argument about environmental impact falls apart. Those have less environmental impact than Fortnight. But, in most cryptocurrencies there needs to be a mechanism to prevent people from arbitrarily printing cash and devaluing the system; aside from POW, staking is popular: you just buy coins outright. There are other methods; but in no case does the technology of blockchain involve POW.
Crypto miners are the reason why graphics card prices skyrocketed back when they did. And mining uses enormous amounts of energy and contributes over 100 million tons of CO2 emissions yearly. Fuck them.
For sure. Not to mention what a "trustless" digital currency could mean for the majority of the world which is not in the hegemonic monetary position.
People argue that The Fed is Democratic or that the PBC is antiimperilest butneithers's plans for global currency dominance has the majority of people in the world having any control or say in their monetary policies. They are both, outside of the home countries undemocratic and imperialist.
And that's just on crypto currencies the value of a denctralized smart contract and other function execution machine is also crazy cool to me.
The majority of the hype from get rich quick suckers and scammers deserve the hate they get IMHO. Even the suckers, because they really would be OK with getting rich off of doing nothing and just having everyone cater to them for it.