Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster
drewdevault.com
  • Nereus
    8·
    4 years ago

    Wouldn’t Proof of stake take care of some of these concerns around energy conservation?

    • DessalinesA
      8·
      4 years ago

      Apparently, although its really sad it hasn’t been more of a priority. Drew is 100% right here, that proof of work is an utterly awful solution to the double-spend problem, in terms of energy waste, ecological harm, and actual use as a currency and not a speculative scam.

      • tracyspcy
        21·
        4 years ago

        In current sociaty there is no bigger goal other than get rich quick. No need to blame people which just follow the promoted rules

      • Nereus
        31·
        4 years ago

        Ahh ok that’s interesting. BTC is proof of work and is demonstrating today how it can become monopolized, see the mining groups in China. so only the da big boys get the next chain reward. Proof of stake at least you are rewarded proportional to what you put in.

        • tracyspcy
          1·
          4 years ago

          You are talking about staking in pools, absolutely same with mining in pools, you will get proportional reward.

  • linkert
    91·
    4 years ago

    I think I love Drew, he’s my open-source crush. Every darn post and project he produces is on-point and sharp AF.

  • Anachron
    3·
    4 years ago

    I can only agree here. The problem with the current implementation is that they encourage hacks, exploits and all that stuff.

    This can only be combated with another approach imo: Mining is not resource but time intensive. As in: No matter how many resources you throw at it, it doesn’t matter whether you run the “miner” on one or 200 computers, it will still generate the same sum.

    On how to exactly implement this would be open to discussion, but it at least combats the current issues cryptocurrencies cause to the whole industry at large.

    • sibachian
      7·
      4 years ago

      This can only be combated with another approach imo: Mining is not resource but time intensive. As in: No matter how many resources you throw at it, it doesn’t matter whether you run the “miner” on one or 200 computers, it will still generate the same sum.

      This is how staking works for some cryptos, which replaces mining for the purpose of minting tokens. also called proof-of-stake (bitcoin is a proof-of-work).

      edit: furthermore, bitcoin automatically adjusts the math to mint the same “amount” per cycle which is why energy and hardware becomes more and more competitive. it literally incentivizes people to use more and more energy to be competitive for mining rewards, even if it doesn’t need to be that way. if bitcoin never exploded all over social media, mining would be “cheap”, relatively speaking.

      imo, bitcoin is an outdated cryptocurrency using archaic technology in quite literally every respect. there are far smarter, more modern, greater utility tokens, not to mention environmentally friendly solutions already available today. people just don’t care as much because it’s not all over social media. reality is, bitcoin is just the most popular, because it was the first cryptocurrency on the market. no other reason to it. it’s really, quite useless, for anything except make money for its owners sitting on piles of it like it’s gold.

      but i have hope that, the more there are people who acquire awareness of the alternative cryptotechnologies, their functions and solutions, the sooner it could one day outpace bitcoin and similar useless tokens which holds its sole value from the proof-of-work concept. and hopefully shift the public consensus towards the future.

      • phil_m
        2·
        4 years ago

        I’m pretty sure, Bitcoin will sooner or later be replaced by a more modern technology/project, pretty much because of the Energy usage (and growing concern around it), the inability to scale and the stubborn devs around it (just look at this issue and the actions of the core dev: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/21217).

        I’m not even sure if this technology will be Blockchain, as (one) Blockchain just can’t scale on a global scale.

        Maybe it won’t need any consensus algorithm, and be less datacentric, such as proposed in Holochain.

      • curious_one
        3·
        4 years ago

        I believe you should be measuring some global events so that results can be independently verified across the globe. Maybe measurement of some cosmic radiation? That would then be proof of time. If there is some radiation source that is periodic and globally observable it could work?

          • curious_one
            3·
            4 years ago

            i think for verification each full node should be taking measurements as well. But would this approach even allow for consensus? All the miners would observe the same event at the roughly same time so how would you even reach consensus for who gets the reward? Maybe this wouldn’t work after all :(

        • blank_sl8
          1·
          4 years ago

          The thing about proof-of-work is that, while performing the work, you have to know about which block you’re creating. You aren’t doing generic work. You’re doing work that’s specific to the block data. If you wanted to double spend, you would have to re-do the work, because the work you did is only applicable to the exact block you mined.

          And therein lies the problem with using a globally observable event like you’ve described: It is not tied to any particular block. I can use the radiation data from the fifth of March to mine a block, then use the same data to mine a conflicting block. “Nothing at stake” problem is related.

  • Dragon
    31·
    4 years ago

    Holochain provides some interesting answers. The whole idea was created by a couple of currency geeks who used bio-mimicry to create a system where value is self-defined and verified by peers. I highly recommend reading about it https://holo.host/faq/what-is-holochain/, https://github.com/holochain/holochain-proto/blob/whitepaper/holochain.pdf. There’s an etherium coin attached right now, disregard that, that’s not what the project is about.

      • phil_m
        3·
        4 years ago

        Well you don’t have to buy the coin, but the technology around sounds super interesting and definitely has a better mindset than the usual blockchains. (agent-centric instead of data-centric).

        There is definitely still a long way to go…

        But at least the first proof of concept applications aren’t anything financial but more socially oriented (p2p chat, collaboration etc.).

        • tracyspcy
          4·
          4 years ago

          It is all could be done without a blockchain and token, that is stop signal for me

          • phil_m
            31·
            4 years ago

            Holochain is not a blockchain, even if chain is in the name, I recommend to at least read into it.

            State has to be somehow saved in a distributed p2p network (DHT to be specific), to be useful for real applications. To motivate users to save state, i.e. offer storage and computation time, it makes sense out of a game-theoretic incentive to reward these users. This does not have to be necessarily a token (it’s just the simplest method).

            Just ignore all the crazy capitalism, chain-maximalism and scams that have arosen around “the Blockchain” etc., and focus solely on the technology, and what good can be taken from it.

            Because there are indeed quite some interesting technologies that resulted in this scene.

            • tracyspcy
              1·
              4 years ago

              I have read today their website, forum and thing with awful name holo.host (wtf???). Yes they going to use dht instead of blockchain, but the fact that they set themself against blockchain put them to the same niche (same as iota with dag instead of blockchain) etc. What i dont like :

              1. Crowdfunding with shitcoin (they got money, but no product for 2 years)
              2. They tried to sell their own hardware nodes
              3. Cannot see any novelty or innovation they going to bring
              • phil_m
                2·
                4 years ago

                Yes I agree with most of your points. It would’ve been better to first just focus on the technology and make it more accessible especially for developers to create an ecosystem. Currently it seems the other way around, make it more accessible for end users (holo port, “Low code zone”), and while this is good in the long run (we don’t want to gatekeep, and include non-developers as well), you’ll first need to actually create applications and the technology around it. There is currently just a very small ecosystem of developers. Also a point that I don’t really like, they could’ve created a lot of libraries to be able to cobble together a “DApp” without any binding to an ecosystem. Because I doubt that one Blockchain/ecosystem/whatever-it-is-called etc. will succeed in the long run.

                I think the novelty they bring is the as they call it “Immune” system, which seems like a good approach to create trustless p2p systems. And just the fact that they combine a bunch of interesting technologies (git/merkle-tree, DHT) together to create a coherent system.

                Anyway it will be interesting to watch where this will go.

                I think we certainly should go true p2p in the long run. E.g. create a p2p chat applications where the enduser devices e.g. Smartphone act as server.

    • Jeffrey
      2·
      4 years ago

      I listened to one of the Holochain developers talk on the Team Human podcast a while ago. It’s worth a listen if you think the project is cool.

  • tracyspcy
    32·
    4 years ago

    Seems majority of problems creted by ethereum scam coin with theirs bullshitting about new internet and blockchain for any purpose :) -

  • SirLotsaLocks
    1·
    4 years ago

    Gemini link

    Is there any extension that could integrate gemini into firefox?

    • SFloss (they/them)OP
      4·
      4 years ago

      If you have a Gemini client installed, Firefox should direct you to open the link in the client. As for opening it directly in Firefox, there’s the add-on that @ajz@lemmy.ml just linked.