17 years*


cross-posted from: lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/3791302…

mastodon.online/@FranckLeroy/1…
in reply to Mythra

This is a big part of it. Its about decentralization. Currently it has a massive environmental impact, but as renewable energy and better cooling technology develops, decentralized cryptocurrencies could be better than fossil fuel invested banks.

The decentralized nature does mean that sometimes criminals can use it, but some countries will consider you a criminal based on the color of your skin.

in reply to explodicle

Well, yeah.

A blockchain is nothing more really than a database.

The use case is when I don't want or have a trusted keeper of that data.

See, if it's your excel spreadsheet, how do I know that you're not going to change the values on it? For some things that doesn't matter - but for things like funds between different parties, etc, that can be a big issue.

Traditionally this has worked by having a trusted third party - a bank, a court, a escrow company, etc. But all these require lots of effort to have as well, and can be bad actors.

in reply to Sine_Fine_Belli

It was never meant to be used in this way at this scale though. He put out a new method/paradigm and that was that. It was the asshole investor tech bros that destroyed the planet once they learned of it.

Just like anything, almost no tech or thing is inherently bad, but it becomes bad when the ruling class get their greedy grimy little grimy in it.

in reply to Tehdastehdas

Lots of the issues Bitcoin faces are not based on the design, but by and large what tech bros made out of it.

If you really want to learn more about it, have a look at the blocksize wars and Bitcoin Cash. Or just wait until Bitcoin finally collapses, which will happen eventually, but I'm not able to tell whether this year, decade or century.

What will break Bitcoin's neck eventually is the OPEX of its mining. Mining on the one hand is a crucial part of keeping the network secure, but on the other hand is expensive way beyond the money that can be earned from transaction fees collected when doing the mining.
Bitcoins being generated from thin air when a new block is being produced are a major part of the revenue for the miners, but the amount of BTC getting created this way gets reduced over time until it reaches 0.
The thing about the mining is that it's being done with more and more computing power, and it can't go below whatever the current amount of computing power is by a lot without putting the network at risk.

in reply to zd9

Even gen AI, despite how it has been used as a tool for the enrichment of the more privileged 0.1% as a tool of suppression of artists' (and critics of technofascism's) voices, is not really a harmful technology.

With enough copyright protections, and regulation of deep fakes, digital formats, and a bunch of other things, I could see gen AI being a valuable collaborator to creative output and workflows.

Hell, other than weapons, I find it hard to justify calling any technology inherently evil or nefarious. And even then, weapons have saved many innocent people's lives against unjustified attacks, wild animals and other threats.

Still, if we don't treat each technological invention with the right amount of cautiousness and care, we risk the deaths of, sometimes, even thousands or tens of thousands of people.

in reply to DigitalAudio

The real kicker is it was and is used in productive and constructive ways. It was just invisible until very recently. The ability to search for other photos of your pets in your photos app, the spam filters that keep your email (relatively) usable, the special effects tools that let artists paint out wires were all possible because of machine learning (used to refer to the subgroup of AI) and were made better by transformers.

If this same tech were released in a post-Capitalist society there would be no need for every single company to ham fistedly shove it into every product that doesn't need it.

in reply to JayDee

in reply to explodicle

Well, maybe they have, maybe they haven't.
At least they made the effort and a better system than CAPTCHAs to make it available to people without the need for special hardware or other prerequisites aside from a computer with internet access was just not there.
Plus I wonder why they've continued developing that project for the last 10+ years in case it was just meant as cash grab for insiders.

People use Bitcoin, although it's clear that Satoshi (whoever that is) has shy of 10% of the total supply: bitslog.com/2013/04/17/the-wel…
Needless to ask what happens to BTC holders, if that amount of BTC appear on the sell side of the market.

in reply to zergtoshi

Nobody cares how much effort they put in if it walks like a scam and quacks like a scam. You'd have to be nuts to trust anybody in the crypto space.

Why stop developing while it's still producing revenue? With >51% of the supply, they can leech off any remaining suckers indefinitely. The price of Nano relative to Bitcoin has done exactly what one should expect. It would need to have been done correctly to begin with and can't now be un-fucked.

in reply to explodicle

That's where our perceptions differ. There'd be zero need to continue development, if scamming was the goal.
The revenue could be had without additonal effort.

How is done correctly?
How would it have been done correctly a decade ago in your opinion?
All distribution schemes I know or can think of (shy of using people's biometric data to stop them from getting more than their fair share) is at risk of being expoited by in-groups - see the fortune of Satoshi.