227
Is Crypto Finally Dead?
(beehaw.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
227 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37804 readers
405 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
As an actual currency, it's functionally useless. Even if every retailer on the planet were to accept it, the overhead for making the transaction is just a non-starter
Because of that, it's entirely just funny money. Even further, since it's entirely a virtual asset, if the power goes out, your wallet goes with it
The environmental impacts are horrifying. This fact alone means that it should all be eradicated. Destroying the planet for Internet funny money isn't an acceptable proposition
For a decentralized currency, people sure do love centralizing under large exchanges, and the massive losses, thefts, fraud, etc. have shown that no matter how "decentralized" it's supposed to be, it's still susceptible to the same bullshit as any other currency
Its high profile association with grifters, scammers, malware, and dark web shenanigans has completely soured its image in the public mind
It's entirely a speculative investment scam now. There's no way to decouple it from that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but since ETH moved to a proof of stake model rather than proof of work (i.e. "mining"), isn't its environmental footprint now a fraction of the wasteful behemoth it was previously?
(Though I 100% agree given the 'gas fees' (transaction costs), it's still absolutely useless as an actual currency.)
Yes, you can now run an Ethereum validator from a Raspberry Pi
Not recommended though, RPIs aren't really suited for production, plus I think only Nimbus runs well on RPIs?
I think he's confusing a validator with a node. You can easily run a node on a Pi.
Ah that would be make sense, but most people wouldn't see the point in running a node. People automatically think of "mining" or "validator"
You're right about the environmental footprint - proof of stake dropped the energy consumption by 99.95%
Ether (ETH) was never intended to serve as a digital currency. it was only meant to be the fuel or incentive for computational tasks on the Ethereum network. An L2 like Optimism or Arbitrum runs on top of Ethereum and facilitates transactions that are significantly faster (tens of thousands of transactions per second), for a fraction of the cost (pennies or fractions of pennies)
I have a few bitcoin that I got when it was new, and I was playing around with it; then I forgot about my coins until it exploded and made it into the public (non-tech) news. I luckily still had my wallet, and I bought a quite expensive watch with Bitcoin when it was near its price peak. The transaction was no more difficult than using Paypal. I could have bought a lot of things; at one point, I could have bought a car with it. There are many vendors who'll accept Bitcoin even today. So, regardless of your other points, saying that it's funny money that you can't buy anything with is simply false. It's worth what people will pay for it, just like the American dollar, or gold, or the artificially inflated price of blood diamonds.
I don't think promoting falsehoods helps any argument. If that one is obviously wrong, what about your other points? Lots of people want cryptocurrency to fail. Lots of people want to maintain the hegemony of the US dollar. Some people even have valid criticisms of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, and the giant farming installations. It's certainly something to discuss, as long as it's kept to facts.
The issue with retail is how long it takes for a bitcoin transaction to be confirmed. The overhead simply isn't feasible. A vendor isn't going to sit around an wait an hour for confirmation that payment has been received. A private seller might not care. But a company that processes millions of transactions per day isn't going to deal with that. It has nothing to do with the belief in it and its worth.
And yes, let me be perfectly clear: I absolutely do want cryptocurrency to fail. That's not about being a shill for government hegemony. It's about there being literally no inherent good in it, either in principle or in practice. From the fact that it consumes more energy than entire countries and pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere than entire major industries, to the environmental impact of increased mining for rare earths, increased manufacturing strain, and supply chain disruption due to the demand for the chips to drive the miners.
Also I really don't appreciate your passive aggressive way of calling me a liar
Your position was clear.
I'm not sure how else you'd prefer someone to call out untruths that you've posted. It's either calling you a liar, or some version of saying you're talking out your ass, or what not. But you're right, that's what I was saying. FWIW, I don't think it's lying the way Trump lies; I think there's just a lot of uninformed knee-jerk reactionism. For example, you talk about processing times; have you ever heard of Lightning? It's a crypto used a lot in Nostr and which has instant transfer times.
My point is that I you're arguing a point that is easily refuted, when you have other points that are reasonable and justifiable. I could argue against the other points, too; for example, I could bring up proof-of-stake crypto-currencies which do not have huge energy use, and which haveno more energy footprint than the SSL transactions that you're using constantly, every day. But it would be a harder arguement for me to make because the original cryptocoin, Bitcoin, is proof-of-work and has had a huge eco impact.
And I might not try to argue that unless I thought you were open to discussing the topic in good faith. Which I don't believe you are; I think you've already made up your mind on the topic, and now all that's left is evangelism.
I do have a question, though: do you understand how blockchains work, and the what the various kinds of proofs are? Not in the "could you program it" sense, but in general, like could you describe how they work to someone over beer? Or have you just read a lot about how bad they are? How much of your opinion is based on your social media filter biases?
That's exactly what I was gonna say: @davehtaylor must have no idea of the nearly-cost-free Layer 2 network.
Additionally, how much money does it take to power banks? All the staff, the electricity, the Brinks armored cars, the accounting for all that cash, the safety deposit boxes and all of their contents and insurance... Does he think ACH transfers or, worse, checks or money orders, are free on an environmental level? How is USD with all of its nonstop-growing debt safe in any long-term way?
The L2 experience is quite poor at the moment, which is more an indicator of how bright the future is
They're not wrong to do so when most of your points are outdated or crap:
Outdated
Bullshit
Privacy coins are the best way to live the dream of fungible secure currency, which is why they're being suppressed. All the others are an experiment in how to monitor transactions more deeply.
If I may don a tin foil hat, likely left rampant by design. The proof of concept has been done, the tech works and has been in the hands of the public long enough that it's normalized. This may be to pave the way for countries to replace their currency with "legit" crypto versions in the next decade or two, which requires putting a bullet in the head of the rest.
If you talk in absolutes you're destined to be wrong.
Outdated.
At some point PoW will probably die a death and PoS will be all that remains. PoS is cheap.
I think a lot of people just have difficulty decoupling a few separate but connected ideas like crypto being internet money, from the blockchain as a ledger, and transaction records as a means of proof.
What people really need is a ledger for cash itself, where notes can be scanned and then structured into a transaction and popped into the blockchain where said transaction ID gets verified and printed out like an EFTPOS note.
If that sounds like we're going full circle it's probably because everything becomes harder but not always necessarily better with the more you DIY.
Some of these points are not inherent properties of cryptos, like the environmental impact and the transaction overhead.
it's not even just that. if you count the number of transactions across all cryptocurrencies that are confirmed by mining, they are absolutely dwarfed by the number of transactions that are not confirmed by mining. same thing with volume of money moved. the environmental complaint applies to a minority of the total activity.
And shouldn't the environmental cost of "real" currencies be compared as well? It's not like printing and minting all those bills and coins is zero energy. Even treating it virtually (direct deposit, etc - we rarely handle cash) has some overhead.
I don't have a horse in this race, but comments that are obviously trying to grind an ace are suspicious to me.
On the tech side of things, the environmental impact of running traditional, centralized services is inherently lower than running any cryptocurrency off of a blockchain. To overcome the technical limitations would be to create another centralized service.
But yeah, there are almost certainly ways that traditional currency can reduce their environmental impact, too.
Funny how people are creating bullshit by taking about things they don’t know.
Hint: Blockchain is more than just currency and when your centralised e-mail server is taken down with all of your e-mail's, than you will think back at people who did the switch to decentralisation.
Another hint: Ethereum did lower its CO2 emissions by 99%, just by changing its code. Can your 100% virtual currency, parked at your favorite bank in a country like sweden, where there is no cash anymore, do the same?
I've found that the same folks who crowed the loudest about cryptocurrencies being decentralized were working the hardest behind the scenes to build the first generation of exchanges and online wallets.
New technologies such as the lightning network will fix this.
If the power goes out, your local ATMs and card readers will stop working as well. It'd have to take a global power outage to bring a crypto network down, and at that point we probably have more important issues to deal with.
This is fixed by proof-of-stake.
True, but it's a personal choice. You don't have to have to store them centralized if you don't want to. The same cannot be said about traditional currencies, as it's not feasable to have stacks of cash lying around.
Also true, but that has nothing to do with the actual currencies. The public image will improve once people learns how it works.
Maturity will make it decouple from that.