I for one am glad to see a company push back on blockchain technologies and their horrendous environmental impact. As an environmentalist in the computing space, it makes me so depressed to see our industry regress so much in environmental impact.
Imagine if you could attach a number to a resource, like energy, that accounts for its various possible usages. If the resource becomes more available, this number will go down and if it becomes more scarce, the number would go up.
If you wanted to use the resource, you would have to pay this number. So naturally, you wouldn't pay to use the resource for something silly. Similarly, if it's important, you'd pay as much as you had to to use the resource. This would discourage people from using the resource foolishly.
The beautiful thing about this system is that you don't have to have moral judgements about what is or isn't worthy. It wouldn't be up to any one individual to say you should use resource for X and not Y. The number would be self adjusting as more or less resources become made available or more or less uses for the resources are discovered. And as the number went up, it would incentivize people to create more of that resource or create a resource to replace it.
If only such a number existed...
This is some praise the market reductive lunacy. Obviously energy production, pricing and consumption needs to be heavily regulated in any sensible society.
If that were the case, we'd have optimal formulas to allocate goods throughout the economy and market economics would be completely obsolete. Whatever your position on markets, the reason they exist is because we don't know how to most efficiently allocate goods a priori. Markets and prices offer us a mechanism, however imperfect and prone to externalities, to allocate resources efficiently. You'd also probably be able to solve the Knapsack problem and the Multi-Armed Bandit problem. I'd love something like this also, but I'm not holding my breath.
We could do a whole lot better with our energy usage across the whole industry.
Also get tired of the aspirational rants of how it is going to fix supply chains and offer banking to the underserved communities. And yes, I understand banking, supply chains, and crypto enough to know that that will never happen.
agreed. have you heard of hREA [1] and http://valueflo.ws, led by Bob and Lynn from http://mikorizal.org, and others? it's sort of an open source SAP alternative designed as local-first networked software. "Radically distributed supply chain systems". it uses the REA accounting method [2] to implement LETS and mutual credit type economic networks for cooperatives / small business ecosystems / commons based peer production / any transitional/solidarity economies.
Bonfire is also implementing the Valueflows vocabulary on ActivityPub [3].
[1] https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea
I think that there are many valid ways to improve business systems software, but that the current leaders are entrenched to a level that they won’t be replaced, similar to libre office not taking off regardless of its rich set of features. I am glad that open source databases have done well though.
I recall working at a large manufacturing warehouse that switched systems, 2 years into the schedule they had to continue to push out the changeover for a variety of issues.
Secondly, the vast majority of the market cap is in crypto that isn't proof of work. So the first point doesn't even matter. Even bitcoin is moving towards a layer2 solution with the lightening network that means the settlement layer won't continue to put more pressure on needing more and more wasted energy.
https://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-tells-us-why...
At the same time, I see this overhyping hyperbolic forecasting in more and more things these days, especially when people are trying to convince other people to invest money, time, and/or other resources in their endeavor. I roll my eyes if I don't outright feel angry and disgusted, because the faux certainty often spreads to many people. I try to imagine why they may express 100% certainty of future events, and often struggle to do so.
To the topic of Zulip, I find it funny they aren't on the crypto bandwagon but they are on the talking point bandwagon of crypto must be for criminals, anti-environmentalists, or scammers. Those are the only 3 points. Whew, you'd think it was 2010.
As someone watching the space since the beginning, imho, Ethereum has it in the bag.
Do you have zero doubt? Do you have a lot of doubt and speak so certainly to mask your own self-doubt? Do you have a lot of money riding on it being successful therefore afraid Ethereum won't solve the problem? Maybe none of those things or a combo?
I really really struggle to know why people speak about such things with near certainty and maybe you won't answer but I hope you do and help me see what may contribute to you expressing such certainty.
I have zero doubt. It's like debating if the sky is neon pink or blue. They're way ahead of everyone else.
Take just fees. https://cryptofees.info/history/2021-11-11. Ethereum is doing 77x Bitcoin, and that's excluding three other Ethereum projects ahead of Bitcoin.
I can express doubt about the success of something doing 2x of a market leader. I can't justify tempering my certainty when it's slaughtering its market peers.
I can agree that they might be ahead in their development of new ways to address energy challenges or gas challenges or other challenges compared to other platforms, yet still struggle to imagine you have no doubt. Maybe I just consider too many variables that could come into play, such as government regulation, chilling effects, global wars, deaths of leaders, etc., that could throw off the inevitability of something achieving something in the future. To be fair, those and other variables could make it even more likely that Ethereum or cryptocurrencies in general will solve those problems, I just don't see it as 100% yes or 100% no.
Maybe I'm just built different.
That being said, I didn't know that Ethereum had such a discrepancy in terms of fee transactions compared to BTC, so I'm grateful you pointed that out and I could learn more about that aspect—thank you.
Is this not all of technology in entirety?
Huh?
* Bitcoin - still proof of work.
* Etherium - still proof of work, switching to proof of stake on January 1, 2020. Or maybe December 1, 2020. Or maybe some time in 2022.
I believe GP is correct that the majority market cap of crypto is more on PoS vs PoW, but I don't have a source readily available.
You only listed two coins, one you were wrong on as it's both PoS and PoW currently. Remember that most ETH competitors have billions in market cap and are pure PoS. Algorand, Cardano, Solana, Avalanche, Polkadot, etc.
Cryptocurrencies by market cap.[1]
There's Bitcoin, Etherium, and then there's everybody else. Binance and Tether are centrally issued. Solana, #5, is the largest proof of stake coin.
Source? I haven’t added up the long tail but this seems dubious given the dominance of bitcoin/ethereum.
> Even bitcoin is moving towards a layer2 solution with the lightening network that means the settlement layer won't continue to put more pressure on needing more and more wasted energy.
Layer 2 doesn’t solve this. Only ~2% of the rewards that compensate miners come from transaction fees. At best, layer 2 could cut out that 2% of incentives.
I'm skeptical that such a calculation could even be meaningfully performed. The long tail of cryptocurrencies includes a great many whose volumes are so low that "market cap" becomes a nebulous concept.
The whole point of blockchains is that everyone has a copy. I don't understand why you think they're migrating unless you don't want third-world countries using blockchains.
It has nothing to do with "want[ing] third-world countries using blockchains"
He means that more of the mining is taking place -due to natural market incentives- in 1st world countries. 1st world countries have "greener" energy production than not 1st world countries, so this is an environmental improvement
(fwiw, I'm working towards getting solar on my house and mining with my excess electricity)
Can we make a list of all the sectors that are consuming energy and determine which are providing the most benefit? Then we can focus on making reductions in the most harmful and the least important energy consumers.
Crypto is a big energy consumer, but I would prefer not to attack it just because it's new. It can provide some awesome things for humanity. I'd rather live in a world with crypto than one with massive military spending, for example.
The shitcoin economy can only be viewed as a whole.
Your new "green" shitcoin will be exchanged with Bitcoin and other dominant coins that use PoW mining. Your shitcoin's value will be based on that.
Technically right but distracting from the point that the most significant blockchain usage is PoW or some other methodology that massively wastes resources of some kind, such as Chia that wastes storage space for no good purpose.
Solar panels, for example, look a lot less eco-friendly when you realize their lifespans are about 20 years and our recycling solution is to... not recycle them. Not to mention precious metals like lithium are getting harder and harder to mine, meaning more and more emissions are required to acquire those materials in the first place. It's estimated that around 46% of an EV battery's carbon footprint is in the factory itself before it's even travelled a single mile. Which is part of why total lifetime GHG emissions for EVs are still around 65% that of gasoline powered cars.[0] and only 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled in the US (compared to 99% of lead-iron batteries).
Sorry I'm rambling. I think my point was that we need to think more about where the materials come from and what happens to them afterwards if we want a more complete picture of the environmental impacts of a technology
[0] https://theicct.org/publications/global-LCA-passenger-cars-j...
If PoS was winning why doesn't it control most of market cap?
Stop it. Hijack some other cause for your anti-crypto views. You don't get to make people feel good about emissions by writing anti crypto blog posts; you do it by actually advocating for lower emissions in activities that are in regular use that are _actually polluting_.
Someone is going to say something about incremental emissions reduction and to that I say, be my guest. The world is full of people selling magical products and ideas that claim to be green. The truth is, decreasing emissions is hard. Stop distracting people from the hard work needed to actually decrease emissions. If you want to help emissions out, go advocate for more buses and fewer automobiles in your community. Advocate for hydrogen subsidies for factories. Advocate for raising the gas tax. Advocate for tax rebates on weatherproofing houses. Advocate for heat pump installation. PoW cryptocurrencies are table stakes.
EDIT: The score on my post is fluctuating wildly and I'm flagged now lol. I've obviously touched a nerve here.