Contributing to WebSockets – Cryptocurrency Users
websockets.readthedocs.io
websockets.readthedocs.io
> I’m aware of efforts to build proof-of-stake models. I’ll care once the total energy consumption of all cryptocurrencies drops to a non-bullshit level.
> I will summarily close issues related to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in any way.
Have we seen any creator of a deep learning library, take a similar position if not stopping any support for anyone using it for mass surveillance or burning up the planet by using their deep learning library to train it on tons of GPUs in the cloud until the data centres catch fire? I don't think so.
It's business as usual for them as the author is getting upset over PoW systems to taint all of them under the same brush despite many alternatives that are more energy efficient than others.
I believe the original creator of YOLO actually quit for that reason.
ml5.js license:
> This license gives everyone as much permission to work with this software as possible as long as they comply with the ml5.js Code of Conduct [...]
ml5.js code of conduct:
> Do not: [...] Use ml5.js to build tools of mass surveillance and prediction to repress the rights of people
https://github.com/ml5js/ml5-library/blob/main/LICENSE.md
Not sure how enforcable this is but it exists.
Bruce Perens wrote about this in late 2019[1][2], specifically focusing on the "hippocratic license", proponents of which IIRC at the time attempted to spark a debate if the Open Source definition needs to be changed, to allow discrimination like this.
[1] https://perens.com/2019/10/12/invasion-of-the-ethical-licens...
[2] https://perens.com/2019/09/23/sorry-ms-ehmke-the-hippocratic...
While I'm not necessarily saying I agree with either, the first is certainly less reasonable than the second (and the two examples linked are of the second kind).
Why would any issue be "about" crypto? Or traditional finance. Or social media. Or recipe websites. Or gardening
I'm not understanding why the content of the website / application would be an important detail of a github issue at all.
Most of them seem to be trivial coding mistakes unrelated to the library, and contributors even helped on some before closing due to the rule. The users should probably have asked on StackOverflow or something like that.
This whole ordeal actually seems much more practical than political.
If anyone wants to use this library for bitcoin, just make proper github issues.
Edit: I'm surprised at the number of people here supporting political statements in open source. I was under the assumption that most people hated the peacenotwar module, but I guess opinions are more evenly split than I thought.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peacenotwar
[2]: https://snyk.io/blog/peacenotwar-malicious-npm-node-ipc-pack...
The websockets library has not had anything malicious added to it. Only the lead dev says he won’t help certain users.
..."free" doesn't mean you don't lose the respect of your users when you go off mission.
People who preach sometimes forget how often most of us are preached to, and how little we're interested in hearing some random dev's political opinion.
There are also legitimate security concerns around devs with political motivations and the willingness to leverage their projects for their agenda.
And you're free to use a different open source library.
You need their software.
You want security? Pay for it. You don’t want a political statement? Pay for it.
Equating human beings with disposable machines is one of the great sins of predatory capitalism.
Someone, some person and not a toaster, has contributed a lot of uncompensated work. It's their right to do with that work as they please.
Also, hating cryptocurrencies is not a "political" issues.
For me, that fact that huge companies flout the securities laws repeatedly over a decade is a huge red flag, and I shared this belief with people whose political beliefs are completely the reverse of mine.
I think you're the only one who is conflating the topic with this "peacenotwar" thing, and other people are only expressing an opinion on the on-topic subject?
Peace-not-war was malware, or more broadly sabotage, this is merely a statement. While both are a form of protesting and stating political stances, one is usually illegal and widely rejected while the other is protected by the UN's declaration of human rights and by the constitution of any non-authoritarian country.
Are these "planet is heating" people going around telling people not to have idle appliances plugged in? Not to use bigger cars if not necessary? If BMW was using websockets in one of their huge SUVs would you not help them?
just feels childish and lacking logic
Yes and yes? We had the "should the government regulate size of cars" discussion on here just yesterday as well.
As well as - including but not limited to - telling people to fly less, to insulate their homes to reduce heating energy use, to use lower energy bulbs, and so on and so on.
(feeling the planet warming particularly acutely today, as the arrival of Californian weather in the UK has resulted in Californian levels of wildfires near populated areas which have never experienced them before, and the largest daily number of fire brigade calls since WW2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62232654 )
> just feels childish and lacking logic
Not at all, actually pretty much opposite. I think it is absolutely normal adult behaviour not to help people with their non-urgent problems unless it is a cause you deeply care about. And, it is more typical not to contribute to any kind of open source or free work kind of thing.
Any PoW system that is currently running right now to process, mine and settle a transaction on-chain is indeed 'burning the planet' which I agree. The thing is, not all systems are like PoW and it doesn't apply to all cryptocurrencies and Proof of Stake (PoS), hashgraphs, and mostly byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithms are not burning up the planet. There are alternatives that are useable today.
Unlike the deep learning systems continuously training their surveillance data every day that have just burned up a data centre yesterday. The tech bros don't want to hear that but will target crypto because it threatens their day to day business, especially with the author as highlighted by some commenters and even some ferocious anti-crypto supporters like the CTO of Adjoint, a private blockchain startup. [0]
They also lack any reasoning other than 'all crypto should die in a fire' which isn't going to happen. So at best, this is indeed a very childish and an extreme position to take.
[0] https://medium.com/@johny.codes/private-blockchains-even-wor...
Bitcoin users can still open issues, as long as they're not bitcoin-specific.
Yes, for god's sake, yes, what is wrong with you?
You think that the climate crisis is imaginary or will go away on its own?
>I will summarily close issues related to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in any way.
It's a free country.
> I will summarily close issues related to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in any way.
Sounds like a very extreme position. I haven't seen any creator of a deep learning library, take the extreme position of not supporting anyone who is using it for mass surveillance or burning up the planet by training it on tons of GPUs in the cloud until the data centers catch fire?
> You already negated all of humanity’s efforts to develop renewable energy. Please stop heating the planet where my children will have to live.
I agree with the energy issues of PoW, but PoS or BFT systems do not suffer from these energy issues and the author knows it.
But we are not complaining about the unavoidable wastefulness of deep learning systems or even the GPU farming and constant retraining / learning of that especially at the expense of it being used for mass surveillance?
No outrage on that is there by the tech bros when there is no efficient alternative for deep learning other than using GPUs, TPUs etc to have these data centres catching fire.
They are no better than the problem of PoW crypto systems today. But at least bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency and there are alternatives that are more efficient right now.
https://www.google.com/search?q=bitcoin+annual+energy+usage https://www.statista.com/statistics/580087/energy-use-of-fac...
Facebook uses 6% the amount of power, as all bitcoin miners.
The amount of power consumed by all of the cloud services we unknowingly use almost 24/7 is a hugely underappreciated problem, I will agree there.
>Education is failing a big time
Indeed.
Like so many bitcoin advocates, your argument relies on a unsourced statement that was deliberately invented and is not in any way close to the truth.
> Education is failing a big time
Arrogance and falsehoods go together in a big way.
I remember, not so long ago at all, it felt as though my position was more or less the only position I saw reflected by others online and offline. Practically everyone I knew who had something to say about Cryptocurrency would have the same basic points— giving power back to the people, providing an alternative to the traditional (read: banks/finance industry) methods, hedge against inflation, hedge against government overreach, etc.
Nowadays, it seems like popular opinion has really switched. Obviously, with just about anything, there’s going to be some negatives and some downsides. From day one with Cryptocurrency, for example, the most obvious use case was for criminal activity and moving value outside the prying eyes of whatever 3-letter agencies that are applicable in your jurisdictions.
I understood that counterpoint to Cryptocurrency just fine. I agreed with it, as well. Criminals do use Cryptocurrency, it’s just a fact— it’s explosion in popularity has certainly opened up and/or made more reliable and easily available many new revenue models for the seedier folks amongst us. Ransomware, for example, has greatly benefited from Cryptocurrency’s creation and gradually increased adoption into the mainstream.
Bringing me to my point, or I suppose question, rather, is the argument that Cryptocurrency uses a ton of energy and is bad for the planet. While this is also true, especially for proof of work stuff like Bitcoin and Ethereum, it feels like whenever I hear discussion of Cryptocurrency using this argument, there’s often little to no genuine conversation being made about how to improve upon it. I’m sure all of us know about other transaction verification methods that don’t eat nearly as much energy, so I’m not going to dive into that now.
To state my opinion bluntly, it feels like the whole energy / electricity usage argument of Cryptocurrency has came about rather abruptly and inorganically. I don’t remember hardly anyone talking about this issue with nearly as much (seemingly blind) passion or negative attitude in, say, 2013-2020~.
Furthermore, while yes— the energy usage of cryptocurrency is a problem, and a damn near inherent problem at that— it seems to me like it’s such a minor drawback comparatively speaking to the other evils in the world. 14 trees burn in the Amazon Rainforest every second. A kid dies in Africa from starvation or malaria every 15 seconds. Oil companies cover up their emissions and pay for favourable regulations that allow them to continue to pollute at industrial scale with little to no pushback.
I am no tinfoil hat wearing cryptobro, don’t get me wrong, but considering how little pollution cryptocurrency produces comparatively speaking to $insert_megacorp_here, and how weak of a logical counterpoint that seems to be against the inherent positives of cryptocurrency, it seems to me like this argument is one that is almost wholeheartedly emotional in nature and one where I wouldn’t be surprised if the roots of it were astroturfed by a select few who did not want to see crypto succeed.
As an analogy, certainly we all remember the marketing BP put in to the “reduce your carbon footprint; *we ALL have to do our part* to reduce global warming” slogan thing they got going. Meanwhilst, they were spitting out pollution at rates that even if every single one of us lived like Taoist monks still wouldn’t have made a dent in.
Am I the only one that thinks this way? I would love to be proven wrong if there’s any counterpoints to my perspective that I could be made aware of.
/rant
The superbowl ad, and the subsequent crypto crash. The scam ecosystem enabled by cryptocurrency really took off, and a lot of retail "investors" have lost money as a result. This takes away a lot of the positive sentiment.
The advertising means that everyone has heard of crypto now; there are far fewer "meh" or "who" people. But there's far more people who themselves or friends have lost money to it. And you'll hear more of this in tech circles. It still isn't all that big on mainstream news either way.
Yes. PoW's energy issues is indeed a problem in which efficient alternatives like PoS, Hashgraphs and Byzantine Fault Tolerant systems, already exist if not for years. We can use a similar case with electric cars as an alternative to petrol and diesel ones. The same is true here.
> I am no tinfoil hat wearing cryptobro, don’t get me wrong, but considering how little pollution cryptocurrency produces comparatively speaking to $insert_megacorp_here, and how weak of a logical counterpoint that seems to be against the inherent positives of cryptocurrency, it seems to me like this argument is one that is almost wholeheartedly emotional in nature and one where I wouldn’t be surprised if the roots of it were astroturfed by a select few who did not want to see crypto succeed.
Totally correct. I have seen the same anti-crypto folks not disclosing their associations or competing interests and deleting their history off the internet [0], where they are actively dedicating everyday to 'stop crypto' or complaining about the environment and tarring all of them with the same brush. Their logic is simply:
We should stop everyone from driving all cars and vehicles because there are more petrol / diesel vehicles than electric cars to offset the CO2 that these petrol / diesel cars are emitting into the atmosphere.
On top of that, the tech bros don't want to complain about the deep learning systems (DLS) used for training purposes and mass surveillance which is no better or no efficient than PoW cryptocurrencies burning the planet as well. The difference is, these DLS have no efficient alternative for re-training or re-learning on new data since 2012 and always requires tons of data centres to achieve this in a shorter space of time.
The fact is, 13+ years since Bitcoin, we have working and efficient alternatives to it. 10+ years in with deep learning and there are no efficient ways to train large amounts of data without causing data centres to catch fire. I'm lead to believe that the environment reaction against cryptocurrencies today is one that is not only emotional, but an extreme response boosted by the ones that have a vested interest to laughably attempt to 'destroy all of them'. [0]
> Am I the only one that thinks this way?
No. Just avoid the extreme positions that either pro-crypto folks or anti-crypto folks set themselves in.
[0] https://medium.com/@johny.codes/private-blockchains-even-wor...
That's the spirit! Upvoted...
Personally, I've been pointing out that it's all at best pointless and wasteful and at worst a scam since around 2011 (I started watching around the time the Trendon Shavers Ponzi scheme got going).
This was definitely a minority position in places like this at the time. I suppose 11 years of failure to actually become useful have moved the needle of public opinion a bit.
> I don’t remember hardly anyone talking about this issue with nearly as much (seemingly blind) passion or negative attitude in, say, 2013-2020~
You may have been in a bubble. Even people who _liked_ bitcoin were concerned about this once ASIC mining got going in earnest (around 2014 I think?)
I could understand the feeling though, if their GitHub got massively spammed by crypto projects.
You just think it's a honorable thing to do because you probably also happen to support that (unrelated / political) message. But imagine a situation where you wouldn't...
What if he e.g. stated that he doesn't do business with companies that actively support LGBT+ issues?
I would rather give up Facebook and all other social (which in my opinion add no value to society) rather than cryptocurrencies (which are instrumental to the right of privately transacting online, which I deem very important).
This obsession over the carbon footprint of cryptocurrencies is ideological and, ultimately, wrong.
Blockchains are public ledgers - this is the opposite of privacy.
There is no such right.
It has an efficiency of approx 0%.
And as it gets more successful it gets less efficient and wastes more energy.
And there is no incentive to reduce that energy usage (Facebook would save money if they could make their algorithms more green, for example so they may pay people to look into that).
Bitcoin has to pollute, for the security of the network.
Also there is the manufacture of disposable single purpose hardware for the mining of bitcoin and it’s environmental impact.