[awill88]

It’s irritating to constantly read so many articles devolve into attacks on the blockchain itself, indirectly blaming the proof of work algorithm and the amounts of energy it uses. It’s always the same theme, oh this stuff is silly, oh and it’s destroying our planet too, what a terrible thing. The tone comes off as we’re here to tear down a side effect of decentralized authenticity and once exposed as a sham, we’ll go ahead and attack the technology itself.. it’s frustrating is all and counterproductive if you ask me. FWIW, I think the value of NFTs are ridiculous but the idea is cool. It just sucks seeing tabloid bullshit driving discussions about a ingenious technology and what’s left is a bunch of thrashing comment threads expressing for or against, for or against.. gets old.

[kumarvvr]

While I agree politically with the idea of a distributed ledger, this implementation (and I am sure a lot of thought has gone into design of distributed ledgers) of making computational complexity as a pre-condition to participate in the ledger is rightfully criticized. The world, overall does not benefit from using the blockchain, in any form, just for the energy consumed.

[awill88]

How else could you verify the ledger without computational power without the reliance on an authority? This is assuming that we are philosophically considering authority as undesirable for ledgers.. like I get it, proof of work at this point is kind of BS in the sense that it’s not accessible for the individual so it loses all its novelty in the libertarian sense.. energy just feels like a problem that is solved elsewhere, I don’t think we should be calling it wasteful if humanity is on the brink of fusion and newer cleaner sources of energy.. I dunno, scrutinizing energy consumption just seems like an easy target, too easy, like lazy.

[dredmorbius]

Maybe some reliance on authority is a good thing?

Because the answer crytpocurrency provides to "how much are you willing to pay to never have to trust anyone" is "one hell of a lot" via work-factor.

A fundamental characteristic of all exchange systems is trust. That may not be institutional trust, but there is trust in something: mineral scarcity and assayability, counterparty, commodity-currency acceptability by others, pricing and exchange systems, recourse options, etc.

In economics, there's a long observation that high-trust markets and the societies in which they exist perform vastly better than low-trust ones. And interestingly, cryptocurrency fairly neatly segregates markets into those who do have fundamental trust in institutions and practices, and those who do not.

[mmmeff]

Iota

[Meph504]

Well the problem is, we need something that is a creditable implementation block chain, Nearly all uses today are dodgy. The almost all seem to think creating a system of false scarcity and convincing people that it makes it valuable.

Mining is pointless, waste of power and resources, So I agree it is the technologies fault, it has yet to have something to seemingly implement its usage in a way that is useful.

[awill88]

Plenty of waste, yes, but distributed authority of history has lots of intrinsic value IMHO, plenty of uses, and I suppose I’m optimistic more will emerge than what’s out there today. Copyright enforcement or decentralized DRM seem like natural evolutions.. I mostly agree, but I disagree with the general concept that blockchain is bad. At most, cryptocurrency is bad, but I don’t think it had to be bad, if that makes sense.

[kamray23]

How will you use a blockchain to do either of those things. DRM is only truly useful for interactive media anyway, so even if you have some kind of decentralized encrypted data decrypted on sufficient transaction, that data flows out of something into pixels and sound waves at some point. No real advantage to be gained over just doing the same in an ordinary W3 online storefront. Copyright management is very doable with stuff like NFTs, but that's management as a separate thing from enforcement. A blockchain cannot automatically detect misuse of copyrighted material or do anything about it even if something on the blockchain knew. It just doesn't seem reasonable to do these things.

On the other hand, the main advantage we should consider with blockchain is decentralised computation. Decentralised computation can possibly be managed and regulated by a cryptocurrency which itself is tied to the value of decentralised computation and as such does not exist as some imaginary token of value from artificial scarcity. The ability for a system to exist all over the world and to communicate and compute everywhere can be important to many applications. Communication, fintech, serverless services, license management, ownership management, the very idea of smart contracts etc.

That's where the real meat of the system lies, and not in online artificial scarcity tokens distributing a soulless, valueless illustration procedurally generated like millions like it based off a bunch of templates drawn in paint over about an hour.

[Meph504]

I agree that the tech isn't bad, it just to the general public, if everything built on a tech is bad, they will equate the tech as bad.

[rhinoceraptor]

In practice there really is no valid use case for a blockchain. Sure, the idea of a distributed, trustless ledger is clever. But in practice the only people able to run full nodes and do transactions are the big stakeholders, either in terms of PoW mining pools or whatever proof of stake model is “totally coming soon”.

The transaction fees and excruciatingly small transaction throughout make on-chain transactions impractical for ordinary transactions, so now you’re back to running transactions through centralized exchanges, which undermines the security of the trust model.

[NetOpWibby]

Welcome to the Internet. That’s always gonna be something people are vehemently opposed to, and most people won’t go deeper than surface level to understand what they’re against.

[awill88]

It’s funny because when I think about that, it makes me go, damn, is that the destiny of all speech and interaction between people on the internet? Regardless of our attempts to bring brilliance and added dimension to our existence and social constructs, at the end of the day, in its current form, argumentation and personalities on the internet get reduced down to binary forms, physically, logically, spiritually.

[NetOpWibby]

It’s really quite exhausting to see people air their grievances and then when presented with more info by an empathetic party, these people just wave off said info. Happened to me last week or so.

https://twitter.com/NetOpWibby/status/1466524102009577475

On the topic of NFTs, most naysayers don’t like how much energy it takes to mint just one on the most popular blockchain for NFTs right now, Ethereum.

With blockchains like Tezos and Solana, the energy output from minting an NFT collection of let’s say a few thousand, is equivalent to using an in-window AC unit for eight hours…drastically better than Ethereum but like we’ve established, most people aren’t looking past the surface with their complaints/distaste.