Blockchain: the wave of the future

No one is ever concerned with how much energy is used to feed ads to the entire population of earth 24/7.

Please propose a law or regulation structure for significantly reducing or eliminating advertisements. I'm serious. I fucking hate ads. I just don't have a reasonable or effective way to get rid of them.
Edit: Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can't come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
- In São Paulo, one of the biggest cities of the world, the municipality forbade by law all billboards and building disfiguring 'decorations' some 10 years ago. Since then, the city became much more bearable, aesthetically. Nothing special happened, everybody was happy, except a few bankrupt ads agencies. Maybe, you must be able to imagine that change is possible. However, there is this ideology, Americans seem to be so fond off, that seems to make such things very difficult.
- Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can’t come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
  Smart TV manufacturers: "Impossible!"
- Ban advertising to minors/for products intended for children
  Ban ads/branding visible from roadways to prevent distracted driving
- Serve ads inside the ads. It’s more power efficient—kill two birds with one stone?
- ads don't go unless capitalism goes
- Make sending unrequested data like ads and trackers to web clients a crime akin to gaining unrestricted access to computers. No need for a new law, just a new interpretation on an older one.
  Most jurisdictions prohibit unauthorized access to computer systems. What if we just say, "running Javascript code that implements functionality not specifically requested by the user is unauthorized tampering".
- Got a better one: just ban marketing outright
- Are we all here because somebody “advertised” Lemmy on reddit?
- What about this, if you buy a product, you no longer have to watch their ads. Anywhere.
- Where does it stop though? Will TV and super bowl still exist?
  What about Facebook, the credit bureaus and Twitter? They're all a waste of energy too.
Same with porn. But I'm building a shake-power generator for fleshlites so it should balance out the power it pulls. Saving the earth one jack-off at a time.
Charging a hybrid car battery only takes 253.4 jerks. Pretty soon we will be expanding our charging service to parking lots across America and Canada! Most of them already have people willing to do it for you already ...they were doing it there anyway... Win/win.
Powerjerk (tm), we make perverts work for you!
Just roll up and say "Hey Jagoff, I need to get to x!" And you'll promptly be taken care of.*
*Do not give them drugs to speed up the process. We are serious about our drug-free workplace.
Edit: steal my idea and I'll find you
- Energy isn't free. More power captured from jerking will increase food consumed, meaning more energy used in farming. You'll have to brand this as either a carbon ~~capture~~ fapture system or as a weight loss program
- Porn is more beneficial for humanity than imaginary ownership.
- Bur, what if they prematurely finish and my car isn't charged yet?
- I have an ancient hermetic method of getting off that requires neither computer or phone. Enquire within if you seek this ancient knowledge.
I am. Same loop of crap blasting on 20x massive screens 24/7 at the station.
Every store that keeps light on at night is also an ad.
My hate for them is one of the main drivers behind my radicalization.
- My grandfather worked in the ad industry and couldn’t stand ads. He’s always mute the TV when they came on and we sat in uncomfortable silence.
- At least lighting has become more efficient than 20-30 years ago.
Yes but what about this whataboutism? And honestly I am fairly certain it ain't as much as Bitcoin. People usually focus on 1 thing to get it done because moving to the next. I bet you try to do that at work too.
- No way ads consume less power than bitcoin. Just the lights for ads probably consume more than bitcoin, not even talking about creating ads, which I assume consumes a double digit percentage of the global work force.
- What are you on about?
- Yes but what about this whataboutism?
  Blockchain user.
Most people aren't loudly in favour of that, especially not the ones concerned with the power usage of blockchain
- Perhaps, but you also never hear them complain about it anywhere near as loudly as people complaining about blockchains.
  Yes, they’ll grumble about ads being annoying or YouTube blocking people who block ads, but the amount of power that gets wasted on this never even crosses anyone’s mind, meaning on some level, there exists agreement that advertisement are a necessary and responsible use of electricity while blockchains are not.
Or how much is spent on the global banking industry...
Lets do an advertising tax 10% of all add revenue.
- Unironically this.
I went and did some mafs.
This thing says the world consumes 180k TWh of energy per year.
This study estimates (with a considerable uncertainty) that the Internet amounts to around 5% of the world's energy usage.
Apparently, 48% of consumer web traffic is ads.. That is dystopian in itself, that means around half the content floating around the internet is stuff the client does not request but is pushed to them.
That would put the ad industry at 4500 TWh per year. However, this is back of the envelope.
Going off of this, a high estimate for crypto mining is 230 TWh.
That means the ad industry costs us around 20 times the cost of crypto in terms of power. Feel free to check me because I don't know shit about most of these things.
That said, this does not account for the entire ad industry, just the cost of sending internet ads around the world. Ads are made, ads are displayed in various media other than websites, and most importantly, ads have the sole purpose of driving further consumption, which all contributes to the societal costs of the ad industry.
- 48%? Fuck i love my adblocker
- Damn, I knew the numbers would be crazy, but that's absolutely bonkers.
Yea the rally against block chain tech is stupid as fuck. It consumes nothing in the grand scale...do people not realize a lot of large enterprises have ~200k nodes give or take? Bigger companies can have in the million range. 200k machines is a joke.
Edit: I can see a lot of people just hate block chain tech without understanding anything tech wise lol
- The nodes aren’t the issue. It’s the fact that those nodes have to expend at least the same amount of energy every single time a record is added and the larger the ledger, the more energy is needed. Blockchain is somewhat unique in that regard.
- Yeah, people tend hate what they don't understand. Especially when most people think think every blockchain performs exactly like bitcoin (which is proof of work). Bitcoin is slow and power hungry and would never actually be usable by the masses for everyday transactions. But it was the first and will likely be a "digital gold" for a long time
  But it's not the only one and in time everyone will be using blockchain technology. It's so much more convenient and useful than most realize. The Solana blockchain has secured a big partnership with Visa that can be read up on if anyone is interested.
- You don't even understand blockchain so I'm not sure what your edit is all about. You're comparing blockchain to a database in your replies as if they're comparable.
Yes, but it's almost certainly a multitude less electricity than bitcoin.
That's such a great point wtf
That is why I only block ads when I'm on a plane 👍
Or that tumble dryers in the USA alone use more energy than Bitcoin.
How much does facebook, the banking system Google search need and does it even make sense to compare this against a small country?
Instead of actually talking about it you're lazily using it to deflect criticism of unsustainable cryptocurrencies. Your input was worthless.

Distributed hashed linked list is so yesteryear. These days we're into text autocompletion instead.

Hey, it's not just fancy autocomplete!
Thanks to years of innovation, it's now copyright infringement as well.
- I wish copyrights will die to this technology! <3
- Call it whatever you like, it's a pretty damn powerful tool.
Autocomplete is the most important thing in your life.
That sentence was brought to you by autocomplete. Autocomplete, you know it and you can do whatever you need.

Sure, but what real-world problem does a trustless solve? I thought this was all very interesting years ago but now that we've had blockchain for years it seems it's only good for illegal or morally questionable transactions.
- Bingo. Capitalism has thus far rejected the blockchain, which is generally evidence that it doesn't solve an important problem either efficiently, safely or cheaply.
- There's a case to be made for a currency that facilitates illegal transactions, or transactions that corporations object to. Just because something is legal in your country doesn't mean it might not be unjustly restricted. Or could just be unjustly illegal in your country or another country. The problem of course is that distributed currency also facilitates things that should be illegal.
  But WikiLeaks is a good example - their legacy is a little mixed now, but when they first came on the scene they were doing work which was a valuable service to the public. If you wanted to donate money to support wikileaks you couldn't because the credit card processors shut them off. Blockchain lets you get around that.
  Likewise it's the combination of distance and direct - I can give $5 in cash to my local leaking consortium, but I can't give $5 to the leaking consortium on the other side of the world without relying on the knowledge and consent of third parties.
- Trusting Humans is literally a security flaw. Any system with trust you can find examples with fraud and abuse from those who held power by holding that trust.
  We trusted bankers to invest our money, and some short sold the housing market with that money
  I could go on, but trust really is a security issue. Decentralization has its efficiency issues, but saying "Bitcoin uses as much power as the 90th largest nation" is peanuts when you consider the energy inequality that America spends and compare what Bitcoin delivers with that energy versus how much energy centralized banks need to deliver a system that's easier to fraud
- Also, the unbanked.
  Also, privacy and anonymity (to an extent).
  Also, complete predictability in the system (its at least domain constrained).
- I was hoping it would help me save on international transfer fees when I was an overseas postdoc, but it would have actually cost more between the exchange fees and my time setting up all the exchanges in various countries, meanwhile also introducing risk in me being robbed of said money and screwing something up and introducing myself to some sort of tax liability. Needless to say, I continued to just pay for the bank transfers
- it's only good for illegal or morally questionable transactions.
  Good thing laws are always just and everyone agrees that following every law is the most important thing a human being can aspire to do in their lifetime.
  ^^/s
  Seriously though, I'm someone that uses credit for 90% of my purchases, but I also enjoy consuming cannabis and I'm well aware how horrible it would be if it wasn't possible to make "illegal or morally questionable transactions."
- With all the information available at your fingertips being ignorant is a choice.
  "this parallel financial system can also serve a tangible social good, offering an onramp to the financial system for people who would otherwise be left out. In countries where the vast majority of the population is unbanked, national currencies are no longer a safe store of value, remittances comprise a hefty portion of GDP, and international sanctions complicate connections to the global economy, a virtual currency that doesn't require an intermediary to approve transactions can be a vital lifeline for survival"
  Bitcoin is poised to blow up Africa's $86 billion banking system
TPS metrics of the most popular blockchains
Blockchain TPS Max TPS

Ethereum 13.15 57.91
Bitcoin 7.35 9.87
Algorand 6.99 221.01
Optimism 4.74 20.66
As a global payments network Visa has the capacity to execute more than 65,000 transactions per second.
- Oh nice, that's how high Solana's TPS has gone in testing (in practice it hovers around 5-10k TPS). There's also newer chains like Aptos that claim to be able to handle 150k TPS with subsecond finality. Of course, neither of these chains are very decentralised, but at least they aren't fully permissioned and centralised. Especially on a network belonging to a partisan, anti-competitive, anti-trust law-breaking, Wikileaks funding thieving Israel supporters like Visa.
But if you're using layer 2 solutions, then you're not actually using the blockchain directly, right? Might as well use credit card then?
- All transactions are still eventually commited to Layer 1 though, so you're still using the Blockchain when using L2s.
there's the small issue of proof of stake being subjective...

Blockchain	TPS	Max TPS
Ethereum	13.15	57.91
Bitcoin	7.35	9.87
Algorand	6.99	221.01
Optimism	4.74	20.66

The real charlatans were the “the technology has promise” people. No, the technology was dumb.

He says on a decentralized platform that became popular because the centralized equivalent became hostile towards their users.
- "Blockchain" and "decentralised" are not interchangeable words
- I don't think Lemmy counts as popular yet.

This is revolutionary

This is de-evolutionary!

...and, hear me out, that will be perfect for keeping messages untraceable by the government. Every single of those 200,000 computers will have full copies of all the messages ever transmitted, unencrypted, but they'll never be able to tell who wrote them and who they were for.

privacy or secrecy from the government isn't a goal of Bitcoin - the protocol doesn't even use encryption.
the goal is protection from (government or other) control
No one who understands bitcoin ever thought it was untraceable.
In the early days it was really common to place messages in the chain.
There are literal marriage proposals among these message.
- I even considered the main benefit to be that it was super traceable.
  I once tracked some stolen crypto trough multiple Wallets and exchanges to find the one wallet where those hackers where keeping all the spoils.
  Granted the owners of a wallet aren't public and thats a form of anonymity but surely intelligence agencies can figure it out.
I'm still 90% convinced it was either invented by the CIA or the NSA for "reasons". The US military invented the dark web and they even claim to have invented it, so it's not a far stretch that another US gov. agency invented Bitcoin.
- Probably invented as a way to more discreetly fund black sites...
Monero entered the chat.

At first I read "200.000" as a particularly precise float, and laughed at the absurdity. Then I realized he meant "two hundred thousand" and it came full-circle from comedy to tragedy. :(

massive scaling
Uh, yeah, after guzzling electricity like a small country, I'm sure bitcoin has massive scaling. Ability to process 9 transactions per seconds counts as massive scalability, right?
- I assume you're speaking Bitcoin, cryptocurrency that uses Proof-of-Work consensus.
  Proof-of-Work is very secure, super decentralized, but it's the culprit behind mining and subsequent electricity drain.
  There are other consensus mechanisms, like Proof-of-Stake, to which Ethereum, Solana and many many others have migrated to or were based on to begin with.
  Proof-of-Stake requires about 100x less electricity, is reasonably secure and is the default option for modern cryptocurrencies. Thereby the energy argument gets less and less relevant, while the fuss around it is only gaining speed.
It makes absolute sense that a massively scalable trustless system involving money would use a consensus algorithm with a large number of nodes.
Whoa whoa whoa. I suppose you didn't get the memo:
,
but the rule is to blindly hate any kind of technology that any one has used in insalubrious ways, in-spite of its potential for liberation and independence.
- In-spite of its potential for liberation and independence.
  When it shows that potential, maybe more people will get on board. Until then there are a host of problems that make a ton of people not want to touch it including but not limited to:
  Capitalists and scammers are already exploiting it the way they do with traditional currencies, except in sometimes new creative ways because of either the lack of regulations or because the technology inherently makes it impossible to trace.
  I don't see the involvement of predatory capitalists or financial institutions changing in a fully crypto world either, because people are always going to need financial services like loans and insurance on their savings and the financial institutions will always have the imbalance of power.
  The currencies mostly benefit people with a ton of capital to handle consensus, which further entrenches the power imbalance found in (1) and (2).
  Insane amounts of resources are needed to reach consensus in a way that is not good at all for the environment, whether that be electricity, computer hardware, or whatever other resource. Sure we already use a lot of power to make our society run. But crypto is asking for more ON TOP of that, compounding the issues. Saying the financial industry already uses a lot of power is not a good argument when I don't think anyone is reasonably convinced that they're going away even after crypto were to take over, and now you're adding an insane power or pollution requirement to run the world's currency system.
  Relying solely on crypto leaves people destitute if their wallets got hacked, unless they decide to utilize traditional banking with insurance (hint: people like stability and a lot of people will choose to do this over having their life savings wiped out).
  Chucklefucks are using the technology to commodify and break the best part of the digital world which is the ability to have bit for bit reproducible copies of information.
  I'm serious. Fix all of that and you absolutely would get people on board. Not even kidding. Crypto would be taken seriously. But I have yet to hear compelling solutions by cryptobros.
- Oh good Lord, I was partially inclined to agree but using generative Ai to make this point tells me everything I need to know.
- Couldn't even be assed to fix the text of the main focus of the picture?

It doesn't require that much computing power, that's just a variable that gets set.

If the difficulty were set lower, one average computer could easily handle it.

Oh sweet. Let's just set the difficulty lower, then.
- But then every jabrony would be able to make money.
One variable, on 200 000 computers simultaneously.
Every time a transaction is made.
Which also means that the more blockchain gets used, the more expensive, slow and power hungry it becomes. It is doomed to fail and never be in worldwide use.
Compare it to something like AI, which gets exponentially better the more people use it. The same trajectory as the internet.
- Which is why people are so horny for chains using proof of stake instead of proof of work

Or, you could just pick one computer, have it do the work and punish it by taking its money if it screws up (ETH).

But yeah you’re not wrong about minable coins.

In a trustless environment...

You're handing over your valuables at gunpoint, nerd.

I think you meant to reply to a comment and instead replied to the post.
- No, I'm just mocking Blockchain idiots in general.

Then some massive org like the NSA creates/captures 51% of the nodes and takes everyone's money overnight.

NSA isn't hurting for money. They're just going to monitor those transactions for suspicious activities. As long as you're not doing business with a terrorist, you have nothing to worry about. If you are doing business with a terrorist... is that a Reaper drone I hear?
It's only guys like SBF you gotta worry about ripping you off.
- NSA isn’t hurting for money
  If you can figure out how to teach those sorts of people to say "no, I think I've actually got enough already" then please let me know, because I've been wracking my brain trying to solve that one for a while now.
You can do the same with a big enough botnet
- That's what I meant by "capture."
- Or an army
that's... not how that works. all you can do with 51% is possibly double-spend whatever coins you already have. or undo some transactions.
so you submit a transaction, then use your extra 1% of hash power to mine a new block that says you didn't actually spend it. at the same time you need to trick somebody else into believing you actually did send the coins, and take their stuff you "paid for." then after you have the stuff, you can submit the block that doesn't have your transaction in it. Voila, free stuff and you didn't spend your coins.
it does not enable you to mess with other's balances. other than possibly reversing some transactions. you would need the private keys to their wallets to take their money. and if you have those, you don’t need 51% of the hash power, you can just take the coins with 0% hash power.
- It's obviously not a comprehensive guide on how to cheat the system. I'm making the point that computers will never be secure under the current paradigm when there are massive and powerful actors with vastly greater resources than the average person. I strongly suspect that an org like the DoD (which had exclusive access to integrated circuit technology for three years before anyone else) could probably capture/spoof virtually the entire network if they wanted too.
The coins can only be stolen for as long as the 51% attack stays live.
- Ignoring the fact they definitely have the resources to sustain it, how many people will continue to run a node after losing everything to such an attack? How will anyone reclaim real world value if they exchange the coins for something else?

Do we have a buttcoin on Lemmy? We need a buttcoin

...which is much lower than the average values for a debit transaction or PayPal
[citation needed]
- A quick search gives me .0015 kWh per card transaction, but that could be wrong.
- I was hoping for the same thing
  That still seems like an insane amount of power for one transaction.

Lot of comments don't seem to understand that these words are not interchangeable

I love how one man created arguably the most complex puzzle in the history of mankind and people shit on it just because it's literally hard to solve (aka "uses energy") and the solutions have value.

What value is that?
- The arbitrary one people assign to it by paying a shitton of real money for your fancy rows of 1s and 0s

Y'all prefer to have the government and banks in charge of money instead? seriously?

What I don't want in charge, is a shadowy cabal of a few rich people only bound to the maximization of their own profit.
I'm not paying extra to remove what little democratic control there is in the existing system.
- the shadowy cabal of a few rich people is called the Fed, it's privately owned by all the banks. there is no democracy in the existing system
For me: probably. Either way, transactions cost money. Either pay the block chain fees or just use cash/credit card.
I'm ok with credit and cash.
- yeah they've done great with inflation so far! lol
Yes I want my democratically elected representatives ("the gobernment") in charge

For anyone who's interested, Holochain solves this problem while fulfilling the decentralization promises of Blockchain.