Comment on Jack Dorsey claims Bluesky is 'repeating all the mistakes' he made at Twitter
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 months agoYou don’t need to go crypto to get there though, IPFS and similar exist and work. IPFS itself is kinda slow, but Iroh is aiming to be a more efficient alternative that solves similar problems. There are also protocols based on BitTorrent.
The way these work is basically:
- users connect to relay nodes
- relay nodes connect users directly
- users continue communicating directly w/o any servers
Then you build stuff on top to keep everything in sync. No servers, aside from the initial connection, which means minimal risk of anything ever going down. If relays go down, anyone can set up another and people reconnect.
The problem is that step 3 is quite complicated, and there are a ton of technical complexities to synchronizing information at scale w/o a central authority. Mastodon/Lemmy/ActivityPub gets around this by having each node (instance) be a complete copy of everything that node cares about. You get a ton of duplication, and eventually that means costs pile up. With a proper decentralized system, there doesn’t need to be nearly as much duplication since you can always hop through some peers to find what you need.
RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
You never do. Its only use case is a payment system for online crime. And even for that many criminals prefer gift cards because it’s such a hassle to explain crypto-tokens to your victims.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
It’s useful for anything online where cash would be useful. So paying for services, money transfers between acquaintances, donations to charity, etc. It turns out cash is useful for crime, and privacy-focused cryptocurrencies work like cash, hence are useful for crime.
Don’t buy it as an “investment” or sign up for services to earn it, but it is useful for non-criminal things.
RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
No, it’s not useful as a cash substitute because of its hilarious inefficiency.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
That’s not necessarily a given. Ethereum, for example, transitioned to proof of stake instead of mining and seems to have reduced electricity use by 99.5%. I’m not exactly sure where that number comes from, nor do I know a good way to compare crypto to other systems (e.g. do we count all the energy used by banks?).
But what I do know is that Bitcoin kinda sucks from an energy perspective, partially because they limit the number of blocks (e.g. buckets of transactions) per day, so mining is more valuable than on a currency with no such caps (e.g. more demand to mine each block = more miners = less efficiency per mined block).
What seems to be true is that cryptocurrencies have a large upfront energy cost due to speculation, and that plateaus as it hits a certain carrying capacity. So crypto scales decently well, and if you do proof of stake instead of proof of work, it seems to scale even better.
But since it’s so hard to calculate, there’s a lot of bad information, which leads to unnecessary and unfair criticism from people who don’t see value in cryptocurrencies. If you ask a crypto bro, they’ll point to the massive amount of power used by financial institutions, and if you ask someone who’s against cryptocurrencies, they’ll compare POS and minor processing use by credit card companies to an entire Bitcoin block (which has lots of transactions). I’d really like to see an updated, neutral look into it, because all the information I’m able to find has huge holes in methodology.