BEWARE of fake EEVblog NFT's

[NiHaoMike]

Hypothetical future: Say you support a creator on Patreon or some other platform, you get an NFT "badge" that shows you financially supported that creator.

That would be a big step closer towards my idea of "supporting the supporters". For example, in a P2P system, supporters of certain content creators get priority downloads of certain content, thus adding to the value of supporting those creators. Then it's a matter of creating a scheme for the client to "prove" they supported, likely pretty easy using public key encryption.

Well, this is just the general confusion about what NFTs are.
You see, most NFTs sold today is not the underlying picture. It is also not the artwork, or even the ownership of the artwork.
Most NFTs that are sold today is just a link to some picture, that is hosted on some server. The image is not even stored on the blockchain. And it happens often times, that the picture gets changed, after selling the NFT (for example to a poop emoji).
There are a few NFTs that are legit stored on a blockchain, but those are simplistic, often times then need some third party tool to actually generate the picture for it. And IMHO the artistic value of these generated "yellow monkey holding a blue banana with a hat" NFTs is zero.

Sounds like something that can be solved by having the NFTs use links to a P2P system like Bittorrent or IPFS.

There are two seperate things here:
1) energy wasted due to mining cryptocurrencies which is just insane (*).

2) energy wasted due to inefficient distributed ledgers (block chain). That is a problem that needs to be solved because distributed ledger is a useful technology. Actually, a specification for bidirectional EV - grid charging (https://www.smart-energy.com/industry-sectors/new-technology/first-blockchain-based-ev-grid-integration-standard-released/) is using distributed ledger technology to make the system more robust and increase availability.

What's energy inefficient about blockchains other than that many of them use a lot of energy to mine? There have been quite a few attempts to make cryptocurrencies that use much less energy for mining, we just need at least one to become successful in the long run.

[nctnico]

There are two seperate things here:
1) energy wasted due to mining cryptocurrencies which is just insane (*).

2) energy wasted due to inefficient distributed ledgers (block chain). That is a problem that needs to be solved because distributed ledger is a useful technology. Actually, a specification for bidirectional EV - grid charging (https://www.smart-energy.com/industry-sectors/new-technology/first-blockchain-based-ev-grid-integration-standard-released/) is using distributed ledger technology to make the system more robust and increase availability.

What's energy inefficient about blockchains other than that many of them use a lot of energy to mine? There have been quite a few attempts to make cryptocurrencies that use much less energy for mining, we just need at least one to become successful in the long run.

The first step you need to make is to differentiate between the distributed ledger and (mining) cryptocurrency. Those are 2 seperate things!
Secondly, a distributed ledger which duplicates data across all nodes in a network uses way too much resources in the form of storage space, network traffic and computational power. I don't have the answer to solve that; it is just an observation that it is a big problem. From what I understand 1 Bitcoin transaction wastes several kWh of energy.

[NiHaoMike]

Secondly, a distributed ledger which duplicates data across all nodes in a network uses way too much resources in the form of storage space, network traffic and computational power. I don't have the answer to solve that; it is just an observation that it is a big problem. From what I understand 1 Bitcoin transaction wastes several kWh of energy.

Almost all of the energy used is for mining. Solve that and the efficiency goes way up.

Storage space is becoming less of a problem as storage becomes cheaper, plus there are mechanisms to "archive" old blocks and keep storage requirements very modest. It could even be possible to keep copies of some old blocks based on how many copies of such blocks currently exist on the network, although I'm not sure if any blockchains currently do that. (Or perhaps it can be designed so that miners have to keep a full copy of the blockchain but mere users only need to retain the most recent 50GB or so?)

Network traffic and computational power for things other than mining is not a problem, a simple Raspberry Pi can easily run a Bitcoin "full node".

[nctnico]

Secondly, a distributed ledger which duplicates data across all nodes in a network uses way too much resources in the form of storage space, network traffic and computational power. I don't have the answer to solve that; it is just an observation that it is a big problem. From what I understand 1 Bitcoin transaction wastes several kWh of energy.

Almost all of the energy used is for mining. Solve that and the efficiency goes way up.

Storage space is becoming less of a problem as storage becomes cheaper, plus there are mechanisms to "archive" old blocks and keep storage requirements very modest. It could even be possible to keep copies of some old blocks based on how many copies of such blocks currently exist on the network, although I'm not sure if any blockchains currently do that. (Or perhaps it can be designed so that miners have to keep a full copy of the blockchain but mere users only need to retain the most recent 50GB or so?)

Network traffic and computational power for things other than mining is not a problem, a simple Raspberry Pi can easily run a Bitcoin "full node".

Yes, but a billion Bitcoin nodes which store the same data adds up to a huge amount of wasted energy. It doesn't matter if there is something far worse in the world.

At some point a distributed ledger needs to have 'supernodes' that have all the data and sub-nodes that store less data and fetch that from the super nodes. Probably peer-to-peer networking technology helps. But again, this is just me thinking out loud.

[NiHaoMike]

At some point a distributed ledger needs to have 'supernodes' that have all the data and sub-nodes that store less data and fetch that from the super nodes. Probably peer-to-peer networking technology helps. But again, this is just me thinking out loud.

That's basically what I proposed? Some nodes store everything, others only store the "hot" part of the blockchain that's in active use. Requiring the miners to have a complete copy would help ensure that the whole blockchain always remains available.

The interesting part is that many of the "energy efficient" altcoins are not at all bandwidth efficient, in particular earnhoney is pretty bandwidth intensive. It's far more common to have flat rate bandwidth at home than it is to have flat rate electricity at home, so it works out nicely. (Would be interesting to work out the environmental impact of the bandwidth use but it's almost certainly orders of magnitude lower than using a lot of energy instead.) IT managers trying to make mining clusters from the office computers they manage, however, would end up with a large degradation in network performance, and then there's the residential IP whitelist they somehow have to get past first.

Point is, it takes far less bandwidth to run a Bitcoin full node than it does to mine some energy efficient altcoins like earnhoney or Swagbucks. (Or at least that was the case - the current fork of Swagbucks is a lot more bandwidth efficient, but sadly increase in difficulty has made it far less energy efficient.)

[daqq]

Hopefully all that crypto cancer goes bust, like dotcom back then.
My compassion will be similar as with those banksters back in '07-09...

I'm hoping that energy efficient cryptocurrencies become the norm. That can be cryptocurrencies that use little energy to mine or cryptocurrencies where the "mining" does useful work (or both). Main problem is that thus far, none of them have been truly popular or have remained efficient in the long term.

(based on https://xkcd.com/927/ )

[EEVblog]

2) energy wasted due to inefficient distributed ledgers (block chain). That is a problem that needs to be solved because distributed ledger is a useful technology. Actually, a specification for bidirectional EV - grid charging (https://www.smart-energy.com/industry-sectors/new-technology/first-blockchain-based-ev-grid-integration-standard-released/) is using distributed ledger technology to make the system more robust and increase availability.

Why didn't they just use Power Ledger? 

[tom66]

At some point a distributed ledger needs to have 'supernodes' that have all the data and sub-nodes that store less data and fetch that from the super nodes. Probably peer-to-peer networking technology helps. But again, this is just me thinking out loud.

That's basically what I proposed? Some nodes store everything, others only store the "hot" part of the blockchain that's in active use. Requiring the miners to have a complete copy would help ensure that the whole blockchain always remains available.

If some nodes hold everything, and the number of those nodes is small, it's theoretically possible to obtain access to all of those nodes and perform a hostile takeover of the network.  With access to the ledger you can corrupt transaction history, removing spending completely or permitting double spending, and the ledger is the only complete record, so unless all of the sub-nodes get together, they won't discover your con (and you might be long gone by that time.)

The 'genius' with bitcoin was giving nodes a reason to be a 'super-node', the mining reward.  Of course it's less genius now it consumes GWh of energy every year, but the original idea was pretty clever.

Solving that problem is non-trivial if you remove the reward mechanism.  I think Ethereum will be doing it by having 'consensus' through proof-of-stake and paying fees to those who maintain the block-chain;  not all that familiar with this though, so could be wrong.  It may be a certain size now where validating the transaction list itself is enough work to be computationally challenging.

[NiHaoMike]

If some nodes hold everything, and the number of those nodes is small, it's theoretically possible to obtain access to all of those nodes and perform a hostile takeover of the network.  With access to the ledger you can corrupt transaction history, removing spending completely or permitting double spending, and the ledger is the only complete record, so unless all of the sub-nodes get together, they won't discover your con (and you might be long gone by that time.)

It would take an impractical amount of work to generate an alternative history up to the first "hot block" since it would basically amount to a complete hash collision on the block right before, in contrast to mining only being a partial hash collision. To make that even less plausible, there could be "super blocks" that all nodes store which then would mean having to create an alternative history that intersects all those points.

Solving that problem is non-trivial if you remove the reward mechanism.  I think Ethereum will be doing it by having 'consensus' through proof-of-stake and paying fees to those who maintain the block-chain;  not all that familiar with this though, so could be wrong.  It may be a certain size now where validating the transaction list itself is enough work to be computationally challenging.

Curecoin and Foldingcoin use medical research as the "work" in "proof of work". Thus while that doesn't solve the energy use problem directly, it does mean that it does useful work outside of mining.

[tszaboo]

At some point a distributed ledger needs to have 'supernodes' that have all the data and sub-nodes that store less data and fetch that from the super nodes. Probably peer-to-peer networking technology helps. But again, this is just me thinking out loud.

That's basically what I proposed? Some nodes store everything, others only store the "hot" part of the blockchain that's in active use. Requiring the miners to have a complete copy would help ensure that the whole blockchain always remains available.

If some nodes hold everything, and the number of those nodes is small, it's theoretically possible to obtain access to all of those nodes and perform a hostile takeover of the network.  With access to the ledger you can corrupt transaction history, removing spending completely or permitting double spending, and the ledger is the only complete record, so unless all of the sub-nodes get together, they won't discover your con (and you might be long gone by that time.)

The 'genius' with bitcoin was giving nodes a reason to be a 'super-node', the mining reward.  Of course it's less genius now it consumes GWh of energy every year, but the original idea was pretty clever.

Solving that problem is non-trivial if you remove the reward mechanism.  I think Ethereum will be doing it by having 'consensus' through proof-of-stake and paying fees to those who maintain the block-chain;  not all that familiar with this though, so could be wrong.  It may be a certain size now where validating the transaction list itself is enough work to be computationally challenging.

Ethereum PoS is years out by their own estimation. Too little, too late.
There are already chains have effective PoS implementation. And it works, today. There are networks that run at 0.001% of BTC's consumption, with tokens, NFT, compatible with the Ethereum virtual machine, and ecosystem, transfers take 2 seconds, and cost less than 1 cent. And you cannot "mine it" so it is not going to be an ecological disaster like ETH and BTC.

[magic]

Curecoin and Foldingcoin use medical research as the "work" in "proof of work". Thus while that doesn't solve the energy use problem directly, it does mean that it does useful work outside of mining.

It's hard to have a cryptocurrency backed by proof of useful work. The work needs to satisfy the condition that it is hard to produce, but very cheap to verify that it has been produced correctly. Then you can have a distributed system that keeps track of transactions, rewards its participants and remains difficult to cheat.

Case in point,

At the end of each month, the FoldingCoin organization downloads the stats of each folder and distributes FLDC proportionate to the amount of completed work.

FLDC is built on the Counterparty protocol which allows for tokens to be built within the Bitcoin blockchain. So every FLDC transaction is actually a Bitcoin transaction as well.

[madires]

Blockchain based crypto money is nothing but an overly complicated and wasteful way of simple accounting. And it comes with a massive design flaw preventing it to scale up. With each new transaction (or bunch of transactions) the blockchain's size increases and that goes on forever. In classic accounting accounts' totals are carried over to the next fiscal year's ledger. So each year you start with an empty ledger and note the totals of the last year for each account as first entry.

[SiliconWizard]

Blockchain based crypto money is nothing but an overly complicated and wasteful way of simple accounting.

Not, it's not. It's a way of holding a proof of authenticity with very high probability, in a completely decentralized manner. "Simple accounting" doesn't give you that.

Beyond the alleged cost - to make a fair comparison, we would need to estimate the cost of "maintaining" regular currencies, which is much greater than many think, and is clearly not just simply about "storing data" - it's very much a political question rather than a technical one, as I already said before, IMHO.

So the funny part of it is, I'd be willing to bet that many people currently fiercely against cryptocurrencies will embrace them as the next great progress, the day their governments will switch to some kind of cryptocurrency - which is something that is already being studied.

[magic]

You gotta be kidding me.

There are two reasons why governments would like to adopt crytpo:
- the total lack of privacy - all transactions are a matter of public record, it just takes linking a wallet to a person and you're in
- no need to collect taxes to run the system - peers pay for their electricity, problem solved

That's about all I can see.

[SiliconWizard]

You gotta be kidding me.

There are two reasons why governments would like to adopt crytpo:
- the total lack of privacy - all transactions are a matter of public record, it just takes linking a wallet to a person and you're in
- no need to collect taxes to run the system - peers pay for their electricity, problem solved

That's about all I can see.

Yes, and? How is that contradicting what I said above?
Of course, if/when governments switch to a "cryptocurrency", it will likely be a system close to what nctnico seems to be advocating - "supernodes", which governments and central banks will have complete control over. Which is kind of the opposite of the current model, which is entirely decentralized.

Maybe your "You gotta be kidding me" was to answer my "many people currently fiercely against cryptocurrencies will embrace them as the next great progress, the day their governments..." point?
You may neither like cyrptocurrencies as they are now, nor a possible future use by governments, but that's another story entirely. Judging from yout typical opinions here, you do not seem to have the opinion of the "majority", which I was targeting here. I am pretty convinced what I said is what is going to happen, at least for a majority of people. =)

[magic]

Maybe your "You gotta be kidding me" was to answer my "many people currently fiercely against cryptocurrencies will embrace them as the next great progress, the day their governments..." point?

Yes.

Judging from yout typical opinions here, you do not seem to have the opinion of the "majority", which I was targeting here.

Damn, this is a strong argument.
I keep forgetting not to have faith in humanity, old habits die hard

[eti]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wake up sillies.

[magic]

OMG Bitcoin down 9%

It went down 50% in a few weeks several times but it always recovers over the next few months.

Compared to contemporary legacy currencies even BTC has value
(Particularly now under the Global Reset it really went nuts for mysterious reasons.)

[Nominal Animal]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wake up sillies.

I can't tell if this is serious or hilariously perceptive, because of how we rely on fiat money and pay for the privilege to the central banks.

I stand by my previous assessment of humanity.

[tszaboo]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wake up sillies.

OMG, is it down with like 9% oh no.
That never happened before.

Oh, wait it did.

[madires]

Blockchain based crypto money is nothing but an overly complicated and wasteful way of simple accounting.

Not, it's not. It's a way of holding a proof of authenticity with very high probability, in a completely decentralized manner. "Simple accounting" doesn't give you that.

Do we need everyone to keep a huge and ever-increasing copy of a public ledger? Again, it doesn't scale!

[nctnico]

You gotta be kidding me.

There are two reasons why governments would like to adopt crytpo:
- the total lack of privacy - all transactions are a matter of public record, it just takes linking a wallet to a person and you're in
- no need to collect taxes to run the system - peers pay for their electricity, problem solved

That's about all I can see.

Yes, and? How is that contradicting what I said above?
Of course, if/when governments switch to a "cryptocurrency", it will likely be a system close to what nctnico seems to be advocating - "supernodes", which governments and central banks will have complete control over. Which is kind of the opposite of the current model, which is entirely decentralized.

Maybe your "You gotta be kidding me" was to answer my "many people currently fiercely against cryptocurrencies will embrace them as the next great progress, the day their governments..." point?

I still want to insist in seperating between cryptocurrencies (the ones that needs to be mined by solving hashes and are useless for real world usage) and distributed ledger (the underlying database to store transactions). IMHO it is absolutely essential to understand the difference. Cryptocurrency are the cars and the distributed ledger is the road; to suggest an analogy.

If I take the NL for example: there is a separate company which takes care of all the financial transactions in the country. The advantage is that banks don't have to have their own payment systems and deal with shops that take payments and so on. So in a way it is efficient by having everything centralised. But it is also a weak point. Every now and then it does happen that there are outages which cause the payment processing in large parts of the country to stop (well, the NL is very small so an outage can cover a significant part of the country quickly).

A step further could be that the banks take part of the role back by using a distributed ledger which is shared among the banks. Another step in achieving decentralisation could be that big chain stores can have their own distributed ledger node.  But in the end we'd still be paying in Euros governed by the European Central bank. Definitely not cryptocurrency!

[madires]

Some basics on money and banking: The Mystery of Banking by Murray N. Rothbard (https://mises.org/library/mystery-banking)

[nctnico]

Murray N. Rothbard (https://mises.org/library/mystery-banking)

OMG  Another moron that wants to go back to the gold standard. Rule of thumb: anyone who is suggesting to go back to the gold standard has no idea about modern economics are supposed to work. In the end gold is just a substitute as well and solves none of the underlying issues.

[Nominal Animal]

OMG  Another moron that wants to go back to the gold standard.

OMG Another moron who does not understand that the way modern economics is taught in academia and described in media is not the actual way modern economies work.

Let me guess, you also believe 'fractional banking' applies to international central banks?  Heh.