I don’t really see how these sort of shenanigans can be avoided.
I think they are unavoidable with the built in volatility of the halving cycle. We'll see what happens in the coming cycles assuming the extremes of the highs and lows continue to reduce each time.
Yes they do. And they don’t work because the vast majority don’t use them.
Uh huh and crypto solves this how exactly?
Back to the blockchain side of things and how apparently it’s no different to google
I was making fun of your business model which was basically "ad funded". Not exactly a new model.
It’s a subtle but important difference and once you start looking at the world this way you start to see potential.
Sigh, yes its clearly people not being visionary enough vs not being gullible.
Even the model you just mentioned still needs someone sitting in the middle controlling that. Whether it is the browser company or a third party addon. So, again, how does blockchain help here?
Its design is neat for the specialist usecase but its a liability for most other cases.
We know who owns which car because the government maintains a database.
Not in the UK it doesn't...
Private ad-supported blockchain bike registration is a perfect example of the proposition: it's taking something that isn't actually a major problem and solving it in the most round-the-houses way possible.
The main problem around bike theft is not an unreliable or untrustworthy database that leaves people without proof of ownership. It's that thieves take your physical object in the real world and piss off down the street with it! If you had your ownership recorded in a decentralised ledger in that circumstance, you'd be in exactly the same position. It kind of gives the lie to the profound-sounding "whoever controls the database controls the civilisation" line when your bike is disappearing over the horizon.
wordnumb
Free Member
[posts gif of a bored chimp in a jester costume licking an empty wallet]
I'll swap you 6 tickets to Fyre Festival for it!
Uh huh and crypto solves this how exactly?
By being a database that is not reliant on the liquidity of a single company.
And because giving your credit card details to a company is a massive barrier to adoption. Paying in another way that feels like it's free because you aren't actually exchanging fiat isn't.
But yeah, this idea probably wouldn't work. It was just meant as an example to try to get you to think about what is actually trying to be achieved without always trying to bring it back to the processes that are currently used.
Like Henry Ford said
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
I’ll swap you 6 tickets to Fyre Festival for it!
Thnx m8 but Thols2 seems to have stolen my NFT investment somehow and now even jet-skiing on a beach with supermodels listening to Diplo won't cheer me up.
Perhaps Marx was wrong and capitalism isn't a necessary step toward social-utopia. Or something.
It’s that thieves take your physical object in the real world and piss off down the street with it!
Thieves steal bikes because they are easy to steal and easy to sell. Do you know for a fact that none of the second hand bikes you've bought have been stolen? At any point in the chain of ownership?
I certainly don't. It is unknowable because there is no universal or near universal system of recording ownership of this extremely valuable product.
I have never bought a stolen car though. I'm certain of that.
NFT's can be twinned with real world products. Something few people seem to realise. Once there is an immutable system of ownership selling a stolen product becomes far less profitable.
By being a database that is not reliant on the liquidity of a single company.
But for 90% of applications there are ways of solving those issues without coming up with the massively complex (and hugely energy inefficient) distributed solution. e.g. in your case the government (directly or through its police forces) could decide to introduce a DB, a consortium of bike manufacturers could do it, UK cycling/British Cycling could do it, or they could all get together and do it.
And because giving your credit card details to a company is a massive barrier to adoption. Paying in another way that feels like it’s free because you aren’t actually exchanging fiat isn’t.
They could fund it with a token cost on the original registration (potentially paid by the retailer) or on each change of ownership, or they could show you advertising whenever you went to check/change details (idea opportunity to helmet/light/tyre etc manuf to promote kit to people with new bikes!), or they could probably provide it FOC to cut down on crime / keep market prices up / encourage membership or by providing paid access to anonymised data to bike makers, councils etc to understand the market/need for active travel etc.
But yeah, this idea probably wouldn’t work. It was just meant as an example to try to get you to think about what is actually trying to be achieved without always trying to bring it back to the processes that are currently used.
Of course it would all fail because without any legal obligation to update your details it would be forgotten about.
The idea of having ways to prove the authenticity of something is not new - almost every website in the world uses cryptographic certificates to do this. The idea of doing that with the block chain is that you wouldn't want a single trusted authority to make that decision so the overhead of having many distributed ledgers makes it worthwhile. In reality for 90%+ of proposed use cases trusted authorities would work just fine.
But for 90% of applications there are ways of solving those issues without coming up with the massively complex (and hugely energy inefficient) distributed solution.
The fact you think NFTs are highly complex and energy inefficient tells me... something.
(Before you post a link showing that each NFT uses 142kWhrs of energy to produce make sure you understand the difference between PoS and PoW and are aware of a rather important event regarding Ethereum).
I have never bought a stolen car though. I’m certain of that.
How?
Did you check the VIN number? Do you know how to check it's not been tampered with? Engine block number?
That's a lot to be certain about.
Blockchain is mostly a solution looking for a problem.
(Before you post a link showing that each NFT uses 142kWhrs of energy to produce make sure you understand the difference between PoS and PoW
Ah yes Proof of Stake.
So instead of having overly large and powerful banks instead we go for a system where the power is given to the largish miners instead.
Which really is the problem. To make crypto usable on a wider scale you bin off most of the theoretical advantages of it.
Even a POS Blockchain is complex and inefficient compared to a centralised database though.
Using the bike database example; you could have (say) the police run a database and everyone pays an extra £1 in tax, or you could could have a distributed network with 1000 nodes, data replicated in 1000 places, and a system of tokens that can be sold for real money, and a way of tracking the value of those tokens.
Whatever the other benefits, you can't say it's not complex and inefficient compared to a single database.
I have never bought a stolen car though. I’m certain of that.
So you're saying the DVLA database is good at keeping track of ownership of valuable personal property...?
the massively complex (and hugely energy inefficient) distributed solution.
Hang on a minute. I thought blockchain was just a series of transactions, and bitcoin uses blockchain, and the energy wastage was caused by people trying to find new bitcoins? I didn't think the concept of a blockchain for whatever purpose does not necessarily come with massive energy consumption?
Hang on a minute. I thought blockchain was just a series of transactions, and bitcoin uses blockchain, and the energy wastage was caused by people trying to find new bitcoins? I didn’t think the concept of a blockchain for whatever purpose does not necessarily come with massive energy consumption?
There are two dominant ways to do a blockchain*. Proof Of Work, which means the more computers you have running flat out 24/7, the more likely you are to win the reward. This is what Bitcoin uses.
And Proof Of Stake, where the more money you have, the more likely you are to get the reward. This is what Ethereum recently moved to. It uses far less energy and just cuts to the chase - in both cases, the people with the most money end up with the most rewards (the major Bitcoin mining companies are worth billions and buy tens of millions of dollars worth of computers at a time), it just skips out the planet-burning part.
But it's still obviously far more complicated than a single database somewhere.
* a decentralised, public blockchain, obviously. I could set up the Doris blockchain, that I control and run, and just pay everyone £10 a month to host a node.
This reminded me, I wonder how Bicycle Club NFT is going.
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/biking/bike-club-nft/
Oh.
I’ve genuinely tried to be optimistic about crypto stuff but I’m still not sold. Literally every time I see it challenged thoughtfully the people defending it have reverted to ‘you don’t understand it and I’m not going to explain it, do your own research’ which doesn’t fill me with confidence. I also think that the key difference between the internet and web3 is that the internet did a great job of solving the first problem it was designed for. I don’t think web3 has really decentralised anything, more re-concentrated it in the hands of different, less accountable people.
I don’t think web3 has really decentralised anything, more re-concentrated it in the hands of different, less accountable people.
Indeed. One of the popular arguments with BTC and Proof Of Work is that the more nodes there are, the harder it would be for a single attacker to compromise 51% of the network, and be able to force through whatever changes they wanted (ie 'all of your Bitcoin belong to me').
But in reality, yesterday 56% of all blocks mined were mined by two particular companies. If they wanted to collude for nefarious purposes, the fact that there are millions of nodes in the BTC blockchain wouldn't matter a jot. One of the companies (Foundry) is owned by DCG, run by Barry Silbert, who will probably go to prison for fraud next year. The other company is BitMain, who make all the mining machines. Decentralised, it is not.
The underlying legal proceedings mentioned in the MSNBC article won't result in Silbert being sent to prison- they're not criminal charges.
Really? Must've misunderstood it. I stand corrected!
