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shawnz
searching PlanetScale…
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781.
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shawnz
5y ago
Do you mean absolutely, or per unit of utility that the users get from it? The casinos in Las Vegas do consume more than several countries, but also they consume less in an absolute sense than Bitcoin does. However I think we can agree the
782.
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shawnz
5y ago
So with point 1, you are saying that you do support mandated government backdoors? Or are you just acknowledging that they effectively exist already? Because that is not relevant: Bitcoin exists already, too, it has no "backdoor",
783.
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shawnz
5y ago
And doesn't the same justification apply for cryptocurrencies?
784.
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shawnz
5y ago
I'll restate my argument in simpler words too: What are the good uses of strong encryption that aren't solved by government controlled encryption?
785.
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shawnz
5y ago
So, what amount of consumption for new technologies is justified then? Where is the point where a new technology becomes irresponsible?
786.
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shawnz
5y ago
Criminals also benefit from plain old encryption of messages too. Intelligence agencies will say criminals use encryption to organize terrorism, exchange abusive materials, etc. They will say that regular law-abiding citizens don't nee
787.
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shawnz
5y ago
Increasing the energy usage of our species is not "irresponsible" or "malicious". Every technological improvement increases the energy usage of our species. I think that is the point they are making, that it is wrong to
788.
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shawnz
5y ago
Casinos in Las Vegas consume quite a lot of energy
789.
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shawnz
5y ago
A major justification for removing the previous content blocking API was that it could be used to do things like inject JS. So clearly the intention is to have content blocking extensions not do that at all. Although in this specific case,
790.
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shawnz
5y ago
GHB is kind of similar to alcohol, but I'm not sure that the long term effects on the brain are any better.
791.
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shawnz
5y ago
This is basically the exact fear which was being expressed by users when Google announced that they would require Chrome extensions to only use declarative content blocking starting with Manifest v3 (which anecdotally convinced me to switch
792.
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shawnz
5y ago
It's not becoming more efficient if you are just allowing blocks to be filled with frivolous data that wouldn't have otherwise ever been put on the blockchain. It's easy to increase the block size, but it's very unlikely
793.
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shawnz
5y ago
Assuming you are talking about PoS systems, I think they are very promising but it's still not obvious that they can achieve the same risk profile as PoW systems. I think they are worthy of further research and I am excited to see how
794.
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shawnz
5y ago
Only if you just consider how hard it is to ban, not how hard it is to replace while achieving the same utility.
795.
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shawnz
5y ago
It's not a counter-solution, it is a suggestion that the problem isn't really a problem. PoW power usage is high in an absolute sense but lower than many other things which people would consider an obvious waste. So why does PoW p
796.
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shawnz
5y ago
In PoS, you are still permanently burning the time value of the money you have staked. That's unrecoverable just like the electricity spent in PoW is unrecoverable.
797.
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shawnz
5y ago
This is the point of slashing, to prevent the same coins from being staked on multiple chains at the same time. To stake you need to issue proofs of the stake which can be used to slash you on other chains.
798.
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shawnz
5y ago
I'm not trying to say it's a simple problem, but I think "it's a glorified Git" is a mischaracterization
799.
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shawnz
5y ago
Considering the proliferation of music remixing social media services (i.e. Tiktok) and the cheap price of storage, maybe even casual users can benefit from lossless these days.
800.
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shawnz
5y ago
I'm not sure what you mean. Isn't the typical fork selection method for proof-of-stake to choose the chain with the most validators?
801.
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shawnz
5y ago
In PoW coins you permanently lose the "stake". So that just means that to achieve the same level of security in a PoS coin, you have to stake a lot more (since you are only losing the time value of the stake).
802.
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shawnz
5y ago
So is your argument that the profit from mining PoW currencies is actually sub-linear with the initial investment because it's more expensive per unit to get larger quantities of hardware and electricity, and so that counteracts the ga
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shawnz
5y ago
By making L1 transactions cheap, it's basically like giving away cheap, permanent, verifiable storage to anyone which is constantly replicated across the globe. Even if second layer solutions become highly centralized, the risk is sign
804.
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shawnz
5y ago
> And yet, anyone who buys these proof-of-stake coins now, years after they were launched, suffers from having a cost basis orders of magnitude higher than that of the early investors. Yeah, they’re all superficially earning “the same st
805.
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shawnz
5y ago
This is often claimed to be an advantage of PoS: you can't get an extra increase in rate of profits by being richer (beyond the linear increase you'd expect). With PoW on the other hand, the richest have the best access to the mos
806.
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shawnz
5y ago
Transactions aren't the only thing which makes cryptocurrencies useful, and even then, cryptocurrency transactions aren't directly comparable to each other or to transactions in traditional financial systems since they can have a
807.
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shawnz
5y ago
It replaced what they were using previously, which was bash. I am not saying that it is a superset of bash's functionality or that it should be expected to support bash features. EDIT: I see what you are saying now. Bash is still insta
808.
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shawnz
5y ago
Unfortunately Ubuntu's new bash replacement "dash" doesn't support "-o pipefail" and will error if it's present
809.
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shawnz
5y ago
It gives other companies with more responsible practices an opportunity to get a competitive advantage from their failure. Without widespread ransomware scammers, the risk of getting compromised is just theoretical, not tangible. Companies
810.
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shawnz
5y ago
Yes, there is a limit to the security that a cryptocurrency can provide (like with anything else). The level of security provided is based on the market price: The higher the price, the higher the rewards, which increases the profitability
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