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sigh
Once again:
Blockchain is not synonymous with cryptomining
Blockchain does not require proof of work
Cryptocurrency and NFT grifting does not devalue blockchain as an immutable distributed ledger
I swear to god people just copy paste whatever makes them feel good without any effort at understanding
True... But Satoshi did invent Bitcoin, which is proof of work, and is everything in OP
Immutable so long as no one party or group owns more than half of the coins on a given blockchain... then the ledger is whatever they say it is and it propagates down because they can manufacture their own "consensus".
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp
and most use cases around things like "smart contracts" end up still requiring a trusted third party at some point
https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties/
I swear to god people just copy paste whatever makes them feel good without any effort at understanding
Why do you think LLMs are so popular?
This is a good comment that makes all good points. But I just wanna say let's stop saying "blockchain" singular and with no preceding article like we're tech CEOs and it's some immutable god. They're blockchains, plural, like any other data structure there can be more than one and there are. eg The blockchain of ethereum is distinct from the blockchain for bitcoin but they are both blockchains.
Yeah but without anonymous payments (xmr) there's no good way to easily pay for diy estrogen or hosting for piracy services, or to anonymously pay my mullvad account.
Granted if society wherent setup as a giant fucking fascist capitalistic panopticon we wouldn't really need any of that.
Any who, I mostly agree with the sentiment though. "Career" investors and venture capitalists belong against a fucking wall IMO.
How do you anonymously pay for things when the ledger is public?
The ledger being public doesn't necessarily mean anyone knows who "13LPtD4GG1XX7fgrze6xMR5V284rRQg9jv" is. But yeah, you can of course track the movement of funds, and make educated guesses on which addresses belong to who.
Which is pseudonymous, and not anonymous. Unless we are talking about monero of course.
Okay, that's probably a fair distinction. Don't know enough about anonymous vs pseudonymous to disagree.
Additionally, you can use a coin tumbler (I think that’s the term) where a bunch of strangers pool their coins for various transactions into one wallet that then distributes the coins to their end destinations, adding a layer of obscurity for which starting wallets are associated with which ending wallets.
xmr is a cryptocurrency which aims to make reading transactions from the chain impossible. Iirc the main mechanism of this is that they bundle a lot of transactions together and send out coins from that pool only once it is large enough, without preserving each specific coin. This repeats for a few proxies. You could trace a coin from origin to endpoint, but this would be pretty much useless as you cannot know whether the endpoint was the intended one or not.
XMR uses some really cool cryptography actually. Zero-knowledge proofs and shit.
That's literally what caused bitcoin mixer services to exist where you throw some amount of BTC in an account with them, tell them how much you want paid to whom, and then it takes all the transactions for a certain (usually random) time period and plays a shell game with them, passing funds from account to account in various amounts and resulting ultimately in the right amount going from you to the target via multiple intermediaries. Slow because it involves a lot of transactions, but the idea was to make it hard to trace exactly who was paying who, beyond being able to know that one or more of the user accounts were paying some amount to one or more of the destination accounts.
Over the last 5 years or so, law enforcement has been shutting down several such organizations for money laundering, being illegal money transmitting businesses or things along those lines as appropriate to the jurisdiction.
Even without them, with good opsec it can be hard to tie a BTC wallet address to a human person, which is the point of anonymous payment.
You do know that you can pay for mullvad in cash?
You can send cash in an envelope to them with your mullvad ID and they will credit your account.
Let's be realistic, that isn't an equivalent alternative
Sending mail is pseudo-anonymous at best. It's exceptionally slow. Most importantly, it's insecure to the point where most postal services explicitly recommend against mailing cash
Can I go to their HQ, slip them a tenner with my ID on a piece of paper under the door?
Yes
The most inefficient system ever invented by humankind so far
And yet, looking at this phenomenal waste of resources, tech bros took a good hard look at it and said 'Hold my beer' - and made LLMs.
Llms are made by genuinely smart mathematicians and computer scientists. Techbros are just the ones hyping them .
You know, that's a good point. LLMs themselves aren't horrible abominations - it's capitalism that, as usual, ruined a good thing.
If only they knew that LLMs would soon take over as the new energy hog in the spotlight
Dude was just bored and wanted to implement his idea from his University paper. He was long gone before Bitcoin became a trading commodity instead of a novel currency.
Of which Bitcoin did it to itself which is why we got hard forks like Bitcoin cash that barely reached $2k when bitcoin was at $70k.
Not to mention that plenty of superior cryptos came out to replace bitcoin like xrp, monero, etc.
These posts are often very dumb and never understand that most of these tech innovations are novel ideas from University research that happend to become the latest trend.
Even LLMs and AI have excellent use cases, yet you'll see idiots like this crap on it 24/7 like its the antichrist.
It's like blaming Einstein for the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.
I have always been fascinated honestly by how reductive public discourse often becomes the larger its activity is. And it honestly is rather simple to explain: If an opinion becomes popular, it has no link with its veracity or validity, all it has to do with is how it appeals to common sense and how easy it is to swallow because for it to be popular, it needs to be approachable by all types of humans no matter their social, economical and personal backgrounds.
It is just like how academic or legal documents often seem classist by the language they use to approach real and proven phenomenons, but the reason their vocabulary is not accessible is because it needs to be nuanced to allow proper human abstraction the reality around us. Whereas the popular vocabulary is common since it's very nature is to allow exchange with all people.
And banks could continue having a monopoly on controlling money and transactions.
Does anyone know I'd proof of stake ended up being better than proof of work? I dont follow crypto but kept hearing that was supposed to improve things
Crypto is a big deal because it enables grifting and crime, but with how shit payment processors are and their tendency to use their position for censorship, crypto actually would be a potential way of solving that problem IF it werent ludicrously volatile and wasteful. But I have no idea if those problems could really ever be solved, or any progress has been made on those fronts
Proof of Stake and Proof of Work are two different ways of electing who should append the blockchain with new transactions.
Proof of Work: the one who can waste most energy fastest is most likely to be elected.
Proof of Stake: the one with most money is most likely to be elected.
It’s a bit oversimplified, but that’s the general idea.
Yes, Ethereum has been using PoS successfully for over three years and they're not the only major blockchain to do so. PoS works great these days, still using PoW in 2026 is a deliberate choice.
IMO xmr kinda saved proof of work by optimising their algo for consumer grade CPUs.
CPU mining is much less econimcal than GPU because you can't fit as many CPUs on a single system. Plus server grade CPUs with lots of smol cores instead of a few big ones hurts it too.
Makes it hard for anyone other than nerds with am extra PC to make money mining, and most of those guys won't be purposely picking a geographic location with the cheapest/most environmentally harmful electricity source. (More nerds live off of nuclear/solar than datacenters do)
I really really really doubt those claims. I would need sources to believe that and also the blockchain itself is not a bad idea. Theres also like a thousand different implementations of it. Its like saying every form of currencies are bad.
What, why would you doubt such obvious claims such as "the blockchain [...] weights 60 000 tons"
I seriously would like to know WTF the poster meant by that
I thought the context was obvious - in server hardware and infrastructure required to house it.
Verifying this number thought seems essentially impossible.
GNU Taler is a far better decentralized payment system (although it's still in beta)
payer is anonymous, but reciever is known, so it's unsuitable for ransomware; this design is so that it is taxable and thus more suitable for everyday usage by the masses
