• emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    THEY'RE FUCKING BURNING THE PLANET TO DEATH FOR THIS SHIT

      • SoyViking [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        They could just keep the numbers on a central server like they do today but if they do so, how will I be absolutely sure that nobody has been tampering with my imaginary internet points?

        • mr_world [they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          We could also just say stuff to each other without votes. We used to do that online. Just share an opinion and have a conversation or let it reverberate into the void without a response. Now everything needs a vote and some kind of emoji response. I swear it's a conspiracy to launder inorganic content. If it's just people talking in a forum, there's no way to slip in advertisement without it being pretty obvious.

          If everything is based on upvotes, you can slip in adverts and fudge the votes to make it look like people pushed it to the top. A blockchain doesn't fix this. It just makes it even more obfuscated. If everyone trusts the blockchain and the votes are manipulated, then they'll never question it. They'll accept it as true because the precious blockchain of objectivity said so. Now you can't attack the message without having a debate about the legitimacy of the blockchain, which will of course appear legitimate from the outside. The conversation goes from "why is this propaganda being pushed on social media" to "people want it because the blockchain says so, trust the science/math"

          • Bernies3trlnKielbasa [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            We could also just say stuff to each other without votes. We used to do that online. Just share an opinion and have a conversation or let it reverberate into the void without a response.

            :this:

            • Speaker [e/em/eir]
              ·
              3 years ago

              Back in my day we had to type out "QFT", now these kids are obsessed with "NFT". :grillman:

            • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              I think post votes result in a better sort than bumping posts every comment, but I definitely see how it seems silly having votes on each individual comment in a thread. It really gamifies basic conversations, which is one of the worst trends of modern social media in general. It's de-emphasized in the culture of this website, but it certainly isn't absent.

          • CoconutOctopus [it/its]
            ·
            3 years ago

            We could also just say stuff to each other without votes. We used to do that online. Just share an opinion and have a conversation or let it reverberate into the void without a response. Now everything needs a vote and some kind of emoji response.

            Indeed. Go back a little bit farther, and every post was text, and generally posts only lived for two weeks on average, unless you saved them to your hard drive.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      Hardly. The cost of creating a Shiba Inu coin is infinitesimal by design. That's how you can produce trillions of them in a matter of days, while Bitcoin won't crest five million units for another thirty years.

      Crypto only needs to be fossil fuel consumption heavy if you're running into the soft ceiling on mining. And modern crypto is moving away from mining as a mechanism for engagement, because the whole point of the coin is for one dude to control the outstanding stock.

      • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        The energy/computation requirements in Bitcoin and most of its early clones were chosen as a means of having a modestly inflationary monetary policy determined by the laws of nature as opposed to being under the control of a political institution like a central bank. It ensures the money supply will grow, but there is nobody with the power to turn the money printer on or off. It was either a deep state op, or the prodigal example of Libertarian tech-bro "I can fix socio-political problems with an app" hubris.

        The result has been a return to the gold standard days, where instead of a central bank controlling money supply, a cartel of massive private banks sit on mountains of bullion and can manipulate the market however they desire. And these banks are surrounded by the same exact kind of predatory creditors and exchanges and speculators along with no avenue for legal recourse.

        Any workable cryptocurrency is going to return to the central banking model. There will be a political institution vested with the power to resolve disputes and mint currency. The money supply will be controlled as a matter of policy rather than a contest to see who can waste the most energy and fry the most silicon solving useless problems of increasing complexity. The Silicon Valley feifs would very much like to assume the role of being that political institution. By the time they do, the Libertarians will probably completely have forgotten why they were interested in Bitcoin in the first place. Elon Musk will roll out his own blockchain, appointing himself as central banker and they will buy that shit like piggies. States will eventually adopt this model as well, but at least that would make sense considering they are at least nominally democratic institutions which need to answer to their constituents.

        • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          I agree.

          However, I think the issue being raised wrt Crypto is about the ecological cost of maintaining the original system. We're not really touching on the bonanza of bullshit that's appeared in the last few years, because the new coins don't require a zillion graphics cards running 24/7 on high burn in order to mint.

          The original pitch for a cryptocurrency never factored in people building massive warehouses full of hardware to brute-force new money. Whether it was a CIA Op or a Libertarian wet-dream fantasy (or both? no shortage of red-pilled capitalist ideologues in Langley), the original idea for Crypto being a permanently deflationary currency just hasn't borne out.

          Whatever Reddit business geniuses think they're doing with the site as they move forward, it has nothing to do with the original conceit of these things as financial instruments.

          • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            However, I think the issue being raised wrt Crypto is about the ecological cost of maintaining the original system.

            Oh yeah. That shit absolutely needs to be liquidated. If it is not liquidated, we are basically accepting the transition from a financial system dominated by 18th century slavers to a financial system dominated by 1990s IRC sex pests. An economy dominated by the chronic masturbating gamer failsons of the elite. Whatever wealth they claim to hold in their electronic Chuck E Cheez tokens is illegitimate and immaterial. (These clowns whine about fiat currency and their solution is a short string of numbers which decrypts a digital "wallet." It's all fucking fake whether you can touch it and it has a slaveowner's face printed on it or not.)

            Whatever Reddit business geniuses think they’re doing with the site as they move forward, it has nothing to do with the original conceit of these things as financial instruments.

            I agree, but if the Reddit dweebs have any brains, individual votes would be the unit of value, and everything from awards to advertisements would be valued in that currency. You can design the algorithm to work like that, and you can enforce against abuse just enough to make it take off regardless of how socially dysfunctional it is. No matter what, it will be an abomination though.