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Comment on The new Flappy Bird game has a hidden secret: crypto

The legal validity of things come from people using it and courts enforcing it, someone years ago might have said:

That’s neat. Until a representation of something on a piece of paper has any legal meaning regarding authenticity, ownership, or anything else, and until the overwhelming majority usage of paper isn’t as a scam, paper remains a pathetic and comically stupid class of speculative asset constituting a pyramid scheme that also happens to destroy the environment.

The thing is that even if a technology is used mostly for stupid things that tells you more about humans than about the technology itself. Or do you also think that phone calls are scams because 90% of the phone calls you receive nowadays are scams, even though the technology behind phone calls is the same used for mobile internet.

Also the destroy the environment claim is really bogus, for starter money pollutes more than crypto when you consider all of the chain of what it takes to produce and transport money. But also for example if you live in the US your home probably pollutes more than a mining farm since they’re usually in places where electricity is extremely cheap, mostly in China near a hydroelectric power plant. But also the technology itself doesn’t need to consume that amount of energy, that’s just the current implementation, but there’s a push to move to PoS instead of PoW, which would mean that NFTs (and crypto in general) would not need farms or even a specially powerful computer.

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TrickDacy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Yikes, you’re in a cult. unreachable.

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Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Ok, I was in agreement with you (the concept of NFTs is great, what people do with it is dumb) until the environment part

Crypto, even proof of stake, isn’t energy efficient and never will be, the banking sector uses more energy but it also manages quadrillion in funds and transactions, crypto’s value as a whole is orders of magnitude less than that and there’s more energy spent per transaction than in the traditional financial sector. Crypto replacing banks and cash would be an environmental disaster.

Next, even if mining is done using green energy, it means that this energy isn’t used to reduce emissions in other, actually essential, sectors. There’s an environmental cost to green energy (what do you think was under the dam’s reservoir?) so having to produce more infrastructure just for crypto is wasteful.

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- acosmichippo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  exactly, and also saying our houses use more energy than crypto as a justification is just relative privation. yes our houses use energy because we need to survive. that doesn’t mean we should just give a blank energy check to whatever inefficient new technology comes along.
  
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  - Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    I didn’t even get to that, house energy usage can’t be compared to crypto energy usage, they’re not used for the same thing!
    
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- Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  There are some valid points here, and I agree that the energy could be used elsewhere and that green energy is not entirely green.
  
  I even agree that for most cryptocurrency as they are now the cost per transaction is higher than alternatives. However the technology for cryptocurrency, especially with PoC can be a lot more efficient in scale. To get an idea of it you can look at Visa, which processes 1700 transactions per second, BCH can do 178, so 10% of it, ETH2 is supposed to be able to process at least 20k, so 10x that amount. I imagine either of those coins pollute a comparable amount to visa when you consider everything that visa needs to operate (machines, cards, servers, etc). I feel that people don’t take these sort of stuff into consideration when they talk about the energy consumption of crypto. There is a discussion to be had here, but blankly stating that it’s an environmental disaster is fear mongering.
  
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  - Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Visa can process a maximum of 24k TPS
    
    Crypto energy usage goes up the more it’s being used and the more decentralized it becomes. Centralized services like Visa can increase the network load while barely increasing the energy requirements.
    
    Crypto bros always forget that to replace the banking system, crypto would need to replace the infrastructure as well, but because of decentralization it would be less energy efficient for the same result.
    
    You can just stop, there’s no way to greenwash crypto and decentralization. The amount of transactions happening on all crypto networks at the moment could be handled by one server if it was centralized. There’s benefits to it, stop trying to sell it as being green, it’s not and never will be.
    
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    Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    
    Crypto energy usage goes up the more it’s being used and the more decentralized it becomes.
    
    That’s wrong, crypto energy consumption has to do with how hard is the PoW difficulty, it does not correlate at all with usage or centralization, it’s only related with security, i.e the more energy it consumes the more energy someone would need to use to attack the technology.
    
    But the energy needed to mine 1 transaction or 1000 is the same. There are problems at scale, but power consumption is not one of them.
    
    Centralized services like Visa can increase the network load while barely increasing the energy requirements.
    
    Not really, they need more servers to process more transactions, but cryptocurrency can scale up much more easily because the whole infrastructure from consumer to miner is decentralized.
    
    Crypto bros always forget that to replace the banking system, crypto would need to replace the infrastructure as well, but because of decentralization it would be less energy efficient for the same result.
    
    That’s what most people fail to see, the infrastructure for a scale at the size of visa is already in place for crypto. So there wouldn’t be an increase in power consumption by mass adoption, only by miner adoption, and that’s a difficult thought to grasp, it’s like if everyone could borrow their computer to visa or Mastercard to process their transactions, the amount of people wanting to offer their computer to visa/master would define how much resources they use, but an increase in visa users doesn’t mean an increase in visa borrowed servers and vice-versa.
    
    You can just stop, there’s no way to greenwash crypto and decentralization. The amount of transactions happening on all crypto networks at the moment could be handled by one server if it was centralized. There’s benefits to it, stop trying to sell it as being green, it’s not and never will be.
    
    I’m not trying to green wash, but crypto is not the environmental disaster the person claimed, especially not when you take into consideration PoS and newer coins with different validation methods.
    
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