Banks aren’t going anywhere. I think you still need service providers for people who don’t want to manage their own stuff. Banks, however, make a lot of money controlling how information flows and charging fees. In a blockchain, if you don’t have the money in your wallet, you can’t make the transaction. In a bank, you have to wait a day for the money to appear in an automated clearing house during the deposit window, which has only been 1 day for three years, and the bank can choose the order in which deposits and withdrawals appear and charge you an overdraft fee even though you technically are within the deposit window.
I’m not a libertarian - we need government and regulation. I just see the potential for companies to have more competition and less rent seeking in industries that are central to our economy. I shouldn’t have to pay 0.17% of a mutual fund’s total future growth and value to buy a list of stocks that are offered on a public exchange. I shouldn’t have to pay a bank a % of my transaction when it costs $0.10 to change a ledger if I have my own connection to the ACH. Blockchain reduces rent seeking because its barrier to entry is so low and it is public, trustless, and distributed.
Did you even read the title of the article (which is about the carbon footprint of crypto), or did you just read “cryptocurrency” and snap into “evangelize” mode?
So, if Ethereum crashes, then all the fancy smart contracts on it you described suddenly become useless? Seems like a drawback if one day the title to your car get lost.
My original comment is that blockchains are energy intensive now, but the future iteration of the most popular one is going to be more energy efficient than our current system of settling accounts, and neither the blog post or the article it cites mentions this. So the message came across as, “blockchains are awful” when an article could make the better case that “blockchains are currently awful because the technology is new, but they could reduce the energy cost of our current economy’s financial ledger system”.
Everything we do uses energy. We probably could use a lot less energy making transactions than we currently do. Blockchain technology might be a way to do that effectively, and it looks like that might happen. Shouldn’t be that controversial.
There are over 2,500 copies of the Ethereum blockchain currently. I would guess that this website likely has 1 if they don’t manually back up, and 2 if they do and their host does backups.
We don’t know that… and the future is far too late to deal with these issues. This stuff is solving a problem that does not exist and making our environment worse in the meantime. We can’t depend on maybes or whatifs to solve our real world problems. We can not assume technology will fix our problems with regards to the environment or anything else. We have actual solutions to focus on the core of the problems with regards to the environment (which is switching to renewables and transforming our energy grid to run primarily on them, as well as moving to electric transportation, greater public transit, more dense urban living, with a greater emphasis on creating green spaces, etc, etc).
Again, don’t depend on whatifs just because it’s shiny and new.
Banks process transactions using software written forty or fifty years ago to run on mainframes, so the computing power required for each transaction is tiny by modern standards.
If the state required all land transfers to be logged with them, why the heck would they not use a SQL database with multiple redundant backups instead of a distributed write-only database outside of their control?
2a. I want courts to the the final arbiter of a contract, not code. this would not have happened if courts were involved. Similarly, I want to see individuals and corporations sentenced to perjury for their role in the bad forclosures.
2ai. The solution to the banks being total assholes is to Break Them Up. Their entire ecosystem is fragile through monopoly, blockchain’s smart contracts are just a solution looking for a problem.
2aii. I plan on buying a house in £. I am paid in £, the bank will issue a mortgage in £, and I will almost certainly need to pay a sales tax in £. Why would I even try to get the seller to accept ETH, as well as persuade the bank to allow me to convert the £ into ETH before giving it to the buyer?
I was familiar with throwing extra data into the transaction. If you want to see the fragility of a distributed self-host system grab a copy of Tor browser, visit one of the hidden wikis, and see how many links fail to load. In comparison, without a blockchain random redditors organise massive seedings of sites that might go dark; e.g. grabbing parler before it shut down, backing up sci-hub.
When ETH has a credit system, issues debit/credit cards, has a call center then you can include the electric and human cost associated with those. Otherwise the fair comparison is ETH’s proof of work distributed write-only database against Mastercard’s (probably bog-standard SQL) database. The latter is probably a few AWS-equivalents keeping in touch with each other around the globe.
The value of any currency depends on natural or artificial scarcity.
Commodity currency such as gold coins or gold-backed bills retains its value because it takes a lot of resources to mine more gold. If anyone could quickly and easily produce as much gold as they wanted then the value of gold-based currency would collapse. Fiat currency such as U.S. dollars retain their value because the issuing governments artificially limit how much currency is in circulation.
The limiting factor for cryptocurrency mining is “how much computational power you got?” If competing cryptocurrency miners have access to similar hardware then the limiting factor remains “how much energy will I dedicate to my computers for bitcoin mining?” If computers become twice as efficient then the miners will dedicate twice as much hardware to the task to stay competitive. It’s a zero-sum game.
Rubbish from a technical viewpoint. Although if you’ve drunk the Libertarian Kool Aid like so many other cryptocurrency fanbois I can understand why you’d assume that.
Again: proof of stake requires trusting other human to validate (as opposed to proof of work); cryptocurrencies are only useful in a limited number of low-trust use cases.
