• @Eldritch@lemmy.world
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    1120 hours ago

    Spicy take. Blockchain and crypto are tools and not inherently bad.

    My biggest issue with them are who currently controls them and what they’re being used for.

    • @phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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      28 hours ago

      Cryptology itself is neutral.

      Blockchain is an inherently bad design for a distributed ledger. Bitcoin’s proof of work algorithm is also an absolutely shit, environmentally destructive design.

      • @tar@lemmy.zip
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        8 hours ago

        how would you set up a distributed ledger to fairly distribute a deflationary currency? I think Blockchain is a fine way to solve this problem, or was from 2009-2012 or so.

    • Phoenixz
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      2120 hours ago

      They are inherently bad. By design.

      At the very basic level, everybody needs to execute eachothers transactions. This means that if a billion wallets make a single transaction that you end up with 10^18 transactions being calculated. To call it inefficient is the understatement of the year.

      This, incidentally, is also the reason why the wallet data file is just ridiculously stupidly enormously big. I’ve been out of it for years now (minus the bit that I’m using now as an investment) but a real Bitcoin wallet required terabytes of data

      All this culminates in Bitcoin using more electricity than a modern country to support a tiny fraction of the world’s financial transactions, something you might want to think about with climate change and all.

      • @Eldritch@lemmy.world
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        420 hours ago

        Oh I don’t disagree with your take on it on that front. What crypto is being used for and how it is being used is generally impractical. It does have legitimate uses. But as you said it’s generally not the ones that’s being used for.

        • @phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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          18 hours ago

          What crypto is being used for and how it is being used is generally impractical.

          Generally criminal, more like. It’s good for money laundering and illicit payments, that’s about it.

          It does have legitimate uses.

          Citation needed.