• Zoolander@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    The nodes aren’t the issue. It’s the fact that those nodes have to expend at least the same amount of energy every single time a record is added and the larger the ledger, the more energy is needed. Blockchain is somewhat unique in that regard.

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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      11 months ago

      It really feels like SOMEWHERE there was a legitimate use for this for very mission-critical stuff that might need to be immutable once published and kept for posterity…

      …but then it just became yet another speculative asset to make magic money that fueled stupid monkey jpegs.

      The pursuit of profit benefits mankind only by the occasional anomalous accident.

      • Zoolander@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        100%. Capitalism is great until it reaches a peak where people who provide no value except in the wealth they’ve amassed are the ones who gain the most from it. You can succeed simply by being born with wealth and having no other value because other people who do have value will need you.

      • lad@programming.dev
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        11 months ago

        This, exactly. Blockchain could have been used for tracking information publishing dates and such, but it is used for converting energy into IOUs

      • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The point in OP is that “blockchain” was not a new thing. The Merkle Tree was patented in 1979, meaning that it has been free for decades. Most programmers might never have a use for it but they still encounter it every time they use git (which is older than bitcoin).

        So, if you’re not aware of this, that’s because it is very technical and nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.

    • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      You do understand what a DB is right? Like there’s millions of them…hell right now typing out this comment has one marking it. And then you’re downloading it to read it… that’s a transaction. Except there are millions of people reading comments constantly on all social media platforms.

      My comment here has more bits in it than a single transaction.

      • Zoolander@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        DBs are not the same as a blockchain. A DB doesn’t have to hash all previous data before it every time the DB is written to. You can read and write to a specific spot in a DB without ever knowing anything else about the DB. With blockchain, inserts have to be successive and they have to reference every previous insert to validate that the entry series is unbroken. On top of that, for things like Bitcoin, every other client also has to validate it since the ledger is shared.

        There’s a reason blockchain is significant. Otherwise, why didn’t stuff like Bitcoin exist prior to it? Databases, in some for or another, have existed for decades. Blockchains are immutable, that’s why. The order of entries matters and validation is a requirement.

        • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          DBs still update their tables every time someone writes to it. And there are millions of DBs being written to every second. It’s absolutely comparable.

          • Zoolander@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            We’re not comparing millions of DBs to a single blockchain. We’re comparing 1 DB to 1 blockchain instance. If you had millions of blockchains, you would use exponentially more energy for the same data vs. a normal database. Updating tables is not the same thing as hashing and validating every prior entry in the table.

              • Zoolander@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                There doesn’t need to be. My argument is not bullshit, you just don’t understand the differences between blockchain and a standard database and are pretending you do which makes the argument impossible for you to understand.

                • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  Lol no I do, you clearly don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. The amount of DBs we have alone, that’s not counting any other compute servers or even WS dwarfs all the block chain out there. This article is a nothing burger and is complete bullshit. Even the study they referenced doesn’t know the exact amount…as it points out .6 to 2.2% is their estimated use…but this shit article went with the higher numbers because it’s great for people like you who hate any tech that you clearly don’t understand.

      • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        With the electricity used to validate a single crypto transaction you could do thousands or even millions of DB queries.

        Yes, everything uses electricity. That’s like saying that it’s fine if you kill one cow per day to eat its ear and throw the rest because hundreds of them are killed every day in farms.

        Wasting so much electricity in such a non efficient manner so a decentralization cult member can have his wet dream of using non-government money makes no sense.