sugar_in_your_tea

@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works

Mama told me not to come.

She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.

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sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup, I have a job I enjoy, and it turns out I don’t need an alarm to get up to go to it.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Didn’t work for my wife.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Instructions unclear, am now in crippling debt and in fear of tomorrow. But yesterday was fun.

sugar_in_your_tea,

You don’t need to go crypto to get there though, IPFS and similar exist and work. IPFS itself is kinda slow, but Iroh is aiming to be a more efficient alternative that solves similar problems. There are also protocols based on BitTorrent.

The way these work is basically:

  1. users connect to relay nodes
  2. relay nodes connect users directly
  3. users continue communicating directly w/o any servers

Then you build stuff on top to keep everything in sync. No servers, aside from the initial connection, which means minimal risk of anything ever going down. If relays go down, anyone can set up another and people reconnect.

The problem is that step 3 is quite complicated, and there are a ton of technical complexities to synchronizing information at scale w/o a central authority. Mastodon/Lemmy/ActivityPub gets around this by having each node (instance) be a complete copy of everything that node cares about. You get a ton of duplication, and eventually that means costs pile up. With a proper decentralized system, there doesn’t need to be nearly as much duplication since you can always hop through some peers to find what you need.

sugar_in_your_tea,

It’s useful for anything online where cash would be useful. So paying for services, money transfers between acquaintances, donations to charity, etc. It turns out cash is useful for crime, and privacy-focused cryptocurrencies work like cash, hence are useful for crime.

Don’t buy it as an “investment” or sign up for services to earn it, but it is useful for non-criminal things.

sugar_in_your_tea,

That’s not necessarily a given. Ethereum, for example, transitioned to proof of stake instead of mining and seems to have reduced electricity use by 99.5%. I’m not exactly sure where that number comes from, nor do I know a good way to compare crypto to other systems (e.g. do we count all the energy used by banks?).

But what I do know is that Bitcoin kinda sucks from an energy perspective, partially because they limit the number of blocks (e.g. buckets of transactions) per day, so mining is more valuable than on a currency with no such caps (e.g. more demand to mine each block = more miners = less efficiency per mined block).

What seems to be true is that cryptocurrencies have a large upfront energy cost due to speculation, and that plateaus as it hits a certain carrying capacity. So crypto scales decently well, and if you do proof of stake instead of proof of work, it seems to scale even better.

And then we get into the issue of where your energy is coming from. Since cryptocurrencies are global, they can be done anywhere energy is cheap. For example, daytime purchases can be done using excess energy in an area where it’s night. For fiat, that energy use is more local, so you’re more likely to process a transaction during peak energy use (afternoons), thus higher energy capacity needed. It’s a really complicated topic, and I’d love for someone smarter than me to break it down.

But since it’s so hard to calculate, there’s a lot of bad information, which leads to unnecessary and unfair criticism from people who don’t see value in cryptocurrencies. If you ask a crypto bro, they’ll point to the massive amount of power used by financial institutions, and if you ask someone who’s against cryptocurrencies, they’ll compare POS and minor processing use by credit card companies to an entire Bitcoin block (which has lots of transactions). I’d really like to see an updated, neutral look into it, because all the information I’m able to find has huge holes in methodology.

But all of that is kind of irrelevant to the discussion about whether it’s useful. If it’s not useful, any amount of energy use is wasteful, but if it provides value, there’s certainly an amount of energy we’re willing to spend on it, so what exactly is that amount?

sugar_in_your_tea,

But energy use isn’t as simple as measuring transaction efficiency, there’s a lot more to a currency than storing who transacted with whom. There’s:

  • security of transactions - fraud and whatnot
  • coordination costs - international transactions, etc
  • cyber security, websites for managing money, etc

Or in terms you’ve used, someone needs to maintain that database, that database needs to be in some facility, and someone needs to audit the database. All of that is baked into cryptocurrencies. Yet the comparisons I’ve seen either account for way too much (e.g. bank tech support), or not enough (e.g. only POS and network costs).

sugar_in_your_tea,

I thought BotW was pretty mediocre. They basically took the “bigger and better” strategy to one of their iconic games and made it “bigger and worse.”

It’s an unpopular opinion apparently, but that’s my take. Hopefully it’s notb the start of a trend of Nintendo following other AAA studio trends.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Eh, it was the worst of the Zelda series for me. To each their own I guess.

EA is looking at putting in-game ads in AAA games — 'We'll be very thoughtful as we move into that,' says CEO (www.tomshardware.com)

EA CEO Andrew Wilson confirmed the company is considering putting ads in traditional AAA games — titles that players purchase up-front for around $70 apiece. In the Q&A part of EA’s latest earnings call, Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs asked Wilson about dynamic ad insertion in traditional AAA games. Wilson said,...

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yeah, they can make their own non-sponsored ads kind of like how GTA does if they want it to feel similar.

sugar_in_your_tea,

And they’re not going to steal a $75 bike, they steal nice bikes that have resell value.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yeah, unless you’re a police department and are literally doing a sting operation, this is just robbing people with extra steps.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I think Marilyn Manson did something like this. Maybe go ask him.

sugar_in_your_tea,

The type of people willing to ride, much less steal, a $75 bike aren’t going to be carrying much cash. So you’re not really attracting the right targets.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Sure. My area has low crime, my bike isn’t worth a ton (was $500-600 new), and I use a well-regarded u-lock. Never had it stolen.

But OP is talking about trying to get the bike stolen so they can jump the thief and steal their money. That doesn’t seem very effective with a $75 bike, which is going to be some big-box hand-me-down pile of crap that most homeless people are going to ignore, much less motivated bike thieves. If you want your bike stolen, it needs to be worth the time to bring it to the pawn shop.

sugar_in_your_tea,

I’m behind you with “TI TIMAH.”

sugar_in_your_tea,

Good and cheap.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Nah, we’re cool with Japan eating our lunch. We just don’t want a nationstate to artificially make their cars cheaper, even if they are good, to grab marketshare.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Nah, the reason is China is heavily subsidizing their EVs to snap up marketshare. If this was a US company, we’d call it anticompetitive behavior.

And no, I don’t think we should subsidize anything. If the tariffs really are leveling the playing field, let them compete.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yup, it’s copyright violation. And copyright is intended to prevent companies from stealing content from creators, not screw over customers.

Make the content easy to access or people will find another way.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Especially if that 14 yo is black.

sugar_in_your_tea,

It’s trivial to get phone numbers given an address in most cases.

sugar_in_your_tea,

Yeah, switching web apps seems like way too much work. I use a mobile app on my phone and the regular web app on my computer.

sugar_in_your_tea,

As a native speaker, I read it as:

I haven’t given it much thought, but there’s a good chance I’ll give it a shot.

It’s a bit awkward, but I skipped over it and grasped what I assume was the intended meaning, so it’s fine. Better words would be “suppose” or “guess” in this context.

sugar_in_your_tea,

That’s just not true, it’s “usually” a scam. ProtonMail and Mullvad aren’t scams just because they accept crypto for payments.

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