- cross-posted to:
- buttcoin@awful.systems
- science_memes@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- buttcoin@awful.systems
- science_memes@mander.xyz
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What a dumb take. You don’t have to go anti-technology in order to be anti-capitalist. The technology itself is not the problem, it’s the capitalist capture that’s the problem. You don’t have to throw the baby with bathwater.
Problem is I don’t see a baby whatsoever…
People have looked at it from all sorts of directions and tried to propose use cases but none have come up with any particular use for this concept that isn’t just as well or better served by a different approach.
Without the crypto-bros, sure, no one would be especially ‘anti-blockchain’ and it wouldn’t have the negative impacts it does today, it just would be a forgotten concept that didn’t go anywhere.
none have come up with any particular use for this concept that isn’t just as well or better served by a different approach
This is literally the fault of the banks and billionaires controlling them. This is exactly what they want you to believe.
They’d go bankrupt if people started keeping their money on a blockchain and they will do anything possible to prevent that and push the propaganda in the oop post.
While it’s partially true, banks and billionaires are much more toxic to this planet and people.
So what are the good uses for this tech then? That was the main point you disagreed with but didn’t provide ant examples
Read other comments, there are plenty. I’m lazy to parrot what was already said by others.
Yeah but without anonymous payments (xmr) there’s no good way to easily pay for diy estrogen or hosting for piracy services, or to anonymously pay my mullvad account.
Granted if society wherent setup as a giant fucking fascist capitalistic panopticon we wouldn’t really need any of that.
Any who, I mostly agree with the sentiment though. “Career” investors and venture capitalists belong against a fucking wall IMO.
You do know that you can pay for mullvad in cash?
You can send cash in an envelope to them with your mullvad ID and they will credit your account.
How do you anonymously pay for things when the ledger is public?
Not all crypto is the same. ZCASH uses an encrypted ledger. Monero combines transactions and redistributes to obfuscate.
xmr is a cryptocurrency which aims to make reading transactions from the chain impossible. Iirc the main mechanism of this is that they bundle a lot of transactions together and send out coins from that pool only once it is large enough, without preserving each specific coin. This repeats for a few proxies. You could trace a coin from origin to endpoint, but this would be pretty much useless as you cannot know whether the endpoint was the intended one or not.
Interesting! So at best you could narrow down the purchaser to one of many possible sources.
My first thought is that a large enough organization trying to demask you could do so by looking at repeat subscription purchases over time coming from the same wallet. You know, like a monthly fee for a VPN. The first month you’re one of a thousand people. The second month. Maybe you’re one of 500. Eventually they get you.
But I know nothing about XMR, they probably solved for this. I just can’t be bothered to read :-D
I believe the way they deal with this is by having the recipient create a one-time address for every sender, so it is not possible to recognize patterns between senders and recipients. Another thing is that every wallet has two associated keys. There is a “spend key”, which is a write-only key that can spend money from the wallet, and a “view key”, which can be used to view the contents of the wallet. You can publish the view key if you want that to be public information, but you don’t have to.
How does the mechanism know who to send the coins to? How can I be sure the coins I put in go to where I intended them to go? And can the sender prove to the receiver it was their transaction?
As I understand it, this happens cryptographically. Send keys can be added to form a larger key, which gets used to sign the pool of transactions. Because the signature used your key as well, the recipient can verify that they have received your coins(from a pool you signed). The important part is that it is impossible to tell who signed what part of the pool, just that one of the people in the pool did. Because all money is pooled together and sent at the same time, it is not possible to read from the amounts sent which transaction belongs to who.
I think I get it (in theory). As much as people shit on crypto, it really is a cool implementation of math and economics.
The ledger being public doesn’t necessarily mean anyone knows who “13LPtD4GG1XX7fgrze6xMR5V284rRQg9jv” is. But yeah, you can of course track the movement of funds, and make educated guesses on which addresses belong to who.
Which is pseudonymous, and not anonymous. Unless we are talking about monero of course.
Okay, politely, fuck off. Its 2026 and I absolutely refuse to believe anyone educated on crypto enough to know what a blockchain is and how it works, even if just a basic understanding, doesn’t know about encrypted blockchains or XMR.
You get to post this comment like once in your life, and after that we both know its in bad faith. I really doubt its the first time.
There’s actually a surprising new discovery coming out of East Asia this year. After years of research, they’ve discovered that you can educate someone online without being a total dick.
I too thought it was impossible. But I can’t argue with science.
sigh
Once again:
Blockchain is not synonymous with cryptomining
Blockchain does not require proof of work
Cryptocurrency and NFT grifting does not devalue blockchain as an immutable distributed ledger
I swear to god people just copy paste whatever makes them feel good without any effort at understanding
True… But Satoshi did invent Bitcoin, which is proof of work, and is everything in OP
Then why hasn’t a better blockchain based currency gained any popularity? If they don’t have critical mass then your distinction is meaningless. It turns out there is just zero real world need for an untrusted distributed ledger. Databases and governments solve the problem much better.
Two points:
Then why hasn’t a better blockchain based currency gained any popularity?
https://www.forbes.com/digital-assets/categories/proof-of-stake-pos/
Etherium and virtually the whole rest of the crypto scene that is “not bitcoin” has pretty soundly rejected the wasteful Bitcoin design. There was even a fork of Bitcoin that would have used the much more efficient proof-of-stake, but since that would be bad for everyone with a proof-of-work “mining” rig it didn’t take over.
It turns out there is just zero real world need for an untrusted distributed ledger
An “untrusted distributed ledger” is literally the backbone of modern software development. While you could plausibly split hairs and assert that git requires “trust”, I don’t think you’d wind up in a spot that both supports your assertion and a cognizable difference for anyone but mathematicians and security nerds. (And even if you did, the exact same sort of non-scam usages of blockchains are ones that operate like git, with the ledger used for something else.)
would you recommend any crypto in particular?
Monero
thanks! looking into it and syncing up. care to share why you’re positive about it?
The most distinguishing feature is that it’s private by default, the sender, receiver and the amounts are cryptographically hidden from uninvolved parties. Other than that
- Tiny fees - fees are only used to prevent spam, not to replace block rewards.
- Tail emissions - every block rewards the miner with 0.6 XMR ensuring chain security, keeping the fees low and the inflation predictable and small - forever approaching 0 but never reaching it.
- Variable block sizes - the block size grows and shrinks with the demand, allowing for more transactions when demand is high but still limiting spam.
- RandomX mining algorithm - ASIC resistant mining algorithm best mined with the CPU ensures fair access to mining and prevents big minig firms from taking over the mining process.
- Community and culture - the focus of most other cryptos is investing and speculation while monero’s focus is on being the best private, uncensored, p2p money. Because of this while other cryptos encourage their users to HODL their coins, monero users are encouraged to save and also spend their coins, treat them like digital cash rather than something who’s only purpose is to go up in price. In my opinion this culture leads to several things:
-
Business acceptance - many privacy centric services like VPN, VPS, e-sim, phone top up, gift card providers etc. accept monero. Usually any service that does, sees it at the top of the chart as the most used crypto, often more than all the other coins combined. Many open source projects accept it for donations as well, with similar findings.
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Community built infrastructure - the monero community focuses on building the infrastructure around the idea of monero being digital cash. Things like xmrbazaar.com, a monero based e-bay/craigslist like market where you can buy/sell things for monero, kuno a monero based gofundme alternative for fundraisers, retoswap.com an instance of haveno, a decentralized, p2p monero exchange, monerica.com a repository of monero accepting business and other monero related things are designed with the idea of treating monero as money.
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Price stability - because of the fact that monero is actually used for payments it’s price is established through adoption rather than speculation which makes it fairly stable in comparison to the rest of the crypto market, thanks to this you can safely spend and receive monero without worrying that a month from now it will loose 50% of it’s value. Of course, there are peaks and valleys often caused by the macro market movements like the recent few day pump to $800 and crash back to $400 but that’s an exception rather than the rule, for the most part (excluding stable coins) it’s one of the most stable cryptos out there with a slight long-term uptrend.
5 Years
All time
fantastic!
for mining, should i solo or p2p pool?
Questioning the technical virtues of an alternative product based on lack of critical mass adoption is pretty funny, when you consider we’re on the fediverse. I know that doesn’t defray your argument, but just an amusing observation.
I see why you might draw the comparison, but I actually don’t think the comparison is valid at all. Forums/communities can still be useful and fun with only a few people. Discord is also massively popular with a small community model, for a more successful example to compare with the fediverse. However a currency that nobody uses or accepts is entirely useless until mass adoption happens. That’s why they typically get mandated by force by governments.
You don’t need mass adoption to be useful, the more adopted a currency is the more useful it becomes but it’s not binary. Seychelles has a population of 130k, does that mean that the seychellois rupee is useless? Of course not, 130k people use it everyday.
~100 milion people use or at least own bitcoin, meaning they would probably be willing to pay or accept payment in it, that’s 1.3% of the world’s population, 1 in 80 people, that puts bitcoin between the Japanese yen and the British pound. ~260 milion people use crypto currencies in one way or another, over 3% of world’s population, 1 in 30 people, that’s just under the euro or the us dolar. And if you use 1 crypto you basically know how to use them all, just like €,$,£. If that’s not mass adoption I don’t know what is.
Most merchants who accept ₿ also accept other cryptos like ethereum, stable coins, litecoin, monero, tron, bitcoin cash… There are payment gateways that make it incredibly easy and automatically convert to your currency of choice, so there is no reason not to accept even the shittiest of shitcoins if it will be swapped before it even gets to you.
