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Who was that dude whose name John Oliver said to Google along with the word "scandal"? What's his deal?
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Mar 13, 2018 01:08
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Dumb Lowtax posted:Who was that dude whose name John Oliver said to Google along with the word "scandal"? What's his deal? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brock_Pierce
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Mar 13, 2018 01:14
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bull3964 posted:I will never tire of John showing footage of someone acting ridiculous, pausing, and then flatly saying 'cool.' It's definitely my favorite running gag. It gets me every time.
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Mar 13, 2018 01:52
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Freaquency posted:It's definitely my favorite running gag. It gets me every time. It's good. I'm also a fan of his alter egos and, of course, the bits about the countries--both the map routine (which I haven't seen in a bit) and the humorous taglines. "The United Kingdom, where I am fondly known as, 'Who?'"
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Mar 13, 2018 02:38
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I have to say I was a bit disappointed in this episode. I know they can't cram everything into an episode, but just casually mentioning how the blockchain tech can only handle ~5 transactions per second worldwide or how every transaction consumes more electricity than 8 households in a day would be a nice couple of fast facts to show what a loving dumpster fire cryptos are and how no one should take them seriously, at least in their current form. Combine that with how broken the community and culture surrounding this poo poo is and you'll see how these problems will never be really fixed so hey.
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Mar 13, 2018 06:21
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Laputanmachine posted:I have to say I was a bit disappointed in this episode. I know they can't cram everything into an episode, but just casually mentioning how the blockchain tech can only handle ~5 transactions per second worldwide or how every transaction consumes more electricity than 8 households in a day would be a nice couple of fast facts to show what a loving dumpster fire cryptos are and how no one should take them seriously, at least in their current form. Is there a good explainer regarding the electricity waste that's from an unbiased source? I first read about this months ago and then read a whole litany of naysayers calling it fake. What's the definitive published account of how this works?
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Mar 13, 2018 06:37
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You have seen the warehouses full of buttcoin crunchers right? Divide your best guess power usage by 5 to get your per transaction cost. Even confined to a single warehouse the using that much power for 5 transactions is awful. Multiply that.
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Mar 13, 2018 06:41
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VH4Ever posted:Is there a good explainer regarding the electricity waste that's from an unbiased source? I first read about this months ago and then read a whole litany of naysayers calling it fake. What's the definitive published account of how this works? From what I understand (which isn't a lot so take this with a grain of salt), it's basically due to the huge amount of mining being done. Bitcoin mining is basically about solving hash functions - if you aren't really familiar with the math it's one of those things where finding a solution very difficult and computationally expensive, but verifying a solution is easy. This is similar to how online encryption works - if you HAVE the key, reading an encrypted file is easy, but if you don't then trying to FIND the key could take thousands of years. When a solution is found, the numbers used to generate it become a new bitcoin. Thus by pumping more and more computing power into solving these equations, you get more bitcoins (also the way the specific function being used works, it takes more work to reach the next solution than it did to get to the previous, so the cost per-coin just keeps going up). The thing is that the function being solved is essentially mathematical masturbation - it's not actually doing any kind of intrinsically useful work; it's just creating a hard to solve problem, then devoting resources to solving it (basically imagine a password cracker that instead of breaking into people's bank accounts, generates random passwords then makes another program guess them and that's literally all it does all day). So the huge amount of resources being dedicated to it are completely wasted. To put it in perspective, the same GPU power could be used to say, solve protein folding problems which can help medical research, or to help SETI process signals from space and maybe discover intelligent alien life. The Cheshire Cat fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Mar 13, 2018 |
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Mar 13, 2018 07:12
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The Cheshire Cat posted:From what I understand (which isn't a lot so take this with a grain of salt), it's basically due to the huge amount of mining being done. Bitcoin mining is basically about solving hash functions - if you aren't really familiar with the math it's one of those things where finding a solution very difficult and computationally expensive, but verifying a solution is easy. This is similar to how online encryption works - if you HAVE the key, reading an encrypted file is easy, but if you don't then trying to FIND the key could take thousands of years. When a solution is found, the numbers used to generate it become a new bitcoin. Thus by pumping more and more computing power into solving these equations, you get more bitcoins (also the way the specific function being used works, it takes more work to reach the next solution than it did to get to the previous, so the cost per-coin just keeps going up). Hmm. This is the nerd in me talking, but this sounds like a lot how they were going to destroy the Borg Collective in Star Trek The Next Generation. They were going to implant a randomly regenerating impossible to solve geometric shape puzzle into the Borg hive mind to essentially crash it from the exponential brainpower needed to try to keep up. So we're essentially doing this, but to ourselves.
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Mar 13, 2018 07:23
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From a free market standpoint, if somebody wants to spend the money they earned digging ditches and filling them in, that's their business. From an societal standpoint, electrical utilities are not free market institutions, and are fairly unlikely to take means to dissuade that sort of wastefulness by either increasing prices. With bitcoin specifically it is no longer worth the cost of energy to mine, but there are a number of loopholes that some clever miners have found to get "free" energy, either by doing their thing while somebody else is paying their utilities, or just using programs to get other people's computers to do the mining for them and stealing processing power.
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Mar 13, 2018 07:32
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There's also the issue of managing/updating the blockchain itself. Even if bitcoin mining itself ended (which, eventually, it will, since there are a finite number of solutions to the function used to generate them), the blockchain tracks literally every transaction made with every single bitcoin. This allows it to prevent say, false data being fed into the blockchain to steal a bunch of bitcoins from someone without them having given them to you (the numbers won't add up and the system will throw out the bogus transaction), but even if you don't understand computing, it's easy to see that a system that keeps track of every transaction made will just grow larger over time, and the more it gets used the faster it grows.
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Mar 13, 2018 07:39
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Etherium has been planning to move from that style, Proof of Work(POW) to Proof of Stake(POS). POS guarantees a certain amount coins for you mine based on how much you lock up as your stake and isn't resource intensive at all. Going into the power usage of cryptos could just make his segment look way out of touch in a few years, something he seemed super worried about.
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Mar 13, 2018 07:42
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SgtSteel91 posted:I doubt that. They may just as easily take a knife to school or drive a car into a crowd of students. Because they want to hurt other people or be on the news for hurting a lot of people and if they can't buy a gun they'll do that or get a gun illegally. This is such stupid, false-equivalency, NRA bullshit. Knives and cars don't offer the same power fantasy that attracts folks to shooting up public spaces. And from a purely pragmatic standpoint, guns are optimized to kill and injure in ways that apply to neither knives or cars. Like, gently caress, a psycho car rammer can be defeated by bollards, large trees, or even a tight corner, and good luck trying to bring one indoors. People, even crazy people, are lazy, and few of them are going to go through the trouble of buying guns illegally, because that would require effort and human interaction. Never mind the indisputable fact that the legal gun industry is close to the sole source of illegal guns in the US. And hell, even if 80% of future mass shooters transition to knives, cars, bombs, anthrax, or whatever after a nationwide ban on firearms, that's still 20% fewer mass casualty incidents. I'll take the possibility of 20 percent fewer deaths to domestic terrorism over some inbred hick's right to own his bang-bang toys. Baronash fucked around with this message at 08:08 on Mar 13, 2018 |
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Mar 13, 2018 07:56
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Woden posted:Etherium has been planning to move from that style, Proof of Work(POW) to Proof of Stake(POS). POS guarantees a certain amount coins for you mine based on how much you lock up as your stake and isn't resource intensive at all. Proof-of-Stake devolves into a more complex Proof-of-Work system (with the added benefit of centralizing what is meant to be a decentralized system) and there is literally no way to stop this. Anyone who says otherwise is feeding you horseshit. Baronash fucked around with this message at 08:04 on Mar 13, 2018 |
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Mar 13, 2018 07:57
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Laputanmachine posted:I have to say I was a bit disappointed in this episode. I know they can't cram everything into an episode, but just casually mentioning how the blockchain tech can only handle ~5 transactions per second worldwide or how every transaction consumes more electricity than 8 households in a day would be a nice couple of fast facts to show what a loving dumpster fire cryptos are and how no one should take them seriously, at least in their current form. Doesn't China hold major sway over its future as well? From the little knowledge I remember, I think most of the mining operations are there now and if the gov't ever bans the currency, the whole thing will collapse, right? This should have been a major takedown of bitcoin, but instead they must have reddit tech-bros on staff who really wanted to evangelize. JazzFlight fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Mar 13, 2018 |
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Mar 13, 2018 15:03
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Genuinely surprised he didn’t have room for Mt. Gox in his 25 minute segment. This is the first time I’ve ever been genuinely disappointed in his work, but it’s also the first time where I probably know more about it than he does.
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Mar 13, 2018 15:20
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There's only so much he can cover in the time allotted and it being a comedy show he's gotta prioritize the stuff that can be joked about while still being relevant. While there is some humor to be extracted from magic the gathering online exchange, that was 3 and a half years ago.
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Mar 13, 2018 15:24
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You dont need a major takedown of bitcoin because most people still think it's a joke.
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Mar 13, 2018 15:35
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I'm glad Dan from Collegehumor is doing alright, despite his alledged Bitcoin enthusiasm
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Mar 13, 2018 16:02
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I was really surprised to see Oliver not even touch on crypto's use in money laundering and the fact that it can't really buy goods and services. But I suppose the aim was more to make a video to show to people that are thinking about leveraging their money into it.
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Mar 13, 2018 16:31
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Most people really do know nothing about bitcoin other than it exists and maybe it's currency? Like the "office guy who won't shut up about it" is representative of what people know. Some asshat who is all smug about mining back when it first launched. Also I keep hearing you can't actually get your imaginary money out and turn it into real money, but there are bitcoin ATMs here where you can withdraw your bitcoin as actual cash, so is that really true other than if you're trying to I suppose get millions out at once? I do agree that he should have talked about the massive processing power and how it's incredibly useless work that is for real driving up energy consumption in obviously measurable ways.
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Mar 13, 2018 16:46
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Dunno, I feel the way he approached the topic is in line with previous episodes that involved technology. Remember the Surveillance episode? Remember how it summed up the topic as "you should care because you don't want the NSA looking at pics of your dick"? Or Encryption, which centered on the debate on security vs privacy? His focus has always been "and how does that affect you, the average viewer who probably doesn't care about the tech stuff".
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Mar 13, 2018 17:10
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Basically, it has several times the volatility of the stock market with a fraction of the infrastructure stability IF you got in at the beginning and are holding cryptocurrency that was cheap when you got it, yes it would be relatively easy (if time consuming) to cash out and make it rich. Right now though? The big issues are that massive volatility and slow/unstable infrastructure servicing the trades back to normal money. It makes it extremely difficult to time sells properly to actually make any money. Say you buy at $7000, it bounces up to $8500 and you want to cash out. You submit your trade and it takes 30 seconds to process. Whoops, in that 30 seconds it dropped back down to $6900 and you lost money. Add on fees and weekly transfer limits and it gets even more difficult.
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Mar 13, 2018 17:14
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Here is a near real-time index on bitcoin energy usage. 26.7 houses for 1 day per transaction and only gets worse. Death to this poo poo. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption They explain their methodology if that interests you. Even if it is off by a factor of 10 the numbers are still horrifying.
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Mar 13, 2018 17:19
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oohhboy posted:Here is a near real-time index on bitcoin energy usage. 26.7 houses for 1 day per transaction and only gets worse. Death to this poo poo. Based on my reading, at a certain point (which may already have been reached) it will become impossible to profitably mine bitcoin. If it has not been reached, we are rapidly accelerating toward the point.
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Mar 13, 2018 17:35
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As a currency, cryptocurrency is no good. There's no point to even considering its potential as one. Only futurists, bizarro libertarians, or money launderers would even try. As a technology, maybe there's something useful? So far I haven't heard of anything worthwhile coming out of it, but hope springs eternal. As an investment...well, there is legitimately money to be made if you're clever or lucky. Most of the segment was just considering that side of things. Initial Coin Offerings sound dumb, but...well, it stimulates business I guess. Only thing is, there's no legal protections keeping people from scamming you or stealing from you somehow, or saving your money if something goes wrong with your wallet.dat file. And then the whole thing about it being some crazy tech thing that a lot of big money investors don't really understand, just like in the dot com crash, but with less intrinsic value beyond speculation. And if this is a bubble that could crash, it's a severe hazard, because big crashes can ripple throughout the whole economy, in addition to ruining the hopeful speculators.
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Mar 13, 2018 17:39
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dont even fink about it posted:Based on my reading, at a certain point (which may already have been reached) it will become impossible to profitably mine bitcoin. If it has not been reached, we are rapidly accelerating toward the point. This is baked into the original idea of bitcoin. The point that we need to reach is the point that it becomes impossible to conduct transactions -- that's when the house of cards falls down ...and catches flame.
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Mar 13, 2018 17:50
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bull3964 posted:Right now though? The big issues are that massive volatility and slow/unstable infrastructure servicing the trades back to normal money. It makes it extremely difficult to time sells properly to actually make any money. Say you buy at $7000, it bounces up to $8500 and you want to cash out. You submit your trade and it takes 30 seconds to process. Whoops, in that 30 seconds it dropped back down to $6900 and you lost money. I believe that's why Steam stopped supporting it. The transaction fees were $20 and it took several hours to actually process a purchase and in the time it took the price fluctuated so wildly that another transaction fee had to be taken to refund the excess. People were spending $40 on fees to buy a $10 game. I imagine he didn't talk about it since he didn't want to touch on the illicit side, but the US government is currently in possession of at around half a billion in bitcoins. They RICO'd $33 million of it when the FBI took down the Silk Road in 2015 and since the people that decide what to do with it have no clue how to handle it they've been sitting on it ever since.
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Mar 13, 2018 18:20
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No one knows when it will hit reality but the damage is here and there is no guarantee that anyone would learn anything as they jumping to the next coin to fill the power use gap. You can see it already with other coins ticking up. Even the most power efficient of coins use a stupid amount of power to do the same transaction with established systems. Remember that page measures only Buttcoin. Even if any coin was remotely as power efficient, never happening as power use is a feature not a bug, there is the massive unsolvable problems of scale(moving to 5 transactions a second was seen as an amazing accomplishment), economic absurdity and legal issues. Every alliteration of a coin just moves the problem laterally. Much better to ban it and move on. A lot of people are going to lose their shirts and then some, better yesterday than tomorrow. Secondary problems like driving up the price of silicone for everything and stripping the world's supply of GPUs which hurts scientific research as much as gamers. Right now the GPU premium is anywhere from 50% to 100% of normal retail price. The sad thing is how so much computing power got wasted instead of doing literally anything else. Blockchain has yet to generate a single legitimate productive use as far as I am aware.
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Mar 13, 2018 18:31
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Yeah even without covering the details it would have been nice if he'd gone into a bit of what cryptocurrencies are ALREADY costing us. Cryptocurrency seems like the logical endgame of Silicon Valley capitalism. Make lots of money with technology by offsetting the costs on to society as a whole. They've just cut out the part where they actually provide a "service" and are straight up printing money.
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Mar 13, 2018 18:43
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John Oliver got HBO to spend 15,000 on a beenie baby.
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Mar 13, 2018 18:50
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$10,000 - he's not an idiot
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Mar 13, 2018 18:59
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oohhboy posted:No one knows when it will hit reality but the damage is here and there is no guarantee that anyone would learn anything as they jumping to the next coin to fill the power use gap. You can see it already with other coins ticking up. Even the most power efficient of coins use a stupid amount of power to do the same transaction with established systems. Remember that page measures only Buttcoin. The normal expectation in a competent government would be a severe regulatory clamp-down on blockchain business after Bitcoin implodes spectacularly. That's no guarantee with this administration.
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Mar 13, 2018 19:02
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dont even fink about it posted:The normal expectation in a competent government would be a severe regulatory clamp-down on blockchain business after Bitcoin implodes spectacularly. That's no guarantee with this administration. Oh, there's a guarantee. As soon as some Bay Area venture capitalist buys his way into the administration, then it'll be made sacrosanct.
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Mar 13, 2018 19:47
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dont even fink about it posted:The normal expectation in a competent government would be a severe regulatory clamp-down on blockchain business after Bitcoin implodes spectacularly. That's no guarantee with this administration. After the crash, there's no real point in worrying or regulating, because after the crash, people are going to have soured so bad on the whole concept that it'd be lucky if there are any diehards left and the whole concept hasn't been buried. It's in the government's best interest to start clamping down now so the crash will either be small enough to not be catastrophic, or even deflate the bubble. As entertaining as it would be for silicon valley to collapse under its own hubris, that would still be a catastrophe, and it's not like they'd learn any more lessons than they did last time.
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Mar 13, 2018 21:47
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Yesssssssssssss
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Mar 13, 2018 21:56
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SlothfulCobra posted:After the crash, there's no real point in worrying or regulating, because after the crash, people are going to have soured so bad on the whole concept that it'd be lucky if there are any diehards left and the whole concept hasn't been buried. It's in the government's best interest to start clamping down now so the crash will either be small enough to not be catastrophic, or even deflate the bubble. Maybe I'm baking in too much cynicism to expect action in the current political climate against fraud so blatant that they are making pump and dump service commercials.
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Mar 13, 2018 22:26
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I will forever regret not issuing an ICO during the frenzy at the end of last year into January.
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Mar 16, 2018 01:37
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On the subject of Bitcoin and electricity: https://twitter.com/davidjoachim/status/974704751207178242 Kinda hope John gives this a brief mention next Sunday.
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Mar 16, 2018 22:23
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oohhboy posted:The sad thing is how so much computing power got wasted instead of doing literally anything else. Blockchain has yet to generate a single legitimate productive use as far as I am aware. A guy on the last page mentioned how that power could have gone into protein folding or SETI research -- that's because before bitcoin, that's exactly what people were doing with their spare processor cycles. Folding@Home and SETI@Home are research projects that distribute what is essentially mining software, except instead of just having your PC do worthless calculations, they're using it to simulate how biological proteins fold themselves, which can actually help find cures to real world diseases, or to analyse the enormous amount of interstellar transmissions that are picked up in search of intelligence. You can just download the software, fire it up, and calculate useful data in the background while your PC is under light load. I doubt people would have been building 5 GPU mining rigs for protein folding, but it's really depressing when you think about the amount of computing going into blockchains that could be put directly to actual real world use.
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Mar 17, 2018 18:40
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