62
17 years*
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
The most inefficient system ever invented by humankind so far
If only they knew that LLMs would soon take over as the new energy hog in the spotlight
Dude was just bored and wanted to implement his idea from his University paper. He was long gone before Bitcoin became a trading commodity instead of a novel currency.
Of which Bitcoin did it to itself which is why we got hard forks like Bitcoin cash that barely reached $2k when bitcoin was at $70k.
Not to mention that plenty of superior cryptos came out to replace bitcoin like xrp, monero, etc.
These posts are often very dumb and never understand that most of these tech innovations are novel ideas from University research that happend to become the latest trend.
Even LLMs and AI have excellent use cases, yet you'll see idiots like this crap on it 24/7 like its the antichrist.
It's like blaming Einstein for the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.
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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.
Admittedly I'm not a hardcore crytography nerd, but I know they've been improving things for years, and that message on that mailing list looked like it was 10 years old.
Not saying your wrong, but Id take it with a grain of salt. Anytime I see a newer encrypted block chain I see it and think whatever improvements have been done here, will eventually bleed into monero because of that. And that unlike the other encrypted blockchain, people will still actively be using xmr for real transactions.
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And yet, looking at this phenomenal waste of resources, tech bros took a good hard look at it and said 'Hold my beer' - and made LLMs.
Llms are made by genuinely smart mathematicians and computer scientists. Techbros are just the ones hyping them .
You know, that's a good point. LLMs themselves aren't horrible abominations - it's capitalism that, as usual, ruined a good thing.
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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
I swear to god people just copy paste whatever makes them feel good without any effort at understanding
Why do you think LLMs are so popular?
True... But Satoshi did invent Bitcoin, which is proof of work, and is everything in OP
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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.
Cryptocurrency development makes a whole bunch of arbitrary value-guided decisions during creation, all of these decisions have tradeoffs such that nobody has figured out a way to feature them all at the same time, or would they want to.
For example, bitcoin is fully auditable. Anyone with a copy of the bitcoin blockchain can review every single transaction in bitcoin's history, and trace the flow of every last satoshi from it's mining to today. This is because the developers of bitcoin place a high value on verifiable auditability and security. Conversely monero was developed for the purpose of being a completely untraceable, unauditable currency that still has a knowable supply. And ethereum was created in a manner that intentionally supported scripting, so that it could be used as a platform for novel applications and contracts. None of these primary features could be ported to either of the other two without breaking them completely, because of the deep programmatic implications of the requirements.
It's not really a question of better or worse, but of use case. The fact of the matter is that the reason these three examples are the leading currencies for their use case is literally because nobody has yet been able to do a better job. And for bitcoin at least, at this point it's security rests just as much in it's wide adoption and interest as it's design intent, so it's unlikely that anyone ever will.
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.
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Blockchain is not synonymous with crypto. Why are you bringing up crypto specifically? Crypto is garbage. But Blockchain is not crypto
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Immutable so long as no one party or group owns more than half of the coins on a given blockchain... then the ledger is whatever they say it is and it propagates down because they can manufacture their own "consensus".
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/51-attack.asp
and most use cases around things like "smart contracts" end up still requiring a trusted third party at some point
https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/the-inevitability-of-trusted-third-parties/
It's not 51% of the coins, it's 51% of the computing power on the network. Both of which are virtually impossible in the case of Bitcoin, though not entirely impossible. I just wouldn't consider a 51% attack even remotely a threat to the network compared to something like government crackdown
That's PoW. With PoS, it is coin ownership.
Which is much more distributed than computing power.
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Perhaps Americans don't see the point of crypto since USD is the world reserve currency for now, but cryptocurrency has been a great way to have economic non-cooperation with authoritarian regimes.
When the government can inflate the currency at whim to pay out their billionaire friends while leaving the common man to suffer, crypto is a nice escape hatch since it has a fixed inflation rate. You don't have to worry about government supression of funds for journalists either.
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Theoronic fingers that satoshi nakamoto actually developed bitcoin as a proof of concept, not as a full payment system.
I think the technology itself has great potential, though capitalism using it for the worst reasons imaginable and making it as inefficient as physically possible will never show us the true potential of this technology.
Under different social structures, it could possibly be a pretty great foundation for new kinds of monetary systems
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Does anyone know I'd proof of stake ended up being better than proof of work? I dont follow crypto but kept hearing that was supposed to improve things
Crypto is a big deal because it enables grifting and crime, but with how shit payment processors are and their tendency to use their position for censorship, crypto actually would be a potential way of solving that problem IF it werent ludicrously volatile and wasteful. But I have no idea if those problems could really ever be solved, or any progress has been made on those fronts
Proof of Stake and Proof of Work are two different ways of electing who should append the blockchain with new transactions.
Proof of Work: the one who can waste most energy fastest is most likely to be elected.
Proof of Stake: the one with most money is most likely to be elected.
It’s a bit oversimplified, but that’s the general idea.
Proof of Stake: the one with most money is most likely to be elected.
This is misleading. Winning the validation election doesn't give you more power.
The one who is most dishonest gets their stake burned.
Yes, Ethereum has been using PoS successfully for over three years and they're not the only major blockchain to do so. PoS works great these days, still using PoW in 2026 is a deliberate choice.
IMO xmr kinda saved proof of work by optimising their algo for consumer grade CPUs.
CPU mining is much less econimcal than GPU because you can't fit as many CPUs on a single system. Plus server grade CPUs with lots of smol cores instead of a few big ones hurts it too.
Makes it hard for anyone other than nerds with am extra PC to make money mining, and most of those guys won't be purposely picking a geographic location with the cheapest/most environmentally harmful electricity source. (More nerds live off of nuclear/solar than datacenters full of miners do)
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The most pathetic system? You can criticize crypto without resorting to petty insults, which just makes your position appear weaker.
Wah~ pls no bully
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this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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