If someone wants to give you money, take it. They can mandate more environmentally conscious PoS cryptocurrencies if they want.

If I call Mozilla and offer to donate a million shares of the dirtiest Earth-polluting company, they should take them. Exit the position. Their mission is not to be picky about how legal money arrives.

The Mozilla Foundation's "mission," as a 501(c)3, is whatever they decide.

They're not beholden to any obligations to maximize donations (already a dubious claim, absent evidence that people were actually donating with cryptocurrencies) in manners they consider unacceptable.

Put another way: you wouldn't be surprised if the ASPCA refused donations in the form of shares in PuppyKicker Inc. Mozilla's decision here warrants a similar response.

Surely, the mission of "looking good on twitter" is as noble as any. They probably have enough money from Google anyway, why would they need any other?

> They probably have enough money from Google anyway, why would they need any other?

If I was in charge of Mozilla's finances (which I'm not), I would be perpetually anxious about Google yanking their money as soon as its lawyers are sufficiently convinced that another browser vendor's marketshare sufficiently deflates any accusations of monopoly.

If Google yanks their money, they're dead anyway. Unless they make similar arrangement with Microsoft or such. I don't see how they can exist and finance themselves as an independent entity.

Hence the fundraising. I don't personally find it surprising that "you're dead anyways" isn't an acceptable conclusion to Mozilla's leadership, regardless of whether it happens to be likely.

What’s uninformed is caving to a blanket rejection of all cryptocurrency despite there being many eco-friendlier alternatives to Bitcoin, and many ways to offset approximate carbon footprints. If you’re a “privacy company,” you better learn about privacy coins.

They’re essentially saying “PuppyKicker Inc. is a stock. Therefore, all stocks are bad.”

What’s the carbon footprint of accepting a large donation from Google? How many flights, full time staff are involved with ensuring this?

Their decision is short sighted for many reasons, including the unpopular truth that in the long term they will need to natively support cryptocurrency “Web 3” features to survive as a competitive browser.

Their mission is entirely to be picky about the impact of their decisions. You can’t sell Bitcoin without encouraging its use, which is exactly why people donate it trying to improve the reputation of their goods for sale. Remember when a few companies accepted it and the Bitcoin salespeople were crowing about how that proved it was the future of finance and you had to buy in now to avoid being left behind? Using Mozilla’s reputation for their marketing is an ethical choice and has consequences.

Maybe there was a period, years ago, where decision of Mozilla to accept or not accept crypto somehow would influence its popularity. This time has long passed, and most people who deal with crypto couldn't care less about Mozilla. The only people who are affected by this decision are Mozilla project, who won't get the donations of people who wanted to donate in crypto. Since Mozilla now considers them a filthy, planet-destroying fraudsters, apparently, I guess it's for the best for both sides. But let's not overestimate how much this means overall. Which is - not a real lot.

If I give you a million shares of a company, that act and your ensuing sale of the shares are not (particularly) polluting. But if I send you bitcoin and you then sell them, those transactions occur via a polluting process.

> those transactions occur via a polluting process.

How much CO2 pollution is each transaction responsible for, and how much would it cost to offset that CO2?

It seems like there should be some threshold above which the donation will include within it the funds needed to compensate for its externalities, but I don't know if it's possible to create a smart contract that only allows donations above a threshold amount.

It costs about $20 to buy the carbon offsets for a single bitcoin transaction (at least according to the first article I found on Google), so double that for the two transactions to receive and then sell. Carbon offsets in practice are often not as much as what you're paying for, so you would probably need to buy more of them to truly offset.

You would also have to factor in the pollution from e-waste generated by miners buying and replacing ASICs, although that's harder to quantify.

But we should also consider whether engaging in such a transaction is worthwhile as a matter of principle. If the organization's goals include environmentalism, does legitimizing Bitcoin by advertising their acceptance of it run counter to those goals?

There is a lot of game theory behind why people mine a PoW cryptocurrency. Attempts to quantify “CO2 per transaction” are fundamentally flawed in my opinion.

Bitcoin’s pollution is not strongly correlated with its transaction volume.

It’s a famous rare collectible. People will mine it whether there is a high volume of transactions or not.

> How much CO2 pollution is each transaction responsible for, and how much would it cost to offset that CO2?

369.49 kgCO2eq. https://www.forbes.com/sites/philippsandner/2021/11/19/bitco...

> An average Bitcoin transaction has a size of 670 bytes on the Bitcoin blockchain, representing an estimated carbon footprint of 369.49 kgCO2eq. Given a price of USD 50 per metric tonne of CO2eq, the compensation of one average Bitcoin transaction costs USD 18.47.

>How much CO2 pollution is each transaction responsible for

Near 0. PoW is about agreeing on what the current state is. A transaction itself doesn't cost very much energy. If you were to process 0 transactions for the next agreed upon state it would take just as much energy as processing thousands of them.

This is equivalent to claiming riding an airline doesn't emit any CO2 because the plane was going to fly anyways

Flying an empty plane does not generate a rare collectible that the airline is speculating may some day be worth over six figures each.

Bitcoin tansactions are unrelated to hashing power, to pollution.

Whether there are zero or a million¹ transactions in a block: the power to mine it is the same.

There is a misunderstanding that hashing power is related to throughput. That correlation does not exist. Hashing power is a function of the price of a Bitcoin.

¹yes, I'm aware of the limts imposed by block sizes. But that too has nothing to do with the power.

The Bitcoin network exists to process transactions. If there are fewer transactions, the per-transaction cost is greater because the network would not exist otherwise – it’s like trying to argue that driving an SUV to work pollutes less because only one of the seats is occupied.

Not surprisingly, “the ends justify the means” isn’t a widely held tenant of humanistic non-profits.

That's an awfully broad statement.

If Phillip Morris wanted to become a big donator to the Cochrane collaboration, they would refuse by policy.

Do you think they're wrong, and they should take the money?

Perfect response from @jwz. "Planet-incinerating Ponzi grifter" is an excellent phrase. I suggest we turn "PIPG" into an acronym.

edit: For example: "Tesla used to accept Bitcoin as payment, but once Elon Musk realized that it was making him look like a PIPG, he had to reverse course."

The only catch is it doesn't have intuitive pronunciation. "Pip gee?"

Why not just "Planet-Incinerating Grifter," or PIG. Then it also applies to Big Oil executives :)

definitely direct all rage at crypto people and ignore Big Oil at YNews, where people have a say with crypto but not at all with Big Oil. makes sense when viewed that way

Easier to make fun of crypto because at least oil has obvious real-world utility, and (unfortunately) still props up our economy. Crypto is like a sideshow. It's also a hot new topic which makes it fun to argue about.

That's not to defend Big Oil or its shills. That industry should've been hamstrung years ago like the poison market it is. But it might be why HN gets extra riled up about crypto while letting other things slide.

Crypto provides better incentives for strong network security than any other security tech: has the bitcoin protocol base layer ever been compromised? Compare its network security against any other corporate or government network, and see if bitcoin doesn't provide some value.

Then look at the ION decentralized identity project Microsoft and others are building in top of it, or Peter Todd's decentralized document integrity attestation project, opentimestamps.org/, or how the bisq.network project has innovated a historically new way of working, where contributors are paid for improving a software project, yet no one is in charge and no funds or data are pooled, avoiding honeypots.

Tons of people and organizations have been building blockchain-based solutions for [vague use case] since like 2010. Announcing that someone is building something on top of the bitcoin protocol is like saying someone is building the next wave of Machine Learning, Big Data, or other [tech buzzword]. I'll believe it when it proves itself in real life, not as a thought experiment or speculation casino.

It's a $2 trillion sideshow and growing faster than anything else.

This is a software forum, and crypto is software. Perhaps a message board for geological engineers might be better for finding criticisms of Big Oil.

I thought by the nature of the forum submissions that it was essentially any STEM-related links or posts would be applicable. Geological Engineers are still considered STEM.

Problem with that is it dilutes the intended audience.

>but once Elon Musk realized that it was making him look like a PIPG, he had to reverse course

It has nothing to do with having enough impact (twitter lol) and market analysts to buy very low, announce owning millions of BTC and accepting BTC for Tesla, then selling a month later around peaks. And then doing exactly the same with Doge. Then doing it again in 2021. Oh, yes, the first sentence was about the trading value peak in 2017-2018. Nope, must be a coincidence.

Crypto has gone through what, three or four cycles now and every time the floor gets higher and the ceiling gets higher. The number of applications expands. The transaction volume increases. The liquidity increases. The stable coin value increases (now over $100B). The integrations increase. The startups founded on crypto increase. And the criticisms look less and less sane.

Tesla sold 10% of its BTC position. It still holds BTC on the balance sheet.

I don't love the characterization of it being a "ponzi scheme"; trying to be catchy is no excuse for being disingenuous and inaccurate.

At their core, Ponzi Schemes are investment funds which pay existing investors with funds collected from new investors [1]. There's really no way of looking at cryptocurrency where this is an accurate analysis.

Generally, existing cryptocurrency investors are not "paid" by the "fund" (currency) in any capacity. This is true for BTC & ETH, which represent the bulk of the crypto market.

The more common argument is that anyone can create a new currency, hype it up, drive market value higher, then exit at the expense of new investors. That's a totally legitimate concern, and it happens far too often; but its not a ponzi scheme. The accurate term would be "pump & dump".

There are many shades of gray between a pure pump & dump and something more legitimate. "Hype" (also known as "Marketing") is something every investment vehicle partakes in; from BTC (far beyond the "hype" phase) to DOGE (I'd label that one as "mass insanity") to TSLA (a fraction the revenue of many other auto manufacturers, but significantly higher value? how'd they get there?) to even PFE (this comment is Sponsored by Pfizer [2]). There are obvious examples of this behavior in the crypto community, but its simply not happening among major currencies; taking a pump & dump "scheme" to a billion dollar valuation is exceedingly rare, and there are currently ~90 coins with a market capitalization above $1B.

Where one does see it happening, in my opinion, is with (most) NFTs. Many holders won't admit this, but there's no reality where 99% of them will be worth anything after the initial purchase; their goal is to shill and liquidate. However, I'm cautious in extrapolating this concern to the "technology" of NFTs, and even further to all of crypto; its similar to asserting all of emerging med-tech is a scam because Theranos was. Ultimately, investment vehicles don't need to "make sense" to have marketable value; but that doesn't mean critical thinking is unnecessary when evaluating it.

There are some currencies, including ETH2, which stake and return an APY on investment. This could adequately, though somewhat inaccurately, be interpreted as being "paid out by the fund"; but the reward doesn't come from new investors. Where it comes from depends on the currency, but with ETH2 it is effectively minted from thin air. This is an inflationary action, which could (again, adequately but inaccurately) be interpreted as "taking money from new investors" (by lowering the value of each ETH they purchased). However, this concern is mitigated by the inflationary effect impacting all ETH holders, not just new investors, and the deflationary counter-effect from london hard-fork transaction fee burning.

ETH is currently still inflationary, but only through a delicate balance of PoW-style minting, PoS-style reward issuance, and london fee burning. The zeitgeist in the ETH community right now is to achieve deflation, for better or worse.

The statement that proof-of-stake APY represents "being paid out by the fund" in the context of evaluating cryptocurrency as a ponzi scheme, is very tenuous. Crypto is, at least in the US, not a currency; its a USD denominated investment vehicle. Being given more crypto does not "pay out" your USD investment, any more than a stock DRIP would be a "payout", because there is no "out". It does not allow you to exit the investment; on the contrary, it increases your investment.

Its totally fair to dislike crypto; I'm certainly in that camp. But its critically important to understand the mechanics, engineering, and economics of why its such a harm to society before one begins levying blind criticism.

[1] https://www.investor.gov/protect-your-investments/fraud/type...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uexqgkyFmo

Fine then, a decentralized Ponzi scheme.

"Crypto Scheme": a decentralized pseudo-Ponzi scheme.

I like it.

Digital tulip bulbs

Its certainly a reasonable comparison. But the important thing to remember is: There are plenty of highly marketable, valuable assets that have disproportionately little productive or utilitarian use-case. Fine metals, gems, art, high fashion, etc. People would certainly buy tulips as a fashion or aesthetic item; they have/had roughly as much utilitarian value as a diamond ring.

It was a mania in retrospect, because it blew out of proportion, but there's nothing intrinsic about the asset which would have made it deterministically, conclusively obvious to a knowledgeable investigator that a crash was in-bound (beside, maybe, its biological nature; biological investments are irregular). Rather, it was unsustainable because of the price; but what price is sustainable for tulips? What price is sustainable for bitcoin?

Markets are very, very weird; probably because human behavior is weird. An undeniable axiom: Markets can remain crazy longer than you can remain solvent. And at some point, a "crazy" market isn't crazy; its just the market. Many would say that a $10,000 engagement ring is a crazy asset to purchase; yet thousands upon thousands are sold & resold every year.

How drunk was he when he posted this? I’m thinking like a 9.

I don't know jwz personally, but given that his own website redirects all requests with an HN referrer to something NSFW, he probably doesn't have to be drunk to express disdain for something.

So, a link to his post[1] on this would give goatse, I presume from the image currently there?

[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/mozilla-blinked/

Yes, but sending a referer header only benefits trackers on the internet, so reconfigure your browser not to do that:

    about:config -> network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy -> set to 2

I worked at the same place as him. Definitely didn't need to be drunk.

He should be ashamed of displaying such a combination of ignorance and arrogance. Having alternative currencies is incredibly important for those living under corrupt regimes and/or hyperinflation and/or unbanked, and most cryptocurrencies don't use proof of work. They could just not accept Bitcoin and Eth1 then.

A single Google Search: 1,080 J

A single Solana transaction: 1,837 J

One eth2 transaction: 126,000 J

Watching an hour of television on a 40 inch+ LCD TV: 540,000 J

https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...

I notice you are avoiding listing Bitcoin and PoW Eth here. If https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co... is to be believed

1779.11 kWh per single Bitcoin transaction would be

One Bitcoin Edit: Block Mined: 6,404,796,000 J

One Bitcoin Transaction on a Block: 2,287,427 J

One Credit Card Transaction: 5,351 J

Edit: Since the source isn't exactly clear if one transaction is a reference to one block mined or one transaction on that block, I'm going to assume it is for one block mined. I'm going to estimate one block contains 2800 transactions.

ETH PoW is almost dead. We’re in the multi-client test net stage now. We’re rehearsing the switch multiple times on test nets to make sure it goes perfectly since there’s no takebacks on prod.

The bellow comment calling it “vapor ware” is ignorant.

> ETH PoW is almost dead.

I've been reading variations of the line "Ethereum is only weeks/months away from Proof of Stake" since probably early 2019.

Also doesn't Proof of Stake introduce another set of problems?

> Ethereum is only weeks/months away from Proof of Stake" since probably early 2019.

No, you haven’t. POS was, at best, a year plus away in 2019. No one credible was suggesting “weeks” back then… the beacon chain wasn’t even close to live yet.

ETH2’s beacon chain launched in Dec 2020 successfully, and has been running over a year in parallel with tens of billions in staked currency protecting it. This launched on time. The plan was originally:

1) beacon chain

2) sharding

3) the merge

The merge is when PoS takes over for PoW. The roadmap was changed in mid 2021 to push #3 before #2. That’s what’s about to happen, and I would even now put it in “months” . It won’t be “weeks” until a merge block # is announced, which will itself be weeks after the announcement of a successful testnet campaign (often multiple).

> No one credible

That's the main problem when it comes to this topic, isn't it?

I can’t help you if you ingest random internet comments in Bitcoin maximalist communities as gospel.

I wonder whether the credit card transaction energy includes the energy spent by thousands of bankers traveling to work each day in petrol powered cars to issue the fiat loans that fuel our modern currencies.

I wonder if the Bitcoin energy includes all the countless people shilling online and traveling by plane to conventions to talk about it and otherwise wasting energy.

Oh there is plenty more in pure energy costs not represented here, but banks do more than just store and move money. Just like crypto currencies being powered by renewable energy, nothing preventing banker cars and data centers from being powered by renewable energy either.

Also citing Eth2, which is vaporware.

The first phase of the transition to ETH2 was implemented on December 1st, 2020, with the launch of the Proof of Stake Beacon Chain. The Beacon Chain has been running without problems for over a year now.

The testnet for the second phase of ETH2 - which is when the execution chain is merged into the Beacon Chain so that Ethereum can fully switch from PoW to PoS and reduce its energy consumption by 99.95% - was launched on December 20th, 2021:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/12/20/kintsugi-merge-testnet/

The second phase is expected to be completed before the end of 2022.

Yeah, a testnet launched in 2021 for a project that was supposed to be live in 2019, then 2020, then early 2021 feels a lot like vaporware.

I mean, how many times have we had to diffuse the difficulty bomb? How many more times will we?

The completion of the first and hardest phase, and a testnet for the second phase, is not remotely close to my definition of "vaporware". "Vaporware" doesn't mean "delayed", or "not complete". It means there is no concrete progress toward implementation, i.e. it's vapor.

Listen, I'm glad you're optimistic, but again, we've diffused the difficulty bomb what, 5 times? And each time, the merge is 6-12 months out? And Vitalik himself said that the delays are due to the team not agreeing on the specs of ETH2 (vs. technical constraints)?

I guess we at least agree that your definition of "vaporware" is a lot stricter than mine. Hell, even Duke Nukem Forever came out eventually, so I may very well be wrong.

I mean the beacon chain is online, but the "merge" is always 6 months away. I think it's crazy to see so many billions locked up in a contract for software that hasn't been written yet, but hey, its all funny money anyway.

To that end, it's very humorous that ETH put in a doomsday mechanism to encourage the merge, but we just keep kicking the can down the road.

Kind of tells you a lot about humanity.

And what could be better for "those living under corrupt regimes" than a system widely used for money laundering?

Illicit activities like cybercrime, money laundering and terrorist financing made up only 0.15% of all crypto transactions conducted in 2021

https://www.axios.com/cryptocurrency-scam-crime-popularity-r...

The source for this article is a "study" from Chainanlysis which only tracks a handful of the possible illicit activities crypto can be used for. They are tracking scams and rugpulls, adding them together, and using that as the "illicit transactions" metric, then dividing that by a ballooned marked cap to get 0.15%.

Considering 40% of all of Bitpay's transactions are for "Gift Cards" [0] (a la money laundering), it seems to be that this blog is being as charitable as possible to CC to get their numbers.

[0]: https://bitpay.com/stats/

You can't assume gift cards are all money laundering. What an absurdly inflammatory and baseless allegation.

The fact is, there is no actual evidence of this extreme prevalence of crime within the crypto space that you allege.

This provides examples of phenomena that are very similar to other phenomena known to possess particular properties, and argues you don't need new evidence to deduce that there is a significant chance that the example phenomena share the same properties as the similar phenomena.

This is not congruent with the gift card example. There is no comparable product that is known to be used in the majority of cases for money laundering.

A blockchain company said that blockchains weren’t evil? You don’t say.

You know there is this company I heard of that has a long history saying some nice things about cigarettes. Maybe I should buy some.

That’s the point. Money laundering is the main feature. It is great for traditional criminals, but also helpful for folks for which money laundering is a weekly part of just surviving, because they don’t have a local reliable currency.

Do you think that ordinary people are more or less likely to take advantage of a system with such high transaction fees and personal risk exposure than the corrupt elites looting their countries?

I don't think it's unrealistic to think that at some point in the near future that ordinary people in the third-world will be using crypto for their every day transactions. Crypto is going through a massive maturity phase right now. I'm certainly not blind to the massive problems with crypto right now, but seeing chains such as Algo that are actively seeking to be both low cost and carbon neutral gives me great hope.

It's definitely possible but I'm not very optimistic because the entire space is so dominated by rich people: VCs are expecting returns on the scale of many billions of USD and that would require extremely high adoption to recover from a service which can be useful in poorer countries. We haven't even seen “better PayPal” in countries like the U.S. where the existing transaction fees go a lot further.

I really do sympathize with people living under corrupt regimes. And I sympathize with them having to use a metal pipe to whack someone in the head to survive. Does that mean that non-profits should start embracing head-whacking?

I think the poster isn't actually living under a corrupt regime because (and I always come back to this), you can't really buy crypto with currencies outside of USD/EUR/JPY/KRW/sometimes RMB and if you have access to those, then you already have hyper-inflation protection taht has historically preformed much better than any crypto has.

Dude must have an ego the size of a planet to say something like that

Thought I recognized the name, check out what his website shows when linked from HN: https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2016/hn.png

Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not a fan of cryptocurrency, but I'm also less than impressed with jwz's maturity. If I didn't know he founded Mozilla, I would've taken him for an angry teenage kid trying to be edgy on the internet.

If he left out "fuck you and fuck this," the rest of the tweet is still incendiary enough to send the message without the edginess. Might have come across better that way.

Regardless, it's sad to watch Mozilla debase themselves, not only by supporting crypto at this stage of the game, but with cringeworthy meme language like "HODL." That was funny for about a week during the Gamestop fiasco; a year later it's another "how do you do, fellow kids" moment.

You have to meet the customer where they are.

Dogecoin IS a meme and has/had a multi-billion dollar cap. Can't blame Mozilla for openly scraping the bottom of the barrel with their marketing.

> Can't blame Mozilla for openly scraping the bottom of the barrel with their marketing.

Yes I can. It makes them look cheap and corny, and weakens their credibility.

> Dogecoin IS a meme and has/had a multi-billion dollar cap

Sure, for about a month, a year ago. It's old news. Anyone still "HODLing" Doge is just a speculator who missed the last wave and is desperately hoping it'll come back so they can sell out.

Point is, Mozilla is wasting their time by marketing to that crowd. Scraping the bottom of the barrel is a bad look.

> Mozilla is wasting their time by marketing to that crowd. Scraping the bottom of the barrel is a bad look.

Beggars can't be choosers.

They aren't beggars. They're a well-respected software foundation. Being a nonprofit doesn't mean you're forced to beg for money from every source imaginable.

If this move was done out of desperation, then they're dead in the water as an organization. More likely, some tone-deaf middle management team thought it would be a good "trendy" outreach initiative.

Okay tone police.

The "finance-obsessed" shot is especially rich coming from a guy who was able to FIRE in his early 30s and spend his time running a nightclub as a hobby.

Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not a fan of HN, but I'm also less than impressed with jwz's maturity.

Well said :)

thank you for reminding me to disable referrers in Firefox :)

Ahem, I believe the correct term may be referers :)

He's one of the more entertaining figures of that generation. IIRC there were some huge flamewars between him and rms during the Xemacs fork.

He still maintains XScreensaver, but now his day job is the ownership of a bar/pizza/venue establishment.

> his day job is the ownership of a bar/pizza/venue establishment

Probably a better fit for him.

More of a hobby, I think. I doubt jwz needs to work for a living.

One of the most histrionic characters in the tech scene, and that's a lot to say.

Brave is on track to destroy his legacy.

https://brave.com/transparency/

Why would this be the case? Chrome's rise didn't destroy Firefox or Mozilla's legacy, so it's not clear why a fork would.

The past doesn't always define the future. Younger folks are more interested in privacy.

And Brave is more than just a "fork."

> Younger folks are more interested in privacy.

I believe this.

I'd like to understand how, exactly, moving from a non-profit foundation's browser to a for-profit corporation's fork of that browser with a built in ad marketplace is a net win for my privacy. That seems like a net loss: the incentive is now to make money off of me, and the browser is actually running non-website code with that goal in mind.

* Brave ads are optin

* Machine learning for ads is done locally; can't be evil

* Trackers and third party ads are blocked.

When is FireFox going to block third party ads and trackers?

My understanding is that Firefox has supported in-browser blocking of third-party ads, trackers, fingerprinters, &c., for a while now[1].

> * Machine learning for ads is done locally; can't be evil

There are too many moving pieces to this to dissect in a single comment. But to roughly sum them up: just about every adtech company that promises "privacy preserving targeted advertising" via ML uses some information-theoretical definition of privacy that doesn't align with normal user's intuitions about the word "private." We saw this with k-anonymity schemes, and we'll see it again when these schemes attract more scrutiny.

And on top of that: Brave's own site implies that local ad ML is currently opt-in only[2].

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...

[2]: https://brave.com/intro-to-brave-ads/

> My understanding is that Firefox has supported in-browser blocking of third-party ads, trackers, fingerprinters, &c., for a while now

I see the part about trackers. What about ads? Does it also block YouTube ads? That's a really nice feature built into Brave.

> just about every adtech company that promises "privacy preserving targeted advertising" via ML

The difference here is it happens in the browser. Does ML happen in Chrome?

> Brave's own site implies that local ad ML is currently opt-in only

Your reading of that isn't correct. The opt in is for ads. And local machine learning comes along with opting in.

> I see the part about trackers, what about ads? Doe sit also block YouTube ads?

Ads are the way the internet can be funded. For most free sites, they need to either be subsidized by another income (see say a personal website that you host yourself - you pay for the domain and hosting if it's not local). Or by either selling a product (see many software companies), or lastly by using ads (see YouTube, Vimeo, and numerous other video sharing sites)

I understand targeted ads being a nuisance and vehemently despise the datamining that supports said systems. But ads in general aren't an evil until they obfuscate the core material of a site. When you block ads, especially on YouTube for creators who use the platform to attract ads and sell their content then you prevent people who've worked to supply their income. If your issue is the ethics that are at odds with Alphabet and the privacy concerns, your fight is with your government to restrict them, Alphabet's own trackers (which you can work towards disabling).

I donate all the BAT I earn through auto contribute and through gifting of BAT to creators on YouTube.

I’ve also contributed a significant amount to an open source developer on GitHub directly through Brave.

Have you not heard of addons? Specifically ublock origin?

I like the idea of being paid to view ads and then donating to YouTubers or Wikipedia. It's pretty cool.

I like the idea of not seeing ads. It's pretty cool.

What's the connection between jwz and Brave? The only connection I can see is just that both jwz and Brendan Eich worked at Mozilla and now Eich has gone on to start Brave, but presumably there's more than that?

Thread: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1478808783006552065?s...

jwz and I were among the actual, full-time job, [email protected] Mozilla founders. There was no "Mozilla" to work at then, it was Netscape employing almost all staff members, with Chris Blizzard of Red Hat dotted in. Mozilla was not spun out until 2003 summer, when AOL laid off most of Netscape but kept three of us mozillans for a few months to complete the transition to the new nonprofit.

Saying "jwz worked at Mozilla" totally understates his role in writing one of the original web browsers, Netscape Navigator, and his part in the creation of Mozilla.org, among other things. It's like saying Bill Gates worked at Microsoft, or that Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked at Google. Thus Brave supplanting Firefox could metaphorically be seen as Mr Eich supplanting jwz. (That's a huge "if", mind you)

What a fractured fairy tale. jwz and I were true co-founders of Mozilla (see my reply nearby just posted). But jwz quit after a year:

https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

I led Mozilla on all tech decision making from 1998 through 2014.

Does this mean I was "supplanting" myself by doing Brave? No. In doing Brave, I certainly was not supplanting jwz, who had nothing to do with Firefox (born as mozilla/browser in 2001, over two years after jwz quit).

Thank you for the clarification! (I should be more careful how I phrase things. I didn't expect a personal response from a celebrity like yourself who's part of history and the anestory!)

> Ponzi grifters

You want to talk about Ponzi? Crypto has nothing on the Fed. The global financial structure is a planet-incinerating Ponzi scheme, so the point of targeting one minuscule subset of it is suspect.

I mean, sure, but replacing it with another ponzi scheme with even less checks and balances isn't really gonna solve anything, but make things worse.

"The breaks occasionally fail, so we did away with them"

Ironcially backed by an ungodly amount of violence and emissions

That's crypto's weak point. Blockchains are effective as long as gun toting folks let the miners mine.

I'd be surprised if Uncle Sam decided to drop the dollar and lose the influence it provides.

The US will never "drop the dollar" while it continues to exist as a nation. Why would the US government allow a system they don't control to run their economy?

A blockchain based "e-dollar" is certainly possible, but Bitcoin will forever be a hugely wasteful online casino.

not whataboutism, as US dollars would be the obvious alternative to accepting crypto

jwz, for context, is Jamie Zawinski.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

Seeing the other replies here, kids these days got no respect for their elders.

Hey, let me check if he still checks the HN referer and insults us if we follow links from HN to his blog:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/today-on-sick-sad-world-how...

Edit: Aw, nope, looks like he got rid of it

Hilarious. Some people just don’t mature past 15 years old.

I confirm i also saw the Egg.

It insulted me (correction: it redirected me to the image meant to insult), seems like your browser could be blocking referers by default (maybe they block it if it's an external link?)

When I was a kid poking around around the early web and trying to learn how to code, I idolized him. It's sad to see he's turned into a bitter old pizza shop owner.

Even more context:

Project Code Rush - The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla Documentary [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

I'm just behind the camera at 1:48

> The tweet prompted a strong reaction from Mozilla founder jwz

wrong,

the tweet prompted a strong reaction from people, founder jwz then reacted too few days later

Yikes, well that eliminates any respect I had for the "founder of Mozilla."

It elevates mine.