That’s why ads are like acne for the Internet, but crypto is a cancer.
Crypto is fairly easy to avoid as an individual - the only thing I can think of that crypto has "contaminated" is GPU prices. Otherwise, don't get involved and just watch and laugh at the dumpster fire from a safe distance. You don't have to get involved in crypto to participate in society.
Advertising on the other hand is very hard to avoid, and even blocking the ads themselves doesn't isolate you from its nasty effects such as the constant tracking and that a lot of products nowadays pivoted to be ad delivery mechanisms (try to buy a consumer-grade TV that doesn't show ads or spy on you). A lot of products & services you need to use to participate in society are involved with advertising and may sell out your data (and providing fake data might be impossible/illegal). Even some government departments (DMV, etc) do it.
The endgame for crypto is tokenizing everything in some peoples eyes.
Video game skins become NFTs that you now "own" instead of just being in-game. So you can transfer them around, sell them on composable markets etc.
Assuming things actually get worked out you could see a merging of the digital and physical worlds assets.
If this a good thing, or will even happen who knows.
This use case actually doesn't make sense if you think about it. Items only make sense in the context of a game, and you trust the game makers to honor it. At that point, there's no incentive for them to actually allow you to port in/port out items.
Think about it this way: what good is the BFG from Unreal Tournament in Cooking Mama?
Even in related games, guns from Battlefield 2042 in say COD Vanguard?
Sounds pretty shit.
1) NFTs are the most expensive, least efficient way to implement the least interesting part of this technology. Even if you accept the dubious premise that they do even that job well.
2) You have explicitly described a system in which every single agreement between devs would require special testing. Is the moonlight sword balanced in the other game? Don't I still have to describe literally every aspecet of the moonlight sword other than who owns it in the second game?
3) Skins and other microtransactions are per game, by an absolute law of their design. That is the point. A game developer has no interest in honoring a microtransaction that I can prove that I paid some other game developer for. I would want my cut.
4) The condition upon which you have proposed that people can acquire the moonlight sword is... for beating Elden Ring? So it's a sign of status. Except that it's a sign of status that I can sell, so it's actually just a signal of wealth or status, maybe? Maybe I can't sell it. But wait, why did I make it an NFT then. So I must be able to sell it, but then it is presumed to have a dollar value, so why wouldn't Fromsoft sell it in the first place. Sounds a lot like a regular microtransaction.
Which brings me to my final point.
5) The market for microtransactions is already very optimized. Videogames are already very good at extracting every penny that people are willing to pay for bullshit cosmetics and play to win garbage. You can't even make money hucking this shit.
Your comment about “trust” has little to do with the technology. It’s a cross between legal gray areas (which would need to be solved/accepted if this becomes the norm) and dogma surrounding web3. I tend to agree that this isn’t likely to happen unless from software essentially abandoned their ip for some reason. But if that happened, it’d be a cool way for the legacy to live in future games in a way that pays homage to the original creators. It’s a use case that makes much more sense then just copying a random gun from one game to another because there are years of history in the item.
I do think for this to make sense you'd have to have, you know, one blockchain everyone used otherwise you still have the "10 app stores" problem, no?
We are of course very far from that happening, or knowing if it can happen, but it’s still a possibility to consider
The only thing a blockchain is good for is assets that fully live on the blockchain for which the source of truth is the blockchain itself - like cryptocurrencies.
Putting NFTs, video game/metaverse avatars, real-world assets, etc will never work; it's at best a very inconvenient, inefficient database replacement, and at worst a scam.
And this means pure cryptocurrencies, backed stablecoins do not offer any of the crypto guarantees either since they are representations of assets held in trust that can be seized.
For a system to be trustless, decentralized and permissionless it must be entirely trustless, permissionless and decentralized. It's not a gradient, it's a step function. Once anything creeps in, all guarantees are void.
I'm not sure whether these things will actually get integrated into video games or how well it's gonna work. It will certainly be interesting to watch this develop.
It's probably contributing more to inflation than people believe. Both in the demand for resources and in terms of redistribution of wealth. Although probably not as much as the new work-from-home paradigm.
I haven't bought a consumer TV since... well, actually, I just haven't ever actually bought one except second-hand non-smart TVs a decade ago. Is it literally that bad? i.e. does everything show ads? Can you root these machines and/or install non-ad-based apps instead?
The primary objective is "growth and engagement" aka an ad delivery mechanism (or data collection mechanism for more ads down the line). The functionality of the product (if any) is merely a necessary evil (from the manufacturer's point of view) to convince the mark to buy & "engage" with the device. If they could get people to "engage" with it without any functionality they'd definitely do that instead.
Buddy of mine used to work in a kabab shop before finishing his IT degree and helped out there off and on. He ordered an installed some 48" monitors (simple HD TVs) and then ordered a few for himself. I think they could 2 inputs max, but that's fine for most purposes.
Web3.0 folks are trying their best to change this.
Even HR departments. Got a new job and am completely spammed constantly at my brand new work email address.
And storage. See Proof of Space and Chia.
Proof of Work is a cancer. The two are heavily intertwined, but they are not technically mutual terms. Proof of Work needs to be stopped, irrelevant of what it is used for.
Unlike money (generically) PoWhatever cryptocurrencies aren't backed by anything anyone can define as valuable. Proof of Housing_built, Proof of Goods_transported, Proof of Music_created, Proof of Space_flights all create real value. Proof of Work where the work is without doubt useless in itself and an absolute net loss for society can't result in anything practically valuable. At best it results in a very wasteful Ponzi scheme.
Imagine something as innocent as "proof of clapping hands", you may get some reward for holding a record but it's otherwise completely useless. That at least only affects you and your hands, even if a waste of time that doesn't seem to bring anything of value - joy or other practical benefits. What if someone could abuse you and force you to clap at the cost of lost productivity at work, health issues, etc. and the result of that work is... nothing?
An attacker can spawn millions of virtual nodes, yet they will never hijack consensus because of the objectively-measurable resource sacrifice.
While there may be too much reward for this sacrifice currently, the idea is a sound one.
The usefulness of PoW is to reinforce a system that produces something. Presumably the higher the value of that something, the more you're willing to waste enabling it. If you're burning through an estimated 110TWh of electricity per year (as of last year, one Netherland's worth) enabling that system, you should be able to show one Netherland's worth of value being created.
> While there may be too much reward for this sacrifice currently
You probably meant it the other way around, too much sacrifice for the reward. Wouldn't the concept of creating value imply that net value was created?
> the idea is a sound one.
In theory many ideas are but the implementation matters. So in practice you'd be hard pressed to show the net value. And I'm not talking about showing me 1 BTC is worth $50.000 more than you can say a defunct company is worth billions because some was doing a pump and dump.
Without the reward, there would be no sacrifice. The reward drives the sacrifice, and it is strictly higher than the sacrifice, otherwise people would not sacrifice in order to lose money and waste resources.
Unfortunately, right now the value created is less than the sacrifice (and I agree with you), which is in turn less than the reward (see the next point).
> So in practice you'd be hard pressed to show the net value.
The Bitcoin transaction fees are higher than $300k/day [1]. So, at least that much value is provided to those transacting, otherwise they would not transact.
Unfortunately, the current implementation still adds a hefty (100x larger) inflationary reward on top - so miners make upwards of $30M/day. [2]
While such a ratio may have been useful in the early days, now that virtually everyone interested knows about Bitcoin, I argue (and agree with you) that this inflationary reward is excessive.
In addition, I argue that the resource sacrifice is excessive because this inflationary reward is excessive. Had the creator(s) of Bitcoin predicted the meteoric rise of the price, they would have diminished this reward more quickly than the current schedule. [3]
Maybe someone could fork a "Bitcoin Green" or whatnot, with the difference that the reward schedule is sped up, and hopefully it would gather a meaningful amount of hash power to prevent 51% attacks [4].
[1] - https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transaction-fees-usd
[2] - https://www.blockchain.com/charts/miners-revenue
But proof of work is not useless, hence we don't have to imagine it. Distributed consensus is useful to many people at this point.
People do it all the time, it must have something. But no practical value. But let's not argue for the sake of arguing. It's like saying Ponzi schemes are good otherwise so many people wouldn't be into them. Or any example of things so many people do that have no value and we'd really rather they stopped.
Proof of Whatever is just about gobbling up some resource (sometimes with incredibly high cost for society in general) for some artificially driven value but of no practical positive consequences to almost anyone in the world. Except for the few that are incentivized to make it look more valuable because they've invested and its actual value never changed. It's still a solution waiting for a problem.
And before you argue more, the computer and internet you're using to post your opinions were created with far less waste and provide far more value. If they go away tomorrow the world will suffer a lot, society will literally regress decades. If proof of waste goes away the "investors" in the pyramid will suffer for being tricked and the rest of the world wouldn't bat an eye.
(It's kind of splitting hairs, but I see gridcoin brought up a lot by people arguing stuff like "Proof of stake isn't the answer. Proof of work is still good, we just need more useful proof of work" which is a big misunderstanding of it. Useful scientific computation generally doesn't work as proof-of-work and is not an example of it even in the context of Gridcoin. Only specific kinds of computation can work for proof-of-work, and the computation being useful in other contexts actually harms its usefulness for proof-of-work because it can allow the computation for 51% attacks to be subsidized by the other uses of the computation.)
To me, there needs to be an effective counterbalance to the need for "proof" in the first place, otherwise we are simply prolonging the petrodollar's capability to exist in a world that is clearly quite ready to abandon it.
Counterpoint: Real Property
Imagine a future where websites force people to consent to allowing them use your device to mine cryptocurrency while you use its services or browse its content instead of ads.
They apparently to came to an agreement with the players where, to support the server, a browser miner would be ran on the dynamic map website.
With crypto mining I can buy my way out of it by having powerful hardware, or - in a hypothetical future where this practice is mainstream - offloading the mining to a separate machine as to not affect my mobile device's CPU. Crypto miners have a defined price: give me an average CPU's hashrate while you stay on the page and that's it - so if you pay that you are good.
With ads, buying your way out is impossible - by attempting to do so you just become an even bigger target. There is no define price for it that you can pay to "opt out".
I disagree. It's just not in its final form yet. But take a peek:
Hulu: 6.99 with ads, 12.99 without
Youtube: Free with ads, 11.99 without (or bundled with another google paid service, like Fi)
HBO: 9.99 with ads, 14.99 without
---
It's coming - if you have money to throw at the problem, you can already buy your way out of a lot of advertising.
If you have time and a bit of technical savvy - setting up a pihole or ublock origin incurs costs on time, but also remove ads.
At least with ads the cost is fairly clear, and it's definite. With mining... it's mostly malicious and will consume as much CPU as it can. That actually taxes me more for having a nice CPU.
https://cyware.com/news/pirate-bay-found-running-browser-bas...
I imagine a future, where people just do not vist sites, where they do not agree to the conditions.
But like others pointed out, those sites exist already since quite a while.
I think all advertising is inherently bad but this is the least bad form of advertising I've ever seen. Not only are users compensated, they can actually turn off the ads in the settings and simply use the browser normally, and it has a built-in adblocker even on mobile.
https://github.com/jtgrassie/xmr-wasm
Individually hash rate will be quite poor but if you make a mining pool out of all your users everything changes. Monero mining pools even have rules prohibiting that.
https://minexmr.com/miningguide
> Botnet / Web Mining Policy
> Sadly it happens that Botnets often run cryptominers on infected PCs.
> minexmr does not support botnets, web miners or any other illegal activities.
> Any account suspected of botnet mining or web mining will be banned.
On my free personal blog, I have nothing for sale, and nobody discovers it in spite of the ones that do read it enjoying it.
Another problem of advertising oligopolies monetizing everything is, if you don't pay them, you are invisible.
Unless you were going for some kind of meta-joke/correction, in which case bravo.
Can we go back to when people weren't so lazy as to do everything in their power to not have to give their cash directly to someone? Sure, you don't have to hand your money to a content maker on YouTube anymore, for example, but I wonder how much the lifespan of your device is decreased by the added processing that comes from advertising, and how much that adds up in the end. You may as well just have paid them money directly in the first place.
Apply that thought to any "free-but-only-because-it's-ad-ridden" software/service.
It's not only crypto or advertising it's the process of capital using technologies to radically transform its production process in search of more profits. Be it by established corporations or groups of crypto miners. This mode of production will do this to any technology that can advanced the generation of capital. This is the core of capitalism, the revolutionizing of production, not for humanities sake, but for profits sake.
To settle on a single manifestation of this mode as its cause is to wear something like horse blinders and all conversations on the topic will be as narrow as the topic you want to hate on the most. And capital will keep chugging and keep using technology for its own sake at everyone's expense.
The whole internet is showing the first signs of a digital resource curse brought on by advertising. Advertising changed the economics of the digital world in such a drastic way that it is poisoning all kinds of internet interactions. It is disrupting every kind of interaction, even those that had nothing to do with advertising. Things that were completely economically neutral before, so people did them just for fun, can now be exploited to extract value, so naturally some people do it and the previous innocent/neutral status quo is lost. For example: most free, non-monetized content providers, a fun tradition from nerds from the 90s, don't exist now because there is such a big economic incentive to abuse such free service.