knightly the Sneptaur

Blockchain currencies aren’t a bubble, they’re a scam.

The results aren’t worth the expense. So-called “AI” is the biggest bubble since the great recession.

Wealth concentration is even worse now than when that song was written.

Of course it does. A million validators on less than 15,000 nodes? The top 100 accounts already own 35% of the network and rising? The top 0.005% of accounts own more than 78%? A Gini coefficient worse than Ukraine? A Nakamoto index of 3?

Ethereum is only months from a level of wealth concentration that would give Lido and Coinbase a combined 51% of the stake.

“Or doesn’t have to”. So you admit it?

You’re the one being irrational.

The amount of hydroelectric power produced by those damns was negligible. All four combined produced less than 200MW, less than 2% of Pacificorp’s total generation capacity.

They’d only have to build 20 or 30 wind turbines to make up the difference, and that’d be far less damaging to the environment than leaving these dams up and probably cheaper than the maintenance they were past due on anyway.

Proof of stake is a centralized system. If access to your ledger is going to remain centralized then there’s no need for it to be a blockchain. You can just have a regular distributed database.

Solarpunk is an anti-capitalist, pro-ecology aesthetic, not a coherent political ideology.

You should put more thought into this, because without a proof method that relies directly on the amount of power produced then you’re just hoping that people aren’t minting tokens for free.

The blockchain isn’t “new” at this point either. It’s been around for 15 years.

A “database with appropriate access control” is a completely different use case, not appropriate at all for communal and open, transparent use. You

It’s precisely the same use case, you’re just talking about using a blockchain as your access-controlled database and merely pretending that a centralized DB can’t be communal, transparent, and open.

You need to have admins, you probably need some management organization altogether, admins can change stuff and it’s difficult to prove they didn’t, and a lot more issues.

You need all that for a distributed database too. In fact, you’d need more management, admins, and paper trails because there would be more copies of the ledger to maintain, and you’d have the same lack of accountability to deal with since you’d be relying on every node to prove their own work.

At the core: no authority in control, complete transparency, unchangeable, decentralized (just like a renewable energy grid should be), everyone can participate.

Again, why is a blockchain needed to achieve these goals? You can get all this more reliably with a neighborhood electric co-op.

A good idea does not need to convince, so if these arguments don’t answer the question, either it needs better explaining or it is not that good.

Please do explain, then. I’m still waiting to find out why you think the blockchain is more useful for your stated goals than other kinds of ledgers.

Communal, local infrastructure. Not a grid spanning vast areas, although it could.

Then why does it need a global management system? If it’s all local, why not use a local database and save the expense of distributing it?

Look, this might totally not be the way to do it, but essentially to achieve independence we need to break up those monopolies.

Independence from what?

If you’re talking about independence from having to share electricity services with other people then you can just go off the grid, no blockchain necessary.

If you’re talking about independence from utility providers then you’ve crafted a tautology, as the only way to achieve independence is to be independent.

If you’re talking about independence from for-profit grid service utilities, then making every home an independent participant in the real-time electricity market will only compound the problem.

Otherwise we will always be enslaved to the powers that I thought we wanted to replace.

Those powers would still exist. Replacing the utility-scale grid operators with a local electric homeowners’ association doesn’t solve the problem, it just moves it closer to home. You still have to deal with the cost of building and maintaining the grid, as well as constant negotiation with all providers and consumers to ensure that the grid will remain stable.

Energy and food independence as well as communal land management I think are fundamental requirements for that - whatever the means, I subscribe.

Adding blockchain makes those goals more complicated to achieve for no benefit.

If you want energy and food independence, you can just do that.

Blockchains (if used correctly) are good at breaking up such monopolies. But it’s just tech. People need to want and do it. So whatever people say :)

False. Blockchains, as a feature of Capitalism, create monopolies. If they broke them up, then the tech bros would have already replaced the banking system with them. What actually happened is that the existing banking system started using crypto too, so now most blockchain-based value is held by an extremely small number of obscenely wealthy folks.

If openness is your concern, then distributed ledgers have already been a thing for decades.

The questions are: What problem are you trying to solve with the blockchain and why wouldn’t a non-blockchain distributed database or a regular database with appropriate access controls be a better solution?

Crypto is just capitalism with fewer safety nets. No FDIC insurance on deposits and no SEC to prevent scams and fraud.

What do you mean, “alternatives”? This sounds like a distinction without a difference.

So you think cryptos “solve” the same problem as paper money? A distributed open network is just the same as some rich bros printing paper?

No and yes.

Money was created to improve upon the barter system by adding a standard unit of value. Paying salaries no longer needed stores of salarium, the state just prints money to pay for services and taxes it back to prevent the currency from inflating.

The problem that crypto solves is that rich bros don’t like the state monopoly on the creation of money. It’s not an actual problem, they just want a legal means of committing fraud.

Sometime the point is not to solve a new problem but to improve a fundamentally broken “solution”.

How is it an improvement?

Also, “Proof of stake” would just mean that the owners of the ledger are unaccountable random rich guys instead of the shareholders of the utility company. That’s a distinction with absolutely zero difference.

But why would we need a blockchain for that?

Crypto is just math

Then crypto is already involved in the electrical grid…

It’s not an open market though. It’s gated and you are at the mercy of the local authorities, which often are very restrictive and difficult.

Utility services are natural monopolies.

Are you proposing that people build a totally independent electrical grid that somehow isn’t regulated by local authorities?