I just started using this myself, seems pretty great so far!
Clearly doesn’t stop all AI crawlers, but a significantly large chunk of them.
I just started using this myself, seems pretty great so far!
Clearly doesn’t stop all AI crawlers, but a significantly large chunk of them.
okay, git using the same algorithm may have been a bad example. let’s go with video games then. the energy usage for the fraction of a second it takes for the anubis challenge-response dance to complete, even on phones, is literally nothing compared to playing minecraft for a minute.
if you’re mining, you do billions of cycles of sha256 calculations a second for hours every day. anubis does maybe 1000, once, if you’re unlucky. the method of “verification” is the wrong thing to be upset at, especially since it can be changed
Oh, god, yes. Video games waste vast amounts of energy while producing nothing of value. For sufficient definitions of “value,” of course. Is entertainment valuable? Is art? Does fiction really provide any true value?
POW’s only product is proving that you did some task. The fact that it’s energy expensive and produces nothing of value except the verifiable fact that the work was done, is the difference.
Using the video game example: the difference is the energy burned by the GPU while you were playing and enjoying yourself; cycles were burned, but in addition to doing the rendering there was additional value - for you - in entertainment. POW is like leaving your game running in demo mode with the monitor off. It’s doing the same work, only there’s no product.
This point is important to me. Cryptocurrencies aren’t inherently bad, IMO; there are cryptocurrencies based on Proof of Stake, which have less environmental impact than your video game. And there’s BOINC, where work is being done, but the results of the work are valuable scientific calculations - it’s not just moving rocks from one pile to another and back again.
in the case of anubis one could argue that the goal is to save energy. if too much energy is being spent by crawlers they might be configured to auto-skip anubis-protected sites to save money.
also, i’d say the tech behind crypto is interesting but that it should never have been used in a monetary context. proof of stake doesn’t help there, since it also facilitates consolidation of capital.
I think decentralized currency is the best part of crypto. Much of US strong-arm policy has been through leveraging control over the dollar? Remember a few years ago when OPEC were making noises about maybe tying oil prices to something other than the dollar? The US government has a collective shit fit, and although I never heard it reported how the issue was resolved, but it stopped being news and oil is still tied to the dollar. It’s probably one of the reasons why the Saudis were about to kidnap, torture, and murder of Jamal Kashogi in the US.
I am 100% in support of a currency that is not solely controlled by one group or State. For all of its terrible contribution to global warming, Bitcoin has proven resistant to an influential minority (e.g. Segwit2x) forcing changes over the wishes of the community. I especially like anything that scares bankers, and usury scabs.
Satoshi made two unfortunate design choices with Bitcoin: he based it on proof of work, which in hindsight was an ecological disaster; and he didn’t seize the opportunity to build in depreciation, a-la Freigeld, which addresses many problems in capitalism.
We’re all on Lemmy because we’re advocates of decentralization. Most of Lemmy opposes authoritarianism. How does that square with being opposed to a decentralized monetary system? Why are “dollars” any more real than cryptocoins? Why does gold have such an absurdly high value?
this reads like a mad rant.
first of all, bitcoin in its original form was meant to be used as a transaction log between banks. it was never meant to be a currency on its own, which can be seen in the fact that efforts in scaling up to more than a few million users consistently fail.
in practice, all cryptocurrencies result in a centralisation of power by default, whether they use proof of work or proof of stake, because they are built so that people with more resources outside the network can more easily get sway over the system. by either simply buying more hardware than anyone else (for pow) or pooling more of the limited resource (for pos) they can control the entire thing.
cryptocurrencies are a libertarian solution to the problem of capitalism, which is to say, a non-solution. the actual solution is to limit the use of financial incentives. i’d wager most people on lemmy would rather abolish currency altogether than go to crypto.
It’s a rant, for sure
Satoshi Nakamoto, they guy who invented Bitcoin, was motivated by a desire to circumvent banks. Bitcoin is the exact opposite of what you claim:
https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/whitepaper/
My comment is a rant, because I constantly see these strongly held opinions about systems by people who not only know nothing about the topic, but who believe utterly false things.
Ok, now I have to wonder if you’re just trolling.
Bitcoin, in particular, has proven to be resilient against such takeovers. They’ve been attempted in the past several times, and successfully resisted.