No one is ever concerned with how much energy is used to feed ads to the entire population of earth 24/7.
Please propose a law or regulation structure for significantly reducing or eliminating advertisements. I’m serious. I fucking hate ads. I just don’t have a reasonable or effective way to get rid of them.
Edit: Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can’t come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
In São Paulo, one of the biggest cities of the world, the municipality forbade by law all billboards and building disfiguring ‘decorations’ some 10 years ago. Since then, the city became much more bearable, aesthetically. Nothing special happened, everybody was happy, except a few bankrupt ads agencies. Maybe, you must be able to imagine that change is possible. However, there is this ideology, Americans seem to be so fond off, that seems to make such things very difficult.
New Jersey also banned billboards. That one is pretty easy and I vote that we should adopt that policy everywhere. It’s much harder to control digital adspace, since you can do things like astroturf campaigns and product placement. Great point though! I like that law.
Hey actually I just thought of one! If the consumer is paying for the product, it can’t come with ads, including things like product placement or ad reads!
Smart TV manufacturers: “Impossible!”
Ban advertising to minors/for products intended for children
Ban ads/branding visible from roadways to prevent distracted driving
Got a better one: just ban marketing outright
Serve ads inside the ads. It’s more power efficient—kill two birds with one stone?
That’s called product placement in a Disney movie
Where does it stop though? Will TV and super bowl still exist?
What about Facebook, the credit bureaus and Twitter? They’re all a waste of energy too.
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I went and did some mafs.
This thing says the world consumes 180k TWh of energy per year.
Apparently, 48% of consumer web traffic is ads.. That is dystopian in itself, that means around half the content floating around the internet is stuff the client does not request but is pushed to them.
That would put the ad industry at 4500 TWh per year. However, this is back of the envelope.
Going off of this, a high estimate for crypto mining is 230 TWh.
That means the ad industry costs us around 20 times the cost of crypto in terms of power. Feel free to check me because I don’t know shit about most of these things.
That said, this does not account for the entire ad industry, just the cost of sending internet ads around the world. Ads are made, ads are displayed in various media other than websites, and most importantly, ads have the sole purpose of driving further consumption, which all contributes to the societal costs of the ad industry.
48%? Fuck i love my adblocker
Tbf most ads are on text news articles, one image can take up thousands of times more data than a few words.
And it’s cached… and there are CDNs… Still way more energy than you want, but not quite as panic inducing as it sounds.
I am. Same loop of crap blasting on 20x massive screens 24/7 at the station.
Every store that keeps light on at night is also an ad.
My hate for them is one of the main drivers behind my radicalization.
My grandfather worked in the ad industry and couldn’t stand ads. He’s always mute the TV when they came on and we sat in uncomfortable silence.
What do you mean ‘uncomfortable’?
Well I was like 25 when I took care of him for two weeks and a pretty hard partier so silence wasn’t really my thing at the time. I’m in my 40s with 4 kids so I’ll I love silence now. I’ll even stare at walls.
Most people aren’t loudly in favour of that, especially not the ones concerned with the power usage of blockchain
Perhaps, but you also never hear them complain about it anywhere near as loudly as people complaining about blockchains.
Yes, they’ll grumble about ads being annoying or YouTube blocking people who block ads, but the amount of power that gets wasted on this never even crosses anyone’s mind, meaning on some level, there exists agreement that advertisement are a necessary and responsible use of electricity while blockchains are not.
That’s because ad serving doesn’t set a lower bound on the electricity price. The value of crypto and the value of electricity are linked.
For the sake of simplicity I’ll just say Bitcoin.
If the price of Bitcoin stays constant (big if), and the rate of Bitcoin per watt does too, then everyone would start mining until the demand for power is so high that the price increases until it’s as high as the Bitcoin per watt.
Sure, they are unrealistic assumptions, but it’s easier to see this way that the value of Bitcoin is (almost) the same as electricity. If it were lower, noone would mine it, if higher, people would buy electricity with bitcoin for a profit until the 2 equalize.
Electricity will never be much cheaper than Bitcoin, market forces will make sure of that, causing a huge environmental impact. Ads, however, only use as much electricity as they need to operate, their amount is not decided based on how much electricity they waste.
Honestly, it never fails to surprise me when on a presumable anticapitalist forum such as this one, someone makes a passionate argument in favor of some of the most ghastly corporate practices known to man, but sure, let’s put that premise to the test, shall we?
Here’s a good article on the power consumption of Bitcoin, which estimates around 110 TWh/yr.
Here’s one on the electricity use of online advertising, which estimates somewhere between 6.5 GWh - 131 TWh/yr.
Shall we call it a draw? Keep in mind that online advertising is a fast growing industry (and likely to continue to grow in the future), whereas Bitcoin’s power use isn’t likely to grow too much, as the above article explains. Also keep in mind that this is JUST online advertising, and completely ignores print, TV, and those digital billboards that are spreading everywhere from Times Square to your local grocery store. Think about neon store signs, illuminated billboards, etc.
Also, that’s just the cost of delivering ads to people (i.e. it doesn’t even include the cost of producing them). Think about how many people work in advertising – all the offices they occupy, the computers, cameras, and whatever other equipment they use, business flights, what have you – and I’m pretty sure the carbon footprint of the entire industry far outstrips that of crypto.
But sure, crypto is the real problem.
I see you completely ignored my comment. The problem is not the amount of electricity used in itself, which the estimate of 6GWh-130TWh is as precise as shooting a dart at the moon.
Crypto uses energy for the sake of using energy. The value of crypto is based on the amount of energy used to create it. It’s not valuable to society. That’s what people is upset about. Crypto provides even less value to society than ads do.
Even you said it, ads spend energy because they employ people, those people generate value.
That’s like saying we should stop heating homes because it consumes more energy than crypto mining. Hose heating improves the quality of life of people. Crypto does not.
Lets do an advertising tax 10% of all add revenue.
Unironically this.
Same with porn. But I’m building a shake-power generator for fleshlites so it should balance out the power it pulls. Saving the earth one jack-off at a time.
Charging a hybrid car battery only takes 253.4 jerks. Pretty soon we will be expanding our charging service to parking lots across America and Canada! Most of them already have people willing to do it for you already …they were doing it there anyway… Win/win.
Powerjerk ™, we make perverts work for you!
Just roll up and say “Hey Jagoff, I need to get to x!” And you’ll promptly be taken care of.*
*Do not give them drugs to speed up the process. We are serious about our drug-free workplace.
Edit: steal my idea and I’ll find you
Energy isn’t free. More power captured from jerking will increase food consumed, meaning more energy used in farming. You’ll have to brand this as either a carbon
capturefapture system or as a weight loss programPorn is more beneficial for humanity than imaginary ownership.
I have an ancient hermetic method of getting off that requires neither computer or phone. Enquire within if you seek this ancient knowledge.
Please elaborate
For only $99 USD all will be explained via a one on one Webinar.
What a deal! I can’t lose!
Yes, but it’s almost certainly a multitude less electricity than bitcoin.
Or that tumble dryers in the USA alone use more energy than Bitcoin.
Yea the rally against block chain tech is stupid as fuck. It consumes nothing in the grand scale…do people not realize a lot of large enterprises have ~200k nodes give or take? Bigger companies can have in the million range. 200k machines is a joke.
Edit: I can see a lot of people just hate block chain tech without understanding anything tech wise lol
The nodes aren’t the issue. It’s the fact that those nodes have to expend at least the same amount of energy every single time a record is added and the larger the ledger, the more energy is needed. Blockchain is somewhat unique in that regard.
You do understand what a DB is right? Like there’s millions of them…hell right now typing out this comment has one marking it. And then you’re downloading it to read it… that’s a transaction. Except there are millions of people reading comments constantly on all social media platforms.
My comment here has more bits in it than a single transaction.
DBs are not the same as a blockchain. A DB doesn’t have to hash all previous data before it every time the DB is written to. You can read and write to a specific spot in a DB without ever knowing anything else about the DB. With blockchain, inserts have to be successive and they have to reference every previous insert to validate that the entry series is unbroken. On top of that, for things like Bitcoin, every other client also has to validate it since the ledger is shared.
There’s a reason blockchain is significant. Otherwise, why didn’t stuff like Bitcoin exist prior to it? Databases, in some for or another, have existed for decades. Blockchains are immutable, that’s why. The order of entries matters and validation is a requirement.
DBs still update their tables every time someone writes to it. And there are millions of DBs being written to every second. It’s absolutely comparable.
We’re not comparing millions of DBs to a single blockchain. We’re comparing 1 DB to 1 blockchain instance. If you had millions of blockchains, you would use exponentially more energy for the same data vs. a normal database. Updating tables is not the same thing as hashing and validating every prior entry in the table.
There aren’t millions of block chains…lol your argument is bullshit.
You don’t even understand blockchain so I’m not sure what your edit is all about. You’re comparing blockchain to a database in your replies as if they’re comparable.
When it comes to power…it absolutely is comparable…but most of you have no clue how much compute we use daily in terms of power. Acting like the block chain sucks down anywhere near the amount of power we use on even in the corporate world is hilarious…you know a lot of colos have their own sub stations right?
The only person here who doesn’t know what they’re talking about is you. If you took a standard DB (MySQL or Postgres, for example) and took that same information and stored it on a blockchain instead, you’d use far more energy on the blockchain and the issue would only get exponentially worse as the chain got bigger. Normal DBs don’t need to hash new entries or validate them against previous entries that are also hashed.
Yes because there are millions and millions of block chains…lol don’t fool yourself into knowing what your talking about.
And yes DBs are only one DB no one ever has HA stacks or redundancy built in…lol
Are you dense, man? No one said that. They’re saying that one blockchain would take several hundred DBs to equal its energy use. You’re wrong and doubling down for some reason and it’s just making you look silly.
I said that genius…go check my posts…the fuck you arguing about? I literally said that the amount of DBs we have make the miniscule amount of large block chains out there look like nothing. Then you show up and say one DB isn’t comparable to one large fucking blockchain…no shit.
Yeah, people tend hate what they don’t understand. Especially when most people think think every blockchain performs exactly like bitcoin (which is proof of work). Bitcoin is slow and power hungry and would never actually be usable by the masses for everyday transactions. But it was the first and will likely be a “digital gold” for a long time
But it’s not the only one and in time everyone will be using blockchain technology. It’s so much more convenient and useful than most realize. The Solana blockchain has secured a big partnership with Visa that can be read up on if anyone is interested.
Distributed hashed linked list is so yesteryear. These days we’re into text autocompletion instead.
Hey, it’s not just fancy autocomplete!
Thanks to years of innovation, it’s now copyright infringement as well.
I wish copyrights will die to this technology! <3
The thing is its only the copyrights of individual artists and creators that will die to this.
The big corpos will find a way to protect their value, just you wait.
They will steal from every single creative in the world and then sue them to hell and back if they use anything they them selves “own”
This is not a threat to the copyrights that you want to die.
You are a fool if you think copyrights can protect anyone but the big corporations.
Copyright are a cancer for mankind, they should disappear.
…and, hear me out, that will be perfect for keeping messages untraceable by the government. Every single of those 200,000 computers will have full copies of all the messages ever transmitted, unencrypted, but they’ll never be able to tell who wrote them and who they were for.
No one who understands bitcoin ever thought it was untraceable.
In the early days it was really common to place messages in the chain.
There are literal marriage proposals among these message.
I even considered the main benefit to be that it was super traceable.
I once tracked some stolen crypto trough multiple Wallets and exchanges to find the one wallet where those hackers where keeping all the spoils.
Granted the owners of a wallet aren’t public and thats a form of anonymity but surely intelligence agencies can figure it out.
Monero entered the chat.
privacy or secrecy from the government isn’t a goal of Bitcoin - the protocol doesn’t even use encryption.
the goal is protection from (government or other) control
I’m still 90% convinced it was either invented by the CIA or the NSA for “reasons”. The US military invented the dark web and they even claim to have invented it, so it’s not a far stretch that another US gov. agency invented Bitcoin.
At first I read “200.000” as a particularly precise float, and laughed at the absurdity. Then I realized he meant “two hundred thousand” and it came full-circle from comedy to tragedy. :(
The real charlatans were the “the technology has promise” people. No, the technology was dumb.
He says on a decentralized platform that became popular because the centralized equivalent became hostile towards their users.
“Blockchain” and “decentralised” are not interchangeable words
Yes, in the same way that federated and decentralized aren’t interchangeable.
You’re dodging the point that being in favour of decentralising doesn’t mean being a blockchain bro
Or, you could just pick one computer, have it do the work and punish it by taking its money if it screws up (ETH).
But yeah you’re not wrong about minable coins.
This is revolutionary
This is de-evolutionary!
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Sure, but what real-world problem does a trustless solve? I thought this was all very interesting years ago but now that we’ve had blockchain for years it seems it’s only good for illegal or morally questionable transactions.
There’s a case to be made for a currency that facilitates illegal transactions, or transactions that corporations object to. Just because something is legal in your country doesn’t mean it might not be unjustly restricted. Or could just be unjustly illegal in your country or another country. The problem of course is that distributed currency also facilitates things that should be illegal.
But WikiLeaks is a good example - their legacy is a little mixed now, but when they first came on the scene they were doing work which was a valuable service to the public. If you wanted to donate money to support wikileaks you couldn’t because the credit card processors shut them off. Blockchain lets you get around that.
Likewise it’s the combination of distance and direct - I can give $5 in cash to my local leaking consortium, but I can’t give $5 to the leaking consortium on the other side of the world without relying on the knowledge and consent of third parties.
You totally can give cash anywhere in the world. You post it as a letter
This was common before electronic transfer
It will also get there faster.
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See I think more nuanced takes like this are good. I’m not familiar with the Chinese banking issue that you are describing, but it sounds like deposit insurance (like the FDIC) might be a better solution than cryptocurrency, and it’s definitely better understood. Since the real world value of cryptocurrencies are so volatile they are a questionable store of value, and taking a risk on a poorly regulated bank might be better than taking a risk on storing your money in a volatile and unregulated security like cryptocurrency. Honestly it’s hard to know which is the better risk. So it could be better or it could be worse.
I agree with your point about transferring money internationally, and even within the US transferring money used to be a real pain. So I’m still interested to see if cryptocurrency can be a better medium of exchange or medium of transfer than traditional ways, or at least give traditional systems incentive to improve. But again the volatility is a concern so for most people the best move is probably to get in and out of the crypto market as quickly as possible or else risk getting a vastly different amount of money out of it than you put in. Admittedly it could appreciate, but when I’m transferring money to someone I don’t want that to simultaneously be an investment. The few times I have used Bitcoin to purchase something the whole process has taken hours, and there’s no guarantee there won’t be price swings — a lot could happen in those hours.
I appreciate the brutal honesty about cryptocurrency not being for the average Joe. It’s not that long since many cryptocurrency boosters were hoping it would replace fiat currency, but now that I think about it I haven’t heard as much about that recently. In its current state it is really not for the average Joe.
Crypto =/= blockchain.
If you can’t see the utility of blockchain with regards to things like actual, verifiable digital ownership, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Digital ownership on one (1) blockchain. Not really that great when you put it like that. What makes one Blockchain more authoritative than another? Even in a closed system, if you think the admins of these chains don’t keep a kill switch in their back pocket specifically for their advantage in ownership conflicts then you should probably read about Ethereum Classic. Even if they don’t want to hard fork, if a chain is controlled entirely by a company, then they can edit it however they want regardless since it’s not really decentralized. The idea that Blockchains will empower the customer with digital ownership is silly to me.
Is a chain is controlled by a single entity then it’s not a blockchain, it’s a linked list with extra steps.
The whole point of a blockchain is that it’s independently verifiable/validated by all its users. Anything else is a literal scam.
A Blockchain is already just a linked list with extra steps.
I want to see what you mean in practical terms, because the only other example that I know besides questionable crypto currencies is NFTs and that was an epic lesson on what not to do. 😅
No, NFTs do have good uses, but things like image NFTs are just a misappropriation, like SPAM is to email.
One use case, is clear, independently verifiable ownership of non-tangible things, like Intellectual Property rights. Movie rights for a book adaptation for instance moving between companies in IP sales and mergers/acquisitions.
And it’s ALWAYS the same problem. You can have all the lists you want. A central authority has to recognize and enforce that list. At which point, the structure of your list is completely irrelevant. It could be ANY list. What matters is that it’s chosen to be enforced. And currently, most power structures are happy with plain old databases. Or pen and paper.
It’s no surprise you don’t know what to tell us. It’s hard to get a mark to buy into a scam once they’ve realized what is was.
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How about first we see a version that isn’t a scam? We’ve seen plenty of scam versions so far.
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It doesn’t require that much computing power, that’s just a variable that gets set.
If the difficulty were set lower, one average computer could easily handle it.
Oh sweet. Let’s just set the difficulty lower, then.
But then every jabrony would be able to make money.
So, in other words, it does require that much computing power.
You too can learn this secret of the ages! You just need to be able pay for my one hour Webinar and Goon on camera for at least three!
Then some massive org like the NSA creates/captures 51% of the nodes and takes everyone’s money overnight.
that’s… not how that works. all you can do with 51% is possibly double-spend whatever coins you already have. or undo some transactions.
so you submit a transaction, then use your extra 1% of hash power to mine a new block that says you didn’t actually spend it. at the same time you need to trick somebody else into believing you actually did send the coins, and take their stuff you “paid for.” then after you have the stuff, you can submit the block that doesn’t have your transaction in it. Voila, free stuff and you didn’t spend your coins.
it does not enable you to mess with other’s balances. other than possibly reversing some transactions. you would need the private keys to their wallets to take their money. and if you have those, you don’t need 51% of the hash power, you can just take the coins with 0% hash power.
It’s obviously not a comprehensive guide on how to cheat the system. I’m making the point that computers will never be secure under the current paradigm when there are massive and powerful actors with vastly greater resources than the average person. I strongly suspect that an org like the DoD (which had exclusive access to integrated circuit technology for three years before anyone else) could probably capture/spoof virtually the entire network if they wanted too.
By spending billions of dollars in order for them to dupe a transaction worth a couple million at most. Once. Before the entire network realizes what happens and a fork is made. It’s just idiotic enough to work!
Wow, I thought I was back on reddit with the tech fear mongering.
A single Ethereum transaction now uses only 0.02 kWh of electrical energy and has a carbon footprint of 0.01 kgCO2, which is much lower than the average values for a debit transaction or PayPal.
…which is much lower than the average values for a debit transaction or PayPal
[citation needed]
A quick search gives me .0015 kWh per card transaction, but that could be wrong.
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I love how one man created arguably the most complex puzzle in the history of mankind and people shit on it just because it’s literally hard to solve (aka “uses energy”) and the solutions have value.
