skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a red herring. In addition to the IDFA, Apple has something called the IDFV (identifierForVendor). This ID is unique to a publisher, i.e. if a user has 3 of your apps installed, all three will share the same IDFV, so you can even do cross-app or cross-selling analytics. What you cannot do by design is use IDFV to build a cross-publisher dossier on users, or target users based on that ID other than on your own apps.

Apple hasn't put any restrictions on IDFV, only on IDFA, which was designed, well, for advertising and needs to be reined-in due to abuses in the Wild West everything goes world of the AdTech surveillance-industrial complex. In fact the existing opt-out "Limit Ad Tracking" setting that already implements what will become opt-in with iOS 14.5 does not apply to IDFVs.

Back in 2010 Steve Jobs himself had banned analytics altogether when Flurry's VP of Marketing blabbed and disclosed the existence of the then secret iPad:

https://venturebeat.com/2010/06/02/apple-flurry-ipad/
I’m guessing it’s because it’s unclear how your comment is relevant to the thread.

(I didn’t downvote you)
Indeed. There's even an xkcd for it - https://xkcd.com/1814/
> Bitcoin increases electricity consumption without offsetting any carbon emissions elsewhere.

Isn't that the same as a Tesla opting to potentially emit carbon at a centralized power plant? Bitcoin rigs don't burn gasoline directly, but rely on whatever source of power is available at their location. Bitcoin does waste a lot of energy, hopefully we can draw from cleaner sources in the long-run to operate it (and find ways to move Bitcoin off of proof-of-work).

UPCO2 is a new token from Uphold.com, and BTC0 is Bitcoin backed by UPCO2 tokens to offset carbon emissions. Using these crypto assets is one way to offset carbon while still using Crypto.
Doesn't matter, really. Bitcoin is secured by waste. Maybe the money is burned in coal-fired power plants, maybe it's burned buying "mining" equipment, maybe it's burned building wind turbines. All of those things are polluting and all of them use manpower and natural resources.

If Bitcoin transitions to 100% renewable energy, then it will just use more of it to achieve the same amount of money-burning. The economics stay the same.
In rural areas of the US, there are some places where OSM data is hilariously bad. At one point they imported a whole bunch of TIGER data that wasn't cleaned up properly, and it's still showing roads that don't exist a decade later.

It's a good way to tell if a mapping service is using their own data or just ripping off OSM though.
> Similarly, maybe you haven’t hit a transaction yet which a government made an effort to block but …

They wouldn't be able to unless they had over 51% of the mining power, and it would be easily noticed.
> non-resident should probably be defined as someone not residing in the city or any corporation with >50% beneficial ownership not residing in the city.

Some places already have that distinction for capital gains. You get a different tax percentage on the capital gain resulting from the sale of your "main residence" (where you spend the majority of your time) vs any secondary or investment properties you might have.

But that doesn't change property taxes.
When arguing with a Bitcoin-fanatic, try this line:

"Yeah I agree that cryptocurrencies are interesting, perhaps some day one will replace the USD. It will probably not be Bitcoin, but rather some other cryptocurrency“.

Watch how they recoil!

For they have been found out, they do not actually care for financial freedom, etc., all these noble crypto goals which can also be achieved with a cryptocurrency that is not Bitcoin.

All they care about is their speculative investment in Bitcoin in particular, so it won't help them much if another crypto becomes the world standard.

It‘s probably <1% that are true believers and >99% that have missed out on a few bull runs and are now hoping to get rich quickly.

Really, try this line some time and you will come to the same conclusion.
To be clear: the Rust foundation does not control any technical decision making in the Rust project. Anyone willing to open an RFC on GitHub has the opportunity to influence the development of Rust, and that has not changed.
Again that nonsense about AMD CPUs and PCI lanes. It's completely unclear why the old h/w wasn't enough (and whether the new servers are enough).

200 million certs / 86,400 means 2,315 certs per second.
Mid-range server with SSDs can do many 000's of TPS. Even if they need 5 tx/cert, that shouldn't be a problem with 3-4 year old servers.
Actually your analogy is flawed. Because the way bitcoin works you have to pay some energy cost per block and you have a limited time to use that block because the next block will be coming in in 10 mins. It would be more like we had to make new coins every 10 mins.

Or am I missing something here?
Which is a good excuse for someone to justify why they can use more tomorrow than yesterday.
> It is hilariously inefficient system

I think you mean "morally reprehensible"
> Musk wants clean power

Sure... /s That's why the solar roofs are very slow to materialize and the rockets/cars/bitcoins get all the focus.

Musk wants to make money. I seriously expect the whole solar-roof brand-bundling of Tesla was a clever PR trick, just like the Mars mission is for SpaceX.
I fear people who enjoy using LinkedIn.
I'd argue that the over-engineering hell preceded this book, with every tiny J2EE project using a full 3-tier stack, incl (but not limited to) stateful EJBs, session EJBs, countless JSPs, DAO layers, god only know what else.

It was this book that actually revealed, in patterns, the bigger picture, where it was all going wrong, and the alternatives. This book and Spring v1.0 go along together in my mind.

BTW (and OT), another underrated Fowler book in a similar vein is "Analysis Patterns", another 10k-ft view of common business problems.
Actually with Covid it might really be illegal to go get tea with your mother in some places, assuming you don't live with her.
Thanks for the link.
Will check them out
> Well that's the problem with all proofs

No, its the problem with pure logical proofs, which is why for statements about reality rather than abstract relations of concepts, empirical proofs (despite being less absolute) are generally preferred.

> the ontological argument

Since you have merely waved at and sketched the argument, let me do the same it's demolition: existence is not a predicate.
The Personal Responsibility Vortex is a decent explanation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjNRtrZjkfE
Analyses like this just take the energy cost of each block of transactions and divide it by the amount of transactions in the block. If the number of transactions in a block doubles, the average energy cost per transaction is halved.

Another way of stating it is "the marginal energy usage of a bitcoin transaction is essentially 0".
People use it as money, so it is money. If people used acorns as money, then acorns would be money.

You don't need to complicate this further.
Is there anything actionable for us, today, in the study? I’m not skilled in reading these, I read the first few paragraphs and knew I was over my head.
Weird... their name is EPA not SPA
In my experience all of those simulators and game engines have really egregious bugs that go undetected. C++ is fine if you don't need correctness (which is actually most of the time, in practice).
I feel like you're trying to justify using Bitcoin rather than engaging with the problem.

The mining-power relationship essentially creates a price arbitrage opportunity between electricity prices and Bitcoin mining fees. This is a very bad thing for the global economy as it ties all other uses of electricity to the Bitcoin mining fees in a very direct way. I can't think of another relationship this direct to energy prices, it could be catastrophic for entire industries. Oh and also it's emitting as much emissions as Argentina at the moment.

A friend of mine called Bitcoin a candidate for The Great Filter, and I'm inclined to agree.
DejaVu fonts great! Great tip
in your example 100 bitcoin users would let a million of people die of starvation/hypothermia so that they can play blockchain.

scale in general does not excuse, but consumption per capita should.

A Ps4 consume around 100 watt/hour

If you keep it on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, is 876 KW/year.

Which is not very much.

At 120Tw/year with 5 million users BC consumption per capita is an astonishing 24,000kw/year (or 24Mw)

Every bitcoin user consumes 27 times the energy consumed by a (quite powerful) gaming console turned on non stop (which is never the case)

That's why there have been campaigns around the World to replace incandescent bulbs with the energy efficient ones.

Compared to the traditional ones the new light bulbs can save up to the 80% of the energy, compared to a bitcoiner, a non bitcoiner can save ~97% of the energy by simply playing videogames.
Which is also true on the opposite side or did your mining rig magically materialize out of nowhere? The difference is that a lot of the infrastructure for the traditional system is already built out which reduces the marginal energy costs to a degree that isn't the case for cryptocurrencies.
Yep and that's Bitcoin's network effect. There is demand for Bitcoin. 2017 was the year of retail interest, 2021 is the year of institutional interest. It's easy to see that the price is now uncorrelated with the retail interest, using Google Trends as an example. [0]

> there is no particular reason to believe that people will be more willing to pay over $45k to update ledgers to indicate possession of a particular alphanumeric string in a couple of decades' time than they are now

Absolutely. Nobody can know with certainty what will happen but if you compare Bitcoin with something like gold you immediately realize that Bitcoin is better in any possible way. There is literally no reason to think that Bitcoin won't replace gold in terms of market capitalization (except for the 7.5% actually used in manufacturing) [1].

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...
Does anyone have any fun stories about fuzzers they ran that broke production systems that were inadvertently connected to the system under test?
It is hard to get CRTs these days. Enjoy it while it lasts.

These days people are playing old vector games like Asteroids on x-y laser projection displays.

Definitely Andy Warhol would have had a blast with Deluxe Paint!
Not saying you are wrong. But the issue is bigger than deleting the apps. Some of them have become inseparable digital tools which are part and parcel of every day life, work, play and to a some extent human existence.
While you might disagree with that, Bitcoin is useful.
If the owner of Bitcoin's 51% hashrate decides to take anyone's coins, then Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is over. They all go to 0. If that happens, then all of the critics will be proven right.

Hasn't happened so far though because Bitcoin disincentivizes this sort of behavior.
Could you elaborate on that? How can future transactions be accommodated if everyone stops mining new blocks?
I certainly would.
Obviously there's more infrastructure behind USD transactions than just Visa. But that doesn't change much about my initial comparison — Fedwire energy costs are low and amortize across many transactions, as is true of the rest of the infrastructure you list.

And if you want to start talking about the Fed and US imperial power, then we have to start talking about the bitcoin hype industry which exists to pump the value of various cryptocurriencies. Cruises, conferences, etc, etc. Besides, it's not as if we could get rid of US imperialism or oil extraction by switching from USD to BTC. You're just naming tangentially-related institutions with high externalities, not actual costs of USD transactions.

This is a deliberate obfuscation on the massive inefficiency in Bitcoin's transaction infrastructure. We don't need to talk about geopolitical power to talk about Bitcoin's transparent wastefulness.
with this pricing model I'd expect they're just reselling something like the GCP OCR APIs, most likely with some domain specific value adds
Energy consumption does not necessarily mean environmental harm. That's not a law of the universe at all.
The mining equipment needed to be produced. The mining rig needed to be installed, many factories needed to be produced. There are workers in these mines, did they spend energy driving a car? Did they use a gym bag? Where did that come from?

BTC is not magic dude, it has externalities too.
They've been trying for years but now it's been running smoothly in production for several months. They plan a few minor tweaks, then after watching it some more they'll migrate the legacy chain to it. That's a fairly simple software engineering task, rather than the difficult research challenge that PoS has been until recently.

The other big change on the way is a massive increase in scalability, which I'm hoping will help move the market in a more sustainable direction.
...and yet it is so.

Total energy required to mine one block / # transactions per block.
BST - Beach Standard Temp

or maybe

FST - Florida Standard Temp / Florida Submerged Temp
Bitcoin is leading a bloodless revolution against the financial and state oligarchs. War is devastating to the environment, we should be thankful that Bitcoin is making the world a more equitable place in a relatively eco friendly way (and definitely more humanitarian).

The alternative to Bitcoin isn't Visa, it's bombs and guillotines. We all have a vested interest in seeing Bitcoin succeed.
Nothing close to 120 gigawatt/sec (going by one estimate)
Search broken. So what is the benefit?
The difference is we have a choice in those matters. I.e. my telephone does not work in that sense, because I will not pick up for an unknown number in most cases. A communicable human is on the other end.

With "AI" (machine learning / neural nets), we're letting opaque boxes arbitrarily control and ban accounts at will. It's like forcing people to use cars that randomly decide that it won't drive that day for no good reason.

"AI is not going to be any different in this respect"

The other examples all include accountable humans, "AI" here does not. We're already seeing issues of machine learning applying sexist biases for example because of datasets and poor training. What are you going to do, hold google, or any other faceless corporation, accountable for its bad translations? Good luck.

It's only going to get worse in the future as other stratified aspects of society get cemented by "AI".
When I look at the parent page of the provided link, https://history.wisc.edu/undergraduate-program/history-caree... , I don't see any numbers about U Wisconsin history major employment rates and average pay. Why? The investment in time and money young people and their families make in college is enormous, and colleges should try to make the investment decision as informed as possible.

History is worth studying, and the purpose of college is not solely to get a job. But that is a purpose.
Via Tesla, bitcoin is now implicitly held by all investors in the S&P 500, including, very likely, you. You are now a benefactor of bitcoin's growth, whether you're aware of it or not. This trend, where bitcoin quietly confers benefits to growing constituencies of people who remain completely unaware of the fact, will continue.

And, at the same time, there are many people, in less fortunate circumstances, for whom the benefits of bitcoin are felt much more acutely: https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1357757736394444800

The "minuscule percentage" you quote (without reference) is very likely already clearly incorrect and will continue, over time, to become more incorrect.
Read two paragraphs below what in your own link.

>However, the CCAF’s report specifies that the 76% refers to the share of hashers who use renewable energy at any point. It estimates that only 39% of hashing’s total energy consumption comes from renewables.

> Behind hydroelectricity, coal (38%) and natural gas (36%) are the energy sources hashers favour most.
This is averaged across transactions because it's more about the mining cost, but also there are _many_ computers that need to process your transaction and repeat the same work, because it's decentralised. That's a big factor too.
The Search for the Perfect Door (2016)
Feel free to present a case where the economic impact of gaming is less than Bitcoin (feel free to include every crypto-currency ever made in that comparison).

Market caps in speculative, unregulated markets aren't indicators of economic relevance. Gaming facilitates billions in production on a yearly basis. Crypto related activity produces very little in comparison. And no, someone buying billions worth of Bitcoin doesn't count (just like people buying GameStop stock doesn't reflect the economic impact of the gaming industry).
This "legacy financial system" comparison isn't fair. I use standard banking and haven't been to a bank in years. I think a more reasonable comparison is with online only banks. Our current system doesn't actually need physical cash. You just need banks keeping score for individual accounts and a central bank keeping score of the banks' accounts.
So essentially, it's privacy or economic growth? John Chambers offers a horrible false choice.

I for one, would be glad to see a future where my privacy wasn't mined.
That is exactly correct.
Bitcoin's inefficiency is tremendous, its throughput minimal, and by design it cannot scale.
Definitionally, money’s value is not supposed to be subjective.
Sure. But the amount of channels gives an indication on the potential users. And it's way way less than on the main network, basically a footnote at this point.

Yeah it _might_ grow in the future. But until it does it doesn't work as an argument.

Also in order to get into Visa levels of efficiency one would have to have (assuming the 741kWh in the main network) 500k TX per second in the lightning network with 0 energy cost. Visa handles around 1700 per second.

So basically if we'd have all the worlds economy in Lightning network we might get close to those numbers (assuming 8 billion people each doing one transaction per 4 hours, that's super high but ah well, whatever). And that's assuming the mining energy consumption doesn't change at all which it definitely would not do in case of the whole world relying on Bitcoin.
Could be anything, just logging the value of x to some place. Assume it never raises exceptions.
The “petro-dollar” concept begs to differ. It postulates that the USD is propped up by continuing the trade of oil for USD. The US ha certainly invaded multiple countries ostensibly for control of their oil.
Starship runs on Oxygen and Methane, both are renewable, both can easily be extracted from the air. Carbon neutral.
This article is just bad. Bitcoin's dirty baggage is magnitudes less than anything else companies and countries do to this world through not just air pollution but environment destruction, water pollution etc.

I'll keep arguing about this continuously. Bitcoin will never reach the severity that some other industries did.

Bitcoin is a non-issue.
Assembly offers direct, low-level control over memory, and assembly can be used to implement anything which can be implemented in C++. Maybe C++ has certain advantages which made this problem a lot easier to solve for Mozilla, and I'm certainly happy to have C++ in the language landscape, but another team with other processes may have been able to use assembly to achieve similar goals.
Nor am I counting the infrastructure surrounding Bitcoin mining. This tabulates only the energy expenditure of the computers performing the transactions.
It'd be best to just...not drive. Second best would be to actively pursue a mass-scale electric conversion so that we could reuse all those big metal chassis, tires, seats, etc in existing cars. It'd be far cheaper in terms of carbon footprint to replace a combustion engine with electric. Why aren't we doing that? Because retrofitting is hard and not very profitable. And yeah, we need a place to put the batteries too. Much better to just junk everything and build more stuff!

(Yes I know, most of the materials of a car will be recycled. But it's just another expression of our throwaway/can't fix that culture).
The goal makes sense but our current DST implementation of a sixty-minute jump twice a year seems unnecessarily large and disruptive. (And not just dealing with kids -- traffic accidents and heart attacks spike after.) Whereas if there was a way to coordinate a daily shift it would be less than a minute.

It reminds me of when I'm camping. I usually fall into a dawn-based time system: Wake up around ~dawn, eat breakfast ~d+2h, lunch ~d+6h, dinner ~d+12h, bed down ~d+16h. You maximize daylight this way but the main problem is that you end up drifting relative to everyone else and if you want to rely on a standard watch to keep your schedule it requires some mental math.

I'd love to figure out how to use a combination of dawn-based time system for my daily routines plus UTC for remote collaboration.
US military requires 20x more energy than bitcoin.
You're getting a lot of replies but I don't see anyone answering the initial questions. Some really rough math for playing video games:

Assuming I'm playing with someone across the country, I hop 13 routers in a quick traceroute.

Assuming each router is commercial hardware (~400W) and my traffic completely saturates them, that's 5,200W.

Plus the two machines at the end of each line, assuming they're beefy gaming PCs/servers with 1,000W power supplies at 100% load just for this game. That's 2,000W.

Playing a 30 minute Starcraft game comes to 3.6kWh, or two orders of magnitude less than a bitcoin transaction. It's almost certainly less than that since my assumptions were very conservative.

~~~

For something live like a concert, a 54,000 sqft hall uses about 1,100 kWh of power per day (lighting, HVAC). Plus 15kW of speakers for a 6 hour concert is 1,190 kWh. Divided by the 6000 people attending, is 0.2 kWh per attendee. Adding a 10 mile solo drive per person is about 3 kWh. Or again about 2 orders of magnitude less.

~~~

These aren't good comparisons when I could do hundreds of each of the activities you listed for the cost of one transaction.
Yes, it's possible. I've tried it myself.
I didn't have time to dig in to the sources but I wonder if that fun fact is still true. Back in the day your VCR and TV used to consume a large amount of power in standby. These days a device on standby consumes pennies of power a year. Of course there are a lot more electronics in the average home these days...
As such thus regulations will occur once normal folks can't get a refund for whatever broken trinket they purchase with Dogecoin or EROS or ETH or ETHC or BSV or Ripple or Stellar or, or do I need to continue?...

I'm off to play in the penny stock section of Yahoo... /s
All the dishes are pre-cooked. So it's just oven or microwave. It really feels like the instagram of food, where it's super easy to put together but gives you a nice result.
Extremely unlikely. Bitcoin has been around 12 years and it's just now starting to go mainstream. Most people still have no idea what it even is. You can count the number of publicly traded companies that have Bitcoin in their treasury on 2 hands and that's only destined to increase.

I can't give you an actual estimate of how long it will take for Bitcoin to lose its market share but I can confidently say it will take decades. At very least until it replaces a good chunk of gold's market cap.
"Smith be praised, the invisible hand will surely prevent them from prospering in the long run, sure."