Regarding the distribution of users on Mastodon servers, the article seems a little biased. The author complains about how "an average of six hundred users per server" doesn't look like "every user knows the system admin where their data is stored". The median users per server would have been a fairer metric than the mean, specially because it later points out that three servers have over 50% of the users in the Mastodon ecosystem...
I guess that the simplest solution is to forbid Google from being in the ad exchange business. Take down AdX and most of the monopolizing effects they have on the ecosystem would be dampened.
I think this will potentially be the lawsuit of the year. Really interesting read.
A lot of the monopoly advantages seem to focus on AdX. I wonder if demanding that Google shall not participate in the ad exchange business could slowly open up competition in all the other markets...
For example, they were concerned that header bidding would make AdX fees go down to 5% instead of 22%, thus they used their advantage in the ad server market to stifle this (plus the FB deal). They are able to do this because they control both markets and can modify the data protocols between these two pieces. Same applies to scrambling IDs (ad servers and display markets)
1. I'm not sure we agree on that... Bitcoin doesn't protect against attacks, it provides you with a relatively simple model to measure the cost of attacks.
At equilibrium, any Bitcoin network participant will look for two fundamental things: (a) being able to move their own assets and (b) relative market price stability of their bitcoin. In case of a sustained 50% attack, both properties start to crack, but not completely. But after the attack, they are regained -- (a) immediately, and (b) eventually.
Consider the attacker to be a government, for example, an actor with a relatively high amount of resources, and the Bitcoin participant a dissident citizen of such government. The dissident wouldn't like to have its assets frozen by the government (through strict censorship of the dissident's transactions), so the market value for Bitcoin drops comparatively to how wealthy was the dissident selling its bitcoin savings. But, also, the dissident might avoid selling if they have enough financial capacity to withstand the attack.
In order to carry out such attack, the government needs to increase its energy spending on Bitcoin, up to the point where the attack is successful for a prolonged period of time. Bitcoin production is intrinsically bound to energy generation, thus to its economic realities (variability of demand, climate conditions, political affairs, just to name a few).
It would cost a government X dollars a day, or Y watts a day, every day, minus the price of the coins generated to attack the network. I estimate X to be the total miner rewards: at the time of writing, 38M USD [1]. Y seems to be at around 456 GWh [2]. Is it worth it for your adversary? That number is the dissident's security parameter. As long as their savings are less valuable than the cost of the attack and they can sustain the attack financially, the dissident should be fine (or really scared about an enemy irrationally spending a lot of energy/money with the purpose of just preventing them to access their money temporarily).
In the end both miners and users just want the chain to move forward. If one particular actor or coalition potentially prevents it, users/miners outside the coalition (if they detect it) would raise their investment to continue chugging blocks.
I think there are no "legitimate" vs "attacker" uses of hashing power. It's more about coalitions between miners and how costly/profitable would it be for them to centralize the network, and how hard is it on the other participants to coordinate a decentralized counter-attack (which ends up profiting them). But eventually, the equilibrium between all participants is to spend as little money/energy as possible. And if it's not decentralized it becomes censorable: next, it loses its value: now who's gonna want to mine something worthless?
2. We see it the same way. I'd add that if Bitcoin is staying around (I don't think it can be shut down), one solution is to use Open Timestamps or other hacks that don't require "block real estate", thus in no way compete with transactions, essentially piggybacking the PoW and getting the timestamp for free.
> This immediately produces an incentive for both the network to make use of as much computational capacity as possible to keep itself safe, and for any attacker to amass enough computational capacity to mount an attack
This seems false to me. Could you elaborate on what incentives you see at play here?
On another note, I feel one of the finest design details of Bitcoin is that its "decentralization-failure-mode", a.k.a. under a 50ish-percent-attack, is technically indistinguishable from normal operation.
2. The DID spec doesn't require the use of Bitcoin. So we agree with your last statement-disguised-as-question. Thus, it shouldn't have been listed as a reason for the rejection of the proposal (which spawned this thread)
There's a non-sequitour in your depiction of an attack. Gaining 50% of hashing power is not that interesting unless you really want to prevent someone from using their Bitcoin. And you can only prevent them from using it while your attack is sustained. When someone has gained ~50% of the hashing power, they only can do a small number of attacks [1], that are only profitable under external conditions, and even then, extremely risky unless you have a lot more than 50%.
There really are no arguments for a race-to-the-bottom boundless energy spenditure. The equilibrium point is the market's appreciation of the service of securing a network of inflationless, politically neutral money, which is a pretty cool thing to have in our world of tyrannic governments.
But I wouldn't use it for the same reason I don't use Bluetooth headsets -- tech is just way too new, and of for some reason there are long term unexpected side effects, we won't know until a decade or two goes by.
PS: I'm vaccinated with the viral vector AstraZeneca one
Yep, this is just the introduction to these kinds of thing. Then, they start to get accountants in both countries to agree on what seems a reasonable rate, say 30%? And the other 70% can be delayed earnings or whatever, and then maybe they decide to reinvest it instead. The list of resources is bottomless and continuously increasing.
What matters is that because the savings are potentially huge, your BigCo
is incentivized to reduce that tax exposure and they've got the legal and accounting workforce to find that optimization.
I met aome of the creators back in the day. The RedHat model is working well for them: open source and sell consultancy. It doesn't scale exponentially but as long as their OSS product is good they won't have a shortage of incoming deals.
1. If you are the Communist party and you are planning electricity for a 5M inhabitants city in 2007, growing at 9% (doubling every ~7 years, electricity use is highly correlated with economic growth), you need to make the plants 10 times bigger than needed for them to last 20 years
2. Mining equipment is placed next to the source of electricity
3. Corrupt officials are co-opted (just turn on that turbine that is wasted working capacity for you, and I'll pay you in cash)
4. Profit?
FWIW, I think this doesn't happen exclusively in China but in every place where there's idle energy capture potential.
I think it's really similar to art. It's more about your relationship with the artist or the emotion that makes you want to own the original... And of course, the art market.
TL;DR: Ethereum uses a lot of energy, we shouldn't use it for anything non essential because it wastes energy.
Contrary to the article title, 90% of the arguments exposed are just rehashing why energy waste os bad, and why we shouldn't make use of it for NFTs.
10% of the article ("the many other reasons") is a critique of the art circuit and imho, a little ranty about how hard it is to get rich from art.
The actually interesting part of the article is at the end, but its just an enumeration of the ways in which cryptoart world:
* Cryptoart creates artificial scarcity for digital objects, creating an “original” which can be owned
* Cryptoart recreates the some of the worst aspects of existing art markets
* Cryptoart offers no intellectual property protection and there is no regulatory structure in place to keep copyrighted materials from being minted into and sold as NFTs
* Cryptoart smart contracts offer no legal protection, and any talk of contracts baked into the NFT “requiring resales to cut in the artist” or “compensate gallery workers” depend entirely on the goodwill of the purchaser.
The rest 4500 words are a repetition of how bad it is to waste energy, woth a note at the end about how the author was "never as bored with a subject to write 5000 words about it", which to me is pretty passionate.