and in the same way, perhaps stop saying “westerners”
many us had the same thought that it’s xenophobic bullshit… perhaps we all should stop arbitrarily grouping people into geographic groups and making sweeping generalisations
and saying that the USA is dumber than a donkey and implying that china is not is just fucking laughable… i’m aussie, so i have no horse in either race: our economy is almost entirely reliant on china and we rely on the USA for basically everything else, including protection from china… and yknow what? all cultures are fucking weird… stop being so god damn condescending. the only thing it proves is that you’ve never travelled enough, or that “different” makes you uncomfortable which makes you an incurable bigot
the australian government (i know, slightly different level of security and requirement) does an interesting thing where when you take a photo in their identity app it flashes a bunch of different colours very quickly. i assume it takes several photos with different colours to help ensure that shadows are behaving correctly (perhaps it also helps with adding detail for facial recognition and rejection?)
… kinda unrelated, but i’ve always found it fascinating
you’re saying a buzz word without understanding the trade offs in designs… POW doesn’t have to imply higher energy cost for more transactions: shove more transactions in a block and POW cost is the same… that’s a trade off sure because then a block becomes a more valuable thing to 51%
POW is also only 1 of a lot of different consensus algorithms, all with their own trade-offs… POS benefits those with money for example (although you can still form mining pools - TBH i’d argue it’s exactly the same in this respect to POW in practice - good luck mining anything of value in POW without investing $ millions)
some blockchains aren’t built to be entirely trustless and uncoordinated, merely semi trusted and loosely coordinated (think a consortium of banks - they don’t trust each other entirely but a blockchain means no individual member working alone can cheat. in this case because it’s semi-organised they can use POS with a special token and delegate those “mining tokens” 1 per member of the consortium or something… you can even set this kind of chain up as an ethereum side chain!)
aren’t needed for regular transactions
but that kinda defeats the point of a central authority having control: the value of any currency is entirely based on what you can use it for… unless you tied their value in a way that the government regulates - eg to have a banking license you must swap USD for eUSD and visa versa on a 1:1 basis without fees (perhaps they burn eUSD to get new USD; IDK - you can’t oversupply. it gets tricky)… anyway, beside the point: regular transactions is exactly what the government needs some control over
imo i actually hate the idea of a public crypto currency
people think that the government having their hands on the levers of a fiat currency is a bad thing, but it’s an incredibly useful property to make sure that we can stabilise things and push away from recession etc! without those levers we can end up in a spiral a lot easier
i think though that where these problems don’t exist is behind the scenes: what if the whole world replaced SWIFT with a private blockchain? maybe a wire transfer wouldn’t take 5 days and cost like $20 (or maybe it would because it’s probably not the technology that makes these things slow)… in this case, you have a known group of semi-trusted actors (international banks), which is actually a perfect set of properties for a blockchain: they’re all able to cooperate but don’t implicitly trust, and can verify each other but mainly use blockchain so they can all automatically agree
and here lies the issue with asking about crypto in non-crypto circles… everyone thinks they completely understand blockchain in its entirely. what they actually have is a rudimentary understanding of a single blockchain as it was literally 15 years ago
of course the problem with asking in crypto circles is that they’re all trying to sell you their new big thing which is probably total trash
so really there’s no good way to ask and get reasonable answers about crypto
they tied meat to themselves and ran at the bear screaming