The first two are grifts and I have yet to see anyone say quantum computing is going to be a grift anywhere, so because of your other comment I’m going to assume you’re just someone who likes crypto and AI and are mad that people are pointing out how they are grifts with huge environmental and social problems
Hi, read the next sentence:
quantum computing is also a grift
Hi, read the next sentence:
You’re condescending so I don’t trust your opinion and you’re also the first person to ever say that to me. Also with nothing to back that take up, good job.
I didn’t mean it to be condescending, you said you’d never seen it, so I said it. It was kind of a joking, cheeky way. I didn’t mean it like you’re stupid or incapable of understanding it. It was a failed attempt at a joke, and once I saw the down votes I realized the joke didn’t land.
No I didn’t back it up but that ship has sailed. I dont really care to prove to you my position now, I’d rather just apologize for how my comment came off.
You know what? That’s ok. I’ve flubbed jokes before. All is forgiven and better luck next time!
The FOSS, for one.
Open source software is a grift?
How, exactly?
Try reading the post again
FOSS isn’t a “new and emergent technology”. The OSI was founded in 1998. Richard Stallman started the FSF in the 80’s.
By that metric, llms aren’t new either and the blockchain was invented in 2008.
Blockchain had potential in use cases beyond currency replacement and speculative assets. AI has actual use cases as a high quality chatbot. Instead these things were hyped and marketed as things beyond their actual capabilities.
Quantum as it is currently doesn’t seem like a grift, but is just a susceptible to being manipulated and marketed as one as soon as there’s a remotely market viable version of it.
The problem isn’t lemmings or luddites, the problem is lying capitalists hoping to sell something that doesn’t exist or isn’t stable.
What exactly are some of the use cases for an infinitely growing, append-only database built primarily so its largest users can rewrite history at will?
Why does a blockchain have to be one big omni ledger? Why do users need more than one token in it? Blockchain could be used for login tokens for a website or for proof of ownership of software licenses.
Yeah it’s currently flawed and used beyond the scale it’s capable of for things it’s not really good for, that was my entire point. Now the tech is tainted and reviled because of the grift and no one wants to touch it and explore what it could be useful for.
If login tokens are stored on a public ledger replay attacks write themselves. Public or private, keeping every login token ever is a horrible audit mechanism and doesn’t scale well. At scale, speed to generate becomes a concern. Not at scale, something lighter is faster.
A normal database scales better than a license blockchain and doesn’t require extra computation to write. Audit logs and hashes prevent extra edits. License files signed by a central authority don’t require a database and the central authority is functionally equivalent albeit less expensive than a blockchain.
I am still interested in a good use for the tech. I have yet to see one that is genuine.
Anything where a trustless system is important. The “largest users can rewrite history at will” is a critique to specific implementations, not Blockchain.
I don’t know that it is, though. Can you show me form of blockchain in the real world where this doesn’t apply? Saying large actors can’t affect a specific piece of internet technology, so far, is rather like teaching physics without friction. It’s nice and fun and easy to understand but completely ignores the reality of any implementation.
Well, you just don’t know. In the real world there are private blockchains between equipotent participants that don’t rely on burning the planet to function. Helpful reading: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ethical-hacking/private-blockchain/
Blockchain is a concept, can’t be owned or affected.
Is it rewritable, or is it append only? You only wrote one sentence yet still managed to contradict yourself so I suspect you have a very meager comprehension of the technology.
Go ahead and prove me wrong. Show me blockchain implementations that are immutable post append. On my end, we can talk about Bitcoin forks. We can also talk about the current state of consensus mechanisms, each of which has the explicit ability for large actors to rewrite history in their favor. Even Monero is susceptible because this is fundamental to the blockchain in any form. It’s been a huge reason why I make sure I get paid up front for any consulting I do in this space.
Only the last few blocks are “rewritable,” which is why a certain number of confirmations are a necessity. Going any further back than that, would be a completely different chain - a fork. The last of of those occurring on Bitcoin was thirteen years ago when it was still encountering growing pains due to an uptake in usage. Forks of more than a couple transactions are not a frequent, regular occurrence by any exaggeration, so for all intents and purposes of modern crypto usage, it is immutable, not rewritable.
If any of it is rewritable, none of it is immutable. You can’t have it both ways.
Notice I put quotes around rewritable. That’s because it’s not the correct term, and I was being charitable in engaging in your straw man argument. It’s actually a collision of timing, where two solutions are presented for the same block in a short amount of time, and until the consensus is reached by the majority, both are temporarily valid. Once consensus is reached, it’s final. There’s no going back. In that sense it is not rewritable, it is immutable. It’s just fuzzy for the first fifteen minutes which branch will resolve as the actual Blockchain in the event of near ties.
I don’t think you’re using straw man correctly.
You’re naively referring to how consensus should work while completely ignoring both the well-defined attacks I referenced and the reality of large actors in a consensus network. You don’t know what you’re talking about or you don’t understand how the theory works or you’re possibly just being obtuse. No matter what, this is pointless. Good luck.
As I understand, it’s normally append-only. But, with some implementations, if a malicious entity controls most of the block production, they can undo recent transactions at will.
Some resort to majority vote, in the case of disagreements. Theoretically, if someone owned/controlled over 50% of the database, they could rewrite it, and have their version seen as true.
For the few valid uses of it, that shouldn’t be a problem. It will also be reasonably detectable beforehand.
It’s not as simple as that. Each block solves the problem of the former block, so to change something five blocks back, you now need to solve six blocks prior to writing the next block, otherwise it’s not cryptographically valid. The resources required to accomplish that are not trivial, and it’s never been done. Very theoretical indeed, in the same sense you could theoretically run through a wall if all of your atoms missed all of the atoms in the wall when you should have collided.
Yup they have their uses, but what happened here is like in a world where hammer is not invented yet, but the invention of the hammer causes every single industry to start using hammer for all their existing process without considering whether they are appropriate or not.
Calling blockchain a pure grift ignores the serious enterprise-level work being done to solve real logistical problems. The technology behind NFTs isn’t just for JPEGs it’s used to create a unique and immutable digital identity for stuff like physical shipping containers and pallets as digital twins. In a global supply chain where a single shipment passes through dozens of untrusted parties like factories, freight forwarders, ports, customs, and warehouses a distributed blockchain leger provides a single source of truth that replaces manual emails, scanned paper documents, and spreadsheets. Smart contracts can automate releases upon verified scans, directly reducing the demurrage and detention fees that cost millions of dollars. The big hurdle isn’t that the tech doesn’t work or is a grift, it’s getting competing companies to agree on common standards and invest in the infrastructure. The speculation was a sideshow, but the underlying utility for tracking physical assets across trust boundaries is a real thing
Capitalism is what makes them grifts. Llms could be neat. Theft at scale, environmental impact, and using it to kill little kids (anyone but jfc the kids killed wtf) is the problem. Its always the horrid companies and governments who look at any tech like “can i hurt people with this? I totally can…”
they will all be enshittified so whats the point
uhm well how about anti-enshittification/corruption technology, wheres that
If you agree with the basic view that any software that does not respect your rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute it, is a form of unjust power over you - then that principle becomes a convenient acid test for virtually all computer technology. Any tech that enables and enhances those rights is not a grift. Any tech that restricts those rights is a grift.
Of course there are edge-cases. Blockchain stuff is usually open-source, and yet it’s a tool that has been designed by and for the most extreme right-wing libertarian types, so while the underlying technologies could hypothetically be used for good, the forms that they’re implemented in are pretty clearly a grift. So intention and design matter too.
I’d also like to see how the Hyppocratic License shapes software over time.
Would also love to see more developments in Farm Hack, Appropriate Technology, and Open Source Ecology.
thats why I think there should be a fsf led effort to make some version of FOSS agentic AI(i know its just a marketing term).
I hate that the ability to just sit at the computer and go
Hey, can you go through the hundreds of images i have in my Downloads folder, and transfer the images in which i appear in the center to this directory, also make it so in the future any pdf with a specific header goes into this directorywill M$ exclusive feature.Yeah, if you can get over a knee-jerk hate of “ai” systems, it’s pretty evident at least some of them are here to stay. So it is necessary for there to be fully free alternatives for those.
None of them are a grift. They get used by financial traders for performing grifts, but the grift was and always has been stock market manipulation. AI is incredibly useful and many competent engineers now use it effectively. I expect the bubble of anthropic/openai will pop once local or on-prem models get better.
The problem is not that this technologies are or aren’t a grift, the problem is that they are used to grift (and that the 4th power that is supposed to protect us against this isn’t doing its job).
In that sense : every next technology will be a grift. Look at spaces, he sold refueling booster as the next step in human
space explorationevolution and finally its just another company used to mine our data. GriftThis is the grift economy baby! Everything is a gotcha.
These technologies are not grifts.
The way they are often employed is absolutely a grift.
Blockchain is a very cool concept. Getting people to pay $1,000 for a picture of a cat and imply that it has value because it’s on a blockchain is grift.
Ai is a cool technology. It has become a grift because the companies behind it are sucking up massive investor dollars, destroying the worldwide computing parts market, and persuading managers to axe jobs promising the AI can take their place.
If quantum computing actually starts to work some of it will be used for grift because many current encryption schemes could potentially be cracked using quantum computers.
The picture wasn’t even on the blockchain. It was a url which links to a picture of a cat sitting on someone else’s server
Was it even that or just a hash of the url (or whatever text/data was being “confirmed”)?
It was some sort of hash system. The blockchain didn’t want to store large amounts of data on the chain itself so it would store some sort of hash of the image file and as I recall a pointer to a server where that file was located.
The whole thing was totally fucking stupid but people poured tons of money into it
I’m learning more and more that blaspheming against predominant gospel on lemmy isn’t worth the effort.
Yet you are doing it right now. Curious.
- turning point USA or something
amen
Fediverse
All technologies are grifts when controlled by the capitalist class and marketed under the logic of capitalism. Simple as that. Even the simple hammers you find at a hardware store are a side effect of some rich asshole’s money hoarding operation.
For this reason, I do not reject the listed technologies outright. (Although I do not personally know of a non-capitalist use for Blockchain, I’m open to suggestions.) I reject the capitalists who control these technologies.
Let me see if I got this right. By that logic if I can see that people need spoons to eat their soup and I provide said spoons at a price that covers my costs and earn me a profit for my hard work to produce them, I’m an asshole that hoards money?
Depends. Are you one of the workers in the spoon production process? Then no, you’re not an asshole that hoards money, at least not on that basis.
Do you privately own the factory? Do you privately own all the spoons that the workers produce under a series of “”“voluntary”“” employment contracts? Then yes, you’re hoarding money (more precisely, hoarding the means of production and products).
Profits are just wealth stolen from workers.
I’m a bit surprised that you’re reacting to that particular clause in my comment because it’s bog standard socialist analysis. Like I’m not saying anything controversial there unless you’re just not a socialist.
Arch Linux
btw
