Fossil fuel are getting progressively harder to produce, since easily accessible oil and gas fields were the first to be exploited, and are (soon to be) depleted, leaving hard to reach ones. So they’re getting more expensive even without taxing them.

Renewable sources are getting progressively cheaper.

The EU is planning to enforce CBAM soon, and other may follow and tax import from country that have 0 carbon tax.

So even if they’re not motivated for dumb political reasons, they’re going to feel more and more financial pressure.

The years is 2025, and the USA is betting on early 20th century energy sources.

Guess what happens next.

RAOP stands for Remote Audio Output Protocol and is the key to enabling Airplay on Linux

https://medium.com/@ed.sav/enabling-airplay-from-linux-1f6358c9ca1c

A non-zero number of employees scripted random daily prompts to maintain LLM usage stars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3j9muCo4o0

They’re not assholes. If this is the work of the federal gouvernment then they’re just following the law.

A work of the United States government is defined by the United States copyright law, as “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties”.[1] Under section 105 of the Copyright Act of 1976,[2] such works are not entitled to domestic copyright protection under U.S. law and are therefore in the public domain.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States

Creating a temp folder does not allow to read aloud articles using TTS. That’s the only reason why I use Pocket. I don’t use it to manage bookmarrks.

10 to 100 Times less reliable than WiFi

The Android app has a decent read-aloud feature. Hope it will still works after the service closes. I don’t use it for article discovery, nor for sync.

It’s an objective improvement over EMV which doesn’t protect privacy at all.

Taler protect payer privacy while exposing income information. Meaning it can help collect taxes to pay for infrastructure, education, public service, …

That’s a fine compromise. I hope Taler become a practical alternative to EMV and other shitty payment systems being pushed by banks.

same on all chains. All have a proposal, discussion, implementation, waiting period (for code to be deployed), and activation

I though most of those steps didn’t occur on-chain in the case of bitcoin. But I could be mistaken.

Would you mind sharing a link with the equivalent information on bitcoin, ie its governance process and how each governance operation (proposal, vote, activation ) is handled by the chain?

I’m looking at BIP-1. It explains how to submit a proposal via mailing list and versioned repository, ie off-chain.

Also looking at BIP-9. It does rely on the chain for governance, and allow polling for the most popular soft-fork. But it focus on exclusively on testing soft forks, which severely limit its usefulness.

allowing multiple backward-compatible changes (further called “soft forks”) to be deployed in parallel.

It seems BIP-9 doesn’t provide a solution to propose/vote/activate the larger non-backward-compatible changes, ie doesn’t help prevent hard forks. And big social and environmental issues affecting bitcoin probably require such large change.

Tezos would still require all nodes to upgrade to the code which contains the new algorithm. It can’t just automatically know what the new code is. It then can schedule these to activate at a certain block using a signaling system of some sort.

Code proposal, vote on new code activation of new code, are all Tezos on-chain operation. These operations include a hash of the new code to be deployed. There’s some off-chain work happening to update tools, which I guess include compiling said code. So you’re right, some off-cain action is needed for deployment https://www.tezosagora.org/learn#an-introduction-to-tezos-governance

My understanding is that compared to BTC governance, a larger part of the process happen on-chain. Also there is a relatively smaller portion of nodes (baker) involved in creating/verifying blocks that must update. This allowed various protocol changes without forks over the years.

Good point, with BIPs the Bitcoin community is more adaptive than I gave it credit for.

It still doesn’t prevent soft nor hard fork. My understanding is that a change in Bitcoin’s consensus logic require ALL users/miners to take action to deploy the new software to avoid hard forks. That’s impossible in practice. So a BIP to change the consensus logic, either tweaking or replacing PoW, would necessary cause a hard fork even if it’s approved.

Not all chains handle this the same way nor suffer from this. For instance, using Tezos means automatically accepting algorithm changes after they are approved. This makes hard forks much less likely.

Tezos incorporates a built-in, on-chain mechanism for proposing, selecting, testing, and activating protocol upgrades without the need to hard fork. This mechanism makes Tezos a self-amending blockchain and allows any user to propose changes to the economic protocol, which defines the possible blockchain operations and how they are processed.

Bitcoin sure have more hype and higher price, but appears to have more difficulty evolving compared to others.

lol it can’t adjust on public approval. It’s software that runs.

It can. Software is written by people. Its authors can build it with an update mechanism.

Crypto currencies such as Tezos have a vote-based update mechanism and a community that periodically submits algorithm changes for approval.

Bitcoin doesn’t have a update mechanism that allows smooth changes. Its take it or leave it (aka hard fork). Peole can move away from it, and it’s sad that so many still haven’t.

The network was built to adjust

Then why doesn’t it adjust to avoid negative social and environmental effects? Probalby because it’s not possible to adjust bitcoin’s algorithm, only some parameters, and because miners don’t have enough intensive to abandon bitcoin for something less destructive.

My understanding is it’s not possible to modify nor fix bitcoin’s core algorithm, which include the difficulty and consensus logic.

A hard fork is possible, which means leaving the bitcoin network and setting up an alternative (hopefully better) network with a different algorithm.

Likely bad coding or bad database design.

Best practice is to avoid using email as primary key in the user database, instead use an internal ID, so that an email change can happen without touching the primary key.

Your reply made me think of an alternative to deleting accounts : replace personal information to use a pseudonym and a throwaway email, remove everything that can be removed.

That would help once the badly coded website get hacked or its database get leaked.

Yes, assuming the site allows deleting accounts.

Many don’t have an easy way of deleting accounts. Some won’t delete an account even when making a formal request.

Malware that feature crypto mining is probably still using GPUs, since the person getting the coins is not paying the utility bill.

Thanks for the refresher. I’m aware of the basics, but assumed the difficulty measured by the number of zeros could only increase. Apparently difficulty can decrease, and I’ve read it’s expected to decrease very soon to keep the system running a while longer.

Bitcoin’s creator was smart enough to design a system that automatically adjust to remain profitable for several years without intervention, but not smart enough to foresee social and environmental costs.

It’s a good example that illustrate why automated systems shouldn’t be left running unsupervised, even if it’s designed by the best minds with the best of intentions.

The headline isn’t accurate as usual, but isn’t completely wrong either. Anyway, the article you’ve quoted is more informative than the one I posted, so thanks for that quote.

We’re at a point where it’s no longer profitable for individual miners, even if we ignore externalities like the cost we’re collectively paying due to pollution and carbon emissions.

Mining require increasing amount of energy and resources as time pass, so unless there’s a radical change in bitcoin’s algorithm or unless energy becomes free, we should expect mining to get non-profitable in more and more situations.