Nope, never bought any of the NFTs that were sold to idiot speculators because I understand the technology and see no value in owning a token representing a digital image. I feel that the rage of downvoting comes from people who got scammed because they didn’t understood the technology and now see it mentioned and think it’s all a scam, similar to how old people used to think emails were a scam because they sent money to a prince in Nigeria.

Cool, I’ve been out of the loop on crypto for years, just checked and you are correct, now the full Ethereum network, capable of beating visa in TpS runs at 0.0026 TWh/yr, i.e. 1/100x of the energy consumption of PayPal, therefore proving my point above.

Did you read the link you sent? It clearly states that only the amount of miners matter like I said before, the amount of transactions has nothing to do with it, you’re mixing the two.

The more people mine, the more decentralized it is

Wrong, decentralization is hard to measure, one person with a mining farm is centralized, while hundreds of people with their personal computer are decentralized but both produce the same amount of hash power. So you can have one person investing more and more in mining rigs increasing the total amount of mining power in the pool but decreasing it’s decentralization.

the more energy is necessary because difficulty is increased.

Yes, this is correct, if you have more computers mining you will have a higher energy spending.

The more transactions happen, the more blocks are required,

Wrong, there’s one blonc every 10 minutes, regardless of the amount of transactions that happen. Did you even read the link you sent?

the more energy needs to be spent to confirm all the transactions.

Wrong, the energy needed to confirm 1 or 1000 transactions is the same, and it’s related to the hashing difficulty established by the total amount of hash power, again, did you even read the link you sent?

The more it’s used, the higher the value, the more people mine.

Wrong, the value of an asset does not necessarily correlate with it’s use, for example gold is more valuable than dollar, even though dollar is a lot more used.

There’s a limit to the number of transactions per block as well, so no, your can’t just say “1 or 1000 it’s the same”.

Yes there is, but until that limit is hit the amount of transactions doesn’t matter. Also that limit is artificial and can be easily raised if needed, as it was done on Bitcoin Cash which can do hundreds of transactions per second more than Bitcoin, but because it has less miners uses less energy, thus proving you are wrong and the two are not correlated.

Visa is already able to handle 24000 transactions per second as is, no need for more infrastructure.

And ETH2 is theoretically capable of 100k, and that’s just one coin which BTW is PoS so nothing of what we talked about miners applies to it. No miners means less power consumption by the network as a whole.

Crypto uses 1% of the world’s energy production for a couple trillions in assets, the financial system uses 2.5% for quadrillions in assets, multiple thousands more than crypto, no, crypto can’t scale to that without a huge environmental impact.

Do you have a source for that? But also you’re measuring environmental impact as just energy consumption, and that’s very wrong, by that same standard I could say crypto is green because it produces no plastic, whereas Visa has huge factories to produce plastic for their cards, their card machines, etc. If you only focus on one environmental impact it’s easy to make anyone to be the bad guy, and for some reason people only see the Bitcoin energy usage and completely ignore that the energy consumption there is the whole story, whereas for other things there’s hundreds of factors pilling on top to generate the environmental impact.

Yes you are trying to greenwash crypto, just stop.

Again, I’m not, I recognize that PoW is an energy hungry method of confirmation, however it’s not the environmental catastrophe that the original comment said and if you take into consideration ALL of the environmental impact of alternatives (not just energy consumption) you will see that it’s not as bad as people make it out to be. Which doesn’t mean it’s good, but it’s far from an environmental catastrophe.

Also when you take into consideration that we were originally talking NFTs, and that’s mostly an Ethereum thing, and Ethereum is migrating to PoS, it’s even less of an environmental catastrophe.

First of all losing value and being a scam are not correlated, the dollar is losing its value compared to the Euro for the past year but it’s not a scam.

Secondly that would be an association fallacy, “X is a scam, X is an NFT, therefore all NFT are scam”.

Crypto energy usage goes up the more it’s being used and the more decentralized it becomes.

That’s wrong, crypto energy consumption has to do with how hard is the PoW difficulty, it does not correlate at all with usage or centralization, it’s only related with security, i.e the more energy it consumes the more energy someone would need to use to attack the technology.

But the energy needed to mine 1 transaction or 1000 is the same. There are problems at scale, but power consumption is not one of them.

Centralized services like Visa can increase the network load while barely increasing the energy requirements.

Not really, they need more servers to process more transactions, but cryptocurrency can scale up much more easily because the whole infrastructure from consumer to miner is decentralized.

Crypto bros always forget that to replace the banking system, crypto would need to replace the infrastructure as well, but because of decentralization it would be less energy efficient for the same result.

That’s what most people fail to see, the infrastructure for a scale at the size of visa is already in place for crypto. So there wouldn’t be an increase in power consumption by mass adoption, only by miner adoption, and that’s a difficult thought to grasp, it’s like if everyone could borrow their computer to visa or Mastercard to process their transactions, the amount of people wanting to offer their computer to visa/master would define how much resources they use, but an increase in visa users doesn’t mean an increase in visa borrowed servers and vice-versa.

You can just stop, there’s no way to greenwash crypto and decentralization. The amount of transactions happening on all crypto networks at the moment could be handled by one server if it was centralized. There’s benefits to it, stop trying to sell it as being green, it’s not and never will be.

I’m not trying to green wash, but crypto is not the environmental disaster the person claimed, especially not when you take into consideration PoS and newer coins with different validation methods.

No, there isn’t, but there are advantages to it as well, just like how a database has advantages over a paper folder.

An NFT can’t be transferred by anyone other than the owner, and ownership can be verified independently.

Here’s an example of a use that would be very cool and would take advantage of it (even though I know it’s unlikely to happen). Ownership of games, some games are sold on different platforms, to verify the ownership of the game (or DLC, or cosmetics) games have to verify with first party services (like PSN or Steam), which means that for the most part you need to buy games on each platform individually, but if platforms used an NFT for it games would be buy once play anywhere, and they would allow you to sell or even borrow games, and no company could prevent you from doing so. Which is obviously the reason this will never happen, but it’s a nice idea.

That being said there are downsides to it as well, such as a person being the full owner of stuff means that a person can lose the key and therefore lose access to the house, or that scammer can steal everything, whereas making you sign your house to someone else is a lot more beurocratic, which serves to protect you from you.

Just to be clear, I’m not a “we should use NFT for everything” type of person, in fact I don’t think there are many use cases nowadays that are worth using it, but the technology is interesting regardless, and solves the problem of how to prove ownership without a centralized trusted organization.

Do you consider a deed to be proof of ownership? A stock? The registry of a car? They’re not inherently proof of ownership, they’re just pieces of paper or entries on a database. If you go down the road of what is proof of ownership then no technology we have is able to prove it.

The thing is that NFTs you can prove ownership of the token, if the token correlates with something, e.g. if the DMV stored car ownership in a Blockchain, NFTs could be used to represent car ownership in a secure and decentralized way.

There are some valid points here, and I agree that the energy could be used elsewhere and that green energy is not entirely green.

I even agree that for most cryptocurrency as they are now the cost per transaction is higher than alternatives. However the technology for cryptocurrency, especially with PoC can be a lot more efficient in scale. To get an idea of it you can look at Visa, which processes 1700 transactions per second, BCH can do 178, so 10% of it, ETH2 is supposed to be able to process at least 20k, so 10x that amount. I imagine either of those coins pollute a comparable amount to visa when you consider everything that visa needs to operate (machines, cards, servers, etc). I feel that people don’t take these sort of stuff into consideration when they talk about the energy consumption of crypto. There is a discussion to be had here, but blankly stating that it’s an environmental disaster is fear mongering.

The whole point of cryptocurrency is decentralized ownership. That’s the big breakthrough in technology, it’s the whole point of it, I can try to ELI5 how that works if you want to, but for the moment I’m just going to assume you accept that cryptocurrency can demonstrate ownership.

NFTs are an extension of that, except they can’t be split or traded by one another, i.e. they’re non-fungible. Therefore you can by definition prove ownership of those tokens, as that’s the whole point of the technology, which again, if you’re curious I can try to explain how it works.

How does ownership of those tokens transfers to ownership of something else? Well, that’s an excellent question, and the answer is that it happens in the same way that a piece of paper grants ownership of a house. There’s no innovative technology behind that piece of paper, but still everyone would agree that it grants ownership, and the reason is that the authority that enforces that chose to respect that piece of paper. Nowadays this is mostly databases and the piece of paper is just generated from the records there, but this is very insecure as anyone with database write access (or access to the physical folder containing the documents in case of old paper deeds) can transfer ownership. NFTs solve this because only the owner of a token can transfer it to someone else, so they’re inherently safer than any of the alternatives.

Again, the technology is great and has millions of excellent applications, but people use it for pyramid schemes and scamming others, but people do that with any piece of technology.

The legal validity of things come from people using it and courts enforcing it, someone years ago might have said:

That’s neat. Until a representation of something on a piece of paper has any legal meaning regarding authenticity, ownership, or anything else, and until the overwhelming majority usage of paper isn’t as a scam, paper remains a pathetic and comically stupid class of speculative asset constituting a pyramid scheme that also happens to destroy the environment.

The thing is that even if a technology is used mostly for stupid things that tells you more about humans than about the technology itself. Or do you also think that phone calls are scams because 90% of the phone calls you receive nowadays are scams, even though the technology behind phone calls is the same used for mobile internet.

Also the destroy the environment claim is really bogus, for starter money pollutes more than crypto when you consider all of the chain of what it takes to produce and transport money. But also for example if you live in the US your home probably pollutes more than a mining farm since they’re usually in places where electricity is extremely cheap, mostly in China near a hydroelectric power plant. But also the technology itself doesn’t need to consume that amount of energy, that’s just the current implementation, but there’s a push to move to PoS instead of PoW, which would mean that NFTs (and crypto in general) would not need farms or even a specially powerful computer.

One small but important correction. NFTs are not a scam, it’s an amazing technology that has the potential to revolutionize lots of stuff, that became popular when people used it for stupid shit.

Saying NFT is a scam because people have used it to scam others is like saying phones are a scam because people call others over the phone to scam them.

NFTs are essentially a decentralized token. This means that they can be used to represent anything you might want to represent with a token, e.g. ownership of a physical object such as a car or a house; ownership of a digital asset, such as a website or game; some predetermined amount of something, similar to a stock or bonds; etc. The fact that some people used it to mean ownership of random pictures and people thought buying random pictures on the internet for a ridiculous amount of money was a good idea tells you more about people than about the technology.

This will be almost impossible. The short answer is that those pictures might be 95% similar but their binary data might be 100% different.

Long answer:

Images are essentially a long list of pixels, each pixel is 3 numbers for Red, Green and Blue (and optionally Alpha if you’re dealing with a transparent image, but you’re talking pictures so I’ll ignore that). This is a simple but very stupid way to store the data of an image, because it’s very likely that the image will use the same color in multiple places, so you can instead list all of the colors a image uses, and then represent the pixels as the number in that list, this makes images occupy a LOT less space. Some formats add to that, because your eye can’t see the difference between two very close colors, they group all colors that are similar into one only color, making their list of colors used on the image WAY smaller, thus having the entire image be a LOT more compressed (but you might noticed we lost information in this step). Because of this it’s possible that one image choose color X in position Y, while the other choose Z in position W, the binaries are now completely different, but an image comparison tool can tell you that color X and Z are similar enough to be the same, and they account for a given percentage of the image depending on the amount minimum of the values Y and W. But outside of image software, nothing else knows that these two completely different binaries are the same. If you hadn’t loss data by compressing get images in the first place you could theoretically use data from different images to compress (but the results wouldn’t be great, since even uncompressed images won’t be as similar as you think), but images can be compressed a LOT more by losing unimportant data so the tradeoffs are not worth it, which is why JPEG is so ubiquitous nowadays.

All of that being said, a compression algorithm specifically designed for images could take advantage of this, but no general purpose compression can, and it’s unlikely someone went to the trouble of building a compression for this specific case, when each image is already compressed there’s little to be gained by writing something that takes colors from multiple images in consideration, needing to decide if an image is similar enough to be bundled in together with that group or not, etc. This is an interesting question, and I wouldn’t br surprised to know that Google has one such algorithm to store all images you snap together that it can already know will be sequential. But for home NAS I think it’s unlikely you’ll find something.

Besides all of this, storage is cheap, just buy an extra disk and move over some files there, that’s likely to be your best way forward anyways.

I didn’t understood your criticism, what are they unwilling to release? What are they claiming all of? Why would ownership rules cause an OOM?

Sharing stack memory is a bad practice in C as well btw.

I just got to work and plugged my surface pro into my external monitor. It didn’t switch inputs immediately, and I thought “Linux would have done that”. But would it?

Nope. My laptop for example doesn’t automatically use an output when plugged in, but that doesn’t bother me because I know other DEs would do that, and it’s my choice of having a minimal window manager that causes that.

And this goes into your next point, because I know that this comes from decisions I made, I’m okay with that. I also know I could probably fix it somehow, even if just by running a script in the background that checks if an output is plugged and tries to use it.

And for me that’s the big difference. As a general rule when things break or don’t work are not the fault of Linux as a general, but of a specific piece of the stack, and more often than not it’s because that piece was backwards engineered without any help from the manufacturers of the hardware it’s meant to be controlling, so I can be very tolerant of these errors since the bad guys here are the third-party who’s refusing to make their things work on Linux. But even things that don’t work as I want to, I can make them do so, and that’s a huge change in viewpoint.

In other words, on Windows I used to be of the thought of things you can do, and things you can’t, with time I noticed that in Linux this thought shifted, to the point that the only question I ever ask myself is: “HOW do I do this?”. This implies that there are no impossible things in Linux, which is obviously false, but I would argue that the correct way to think about this is “things that are impossible on Linux, for now”, and that’s a huge difference, because Linux is always evolving and getting better and better, things you thought are impossible now might be trivial in a few months or years whenever someone with the knowledge to fix it gets bothered with it.

First of all you’re missing the point.

Drivers are automatic during setup.

That still means third-party drivers, so it’s still not a Windows win but rather a “windows is so ubiquitous that Logitech (or whoever) was forced to release a driver for it”, which is what the comment you’re replying was talking about.

Secondly, bullshit. In my 20 years using Linux I have never, ever, plugged in a mouse that didn’t get immediately recognized and worked as expected. What mouse do you have? You said Logitech, which model? The only thing that I ever needed specialized software on a Logitech mouse was to configure extra buttons or to pair it to a different dongle (both stuffs that also need specialized software only provided by Logitech on Windows)

Yup, you can buy the official dock or really any usb-C dock. Resolution can be set, so you can even do 4k on it if the tv supports it and the deck can handle it for that game

But it is a replacement for a console like I told the person I replied to.

Those are the usual problems in Linux, they can be summed up by “Third party companies don’t support Linux”, and they are especially annoying because with time you learn that there’s no reason that thing shouldn’t work, other than because the company either purposefully figures out if you’re running Linux and crashes the program (e g. DRM, anti-cheat, etc) or because they created their own closed proprietary protocol and refuse to share the public API for it so it needs to be reverse engineered.

At the same time I think most people don’t think about how much prior knowledge you need to just be able to use Windows or Mac. And for someone without ANY prior knowledge all of them are the same.

Story time, my MiL is a zero when it gets to computer literacy, to the point that every week I had to solve something for her. Eventually I gave her a laptop with Linux in it to make it easier for me to do support, and to my surprise she had lots of problems the first months when setting things up and until learning the ropes, but afterwards there were almost no problems.

The thing is that people have a lot of Windows knowledge, so when they try Linux they expect it to be Windows and get frustrated when it’s not.

Yeah, but now you can buy an all-in-one convenient PC to plug on your TV with almost 100% retro compatibility, it’s called the Steam Deck and it’s awesome.