FaceDeer

Why is it "a lot for a virtual currency?" What's the typical energy usage of a virtual currency?

In 2019 Visa used 740,000 gigajoules of energy, which is equivalent to 6727 households (google dug up a figure of 110 Gj/year for that). So this really doesn't seem like a lot for this kind of thing.

I’m not sure I get the point. Company is a broad term. I don’t see how MakerDAO is not a company.

Company is actually not a broad term, it's a legal term with a specific meaning. MakerDAO is not a company, it's a smart contract. If you want to use terms that loosely it's going to be difficult talking about this stuff.

Using crypto-tokens is simply a technologically vastly inferior way of tracking debts, not a new currency.

But ultimately that's the thing that you're arguing here, so you can't simply state it as a premise. That's the classic meaning of begging the question.

The apparent fraud is the only way this makes economic sense.

That came out of nowhere, this is the first time an accusation of fraud has shown up in this discussion. What fraud?

Why does everything have to be about money?

Then I guess I won't see whatever websites decide to use it (until it's cracked). Oh well.

Unlikely. Some new approach to paid journalism will need to be developed. But that's already the case, AI's just driving the existing trend further.

Since it's a common mistake when discussing cryptocurrency energy use, I should point out that it's really only Bitcoin specifically that uses significant amounts of electricity these days. Most other cryptocurrencies have switched to proof of stake systems, which uses negligible energy.

I just did a search, and according to the articles I've found Google abandoned the "Web Environment Integrity" API in November and removed their prototype from Chromium.

Oh no, we may have to go back to an Internet where people posted web pages because they wanted to share information rather than to make a buck.

I do not remember Google's attempt at DRM for the Internet, which is an indication of how well it went for their attempt.

Yes, it does.

No. The part I was objecting to was: " gives an unsecured, zero-interest loan to a company with unknown credit worthiness." That's the part that's incorrect. Some stabletokens don't involve a company at all, it's entirely on-chain controlled by smart contracts.

How is the smart contract updated with the current market prices?

The one I'm most familiar with is DAI, which is maintained by the MakerDAO smart contract. MakerDAO uses a collection of price oracles to determine prices, which are in turn managed by people who own governance tokens (MKR) for the MakerDAO smart contract itself. They vote on which oracles are used, and on other economic parameters used by MakerDAO to keep its peg table. If MKR holders do a good job then MKR tokens appreciate in value, "rewarding" them. If they do a poor job then MKR tokens lose value.

This is complicated, but it's a necessary complication to ensure that MakerDAO can function in a decentralized and trustworthy fashion. There are a number of pages out there that go into more detail, this one seems pretty good at a glance.

I had hoped that my question would make you realize that a debt is not a separate currency.

Well, I'm not sure what you mean here. Tokens that represent a debt can certainly be used as a currency if everyone involved considers the debt to be sound and trusts that it will be repaid.

I really don't see your point here. I'm agreeing that you can't use it for everything. But what's wrong with that? There are plenty of things in this world that aren't useful in every circumstance and yet that doesn't mean those things are worthless. Use them for the things that they're good for. Elsewhere in this thread I listed off a whole bunch of non-stock, non-currency applications that have been built on blockchains if you really don't like the monetary applications.

As a side note, though, I'm kind of amused and baffled that the Grand Nagus of all people is dismissing any monetary uses for cryptocurrency.

You can't use them as a currency everywhere. But the same can be said for any other currency too. You can't use US dollars everywhere. You can't use Chinese Yuan everywhere. And so forth. A currency doesn't have to be universally accepted everywhere on the planet for every application before it's useful.

Regardless, I was talking about using Ethereum as a distributed database.