I don't play videogames and know very little about crypto mining, but isn't the mining being done on specialised hardware these days and not GPUs? Are GPUs still being wasted on crypto nonsense?
Given the continuing high price of video cards these days, I'm going to say yes, many people are still leveraging GPUs for mining.
EDIT: Maybe not as much as previously, but still enough to have a noticeable impact on the market.
"Web3" is just a new label to make it seem like the same old bullshit is somehow novel and revolutionary.
First "blockchain" was the future, it was the next big thing, it was a revolution, it was going to change everything, you'd be a fool not to get involved. Sure, there might not be a lot there yet, but it's like the Internet in 1994 - this is only the beginning!
If they were still saying the same things about "blockchain" then people would notice that these lofty promises have delivered nothing for ten years. But give it a sexy new name like "Web3" and now it feels new again, even though nothing has changed, and they can continue to entice people in with the same old promises. Sure, Web3 doesn't seem to have produced much yet, but this is only the beginning. It's like the Internet in 1994!
Why would web3 be capable of anything else? Satoshi invented the blockchain to solve one specific problem: creating a decentralised currency. It was never supposed to be some kind of universal "truth machine" applicable to any other kind of real-world problem. How would it? The existence of data on a blockchain doesn't prove anything except that some data was added to a blockchain. The idea that this has practical applications for anything other than a currency (e.g. supply chain management, concert tickets, property deeds, all the other classic examples that cryptoheads have been citing for years without a single successful example in real life) is absurd, in fact it's so laughably absurd that I question the intelligence of anyone who can say it with a straight face.
Basically, I think that everything in the crypto space is bullshit, with the possible exception of Bitcoin itself, but I'm still agnostic on that front. I hope I'm wrong - it's appealing to think that we're on the cusp of another technological revolution that will make everything better, especially if it gives me a chance to get rich! - but for fuck's sake, it's been five years since this classic article and still nothing has fundamentally changed: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...
If an asset doesn't live exclusively the blockchain, the blockchain can't enforce its ownership. If the blockchain can't enforce its ownership, it doesn't have anything else to offer.
One small corner of potential I still see is running some low-volume Internet services with a blockchain as a backing store. There was a bit of a buzz a few years ago around distributed DNS, and it seems to fit the criteria to me. The asset itself (DNS records) is a tiny set of key-value pairs, so it can feasibly be stored on the blockchain itself. Clients can look up the blockchain directly, if operating a node is cheap enough, or use middleman servers.
I think it's fine technically, but adoption is going to be a problem. On the plus side, the current administration of this centralized resource (ICANN), has its fair share of opponents and critics[0] - of course it is extremely debatable whether an ancap-style decentralized market would be preferrable, nevertheless there is an existing group of unsatisfied users who have reasons to look at alternatives.
And snce adopting an alt-DNS doesn't mean you need to drop your traditional DNS records, there's no real cost to jumping in.
On the other side, clients will only see added value if your site *isn't* available on the ICANN DNS network, and that's a long shot. Worse, you need a 'killer app' of a site to make people switch to a different DNS system, but realistically a site isn't going to grow big enough without being available on the traditional DNS in the first place. You'd need a few major sites to announce that they're pissed off with ICANN (for example due to a high-profile name dispute) and that they're moving to an alternative DNS. Fat chance of that.
To put it more bluntly - if IPv6 is still having trouble with adoption, what chance does decentralized DNS have?
Not disagreeing with anything you're saying here but rather adding the conversation:
> There was a bit of a buzz a few years ago around distributed DNS
DNS is already distributed: records are aggressively cached across the internet. It's globally scalable and it works pretty well. There's security issues with it that we could fix (most of which we could fix without blockchain).
A blockchain-based DNS gives us what? It has the advantage of removing the "admin rights" from name registrars. This definitely sounds desirable but it comes with an obvious, massive burden/baggage: in order to retain those byzantine properties, everyone who wants to look up a DNS record has to have a multi-terabyte blockchain file locally downloaded and verified. The pro doesn't outweigh the con. And delegating to a cache brings us back to where we already are now.
I disagree: delegating to a cache isn't a major problem, when the single source of truth is public and relatively easily accessible. A DNS server censoring or tampering with DNS requests is already trivially detectable now by comparing it to other servers, and it would be even easier to detect when anybody can operate a "full" DNS node with a $50 hard drive and a fiber connection.
I'm pretty sure "Web3" is just a term that crypto-enthusiasts have invented to mask the fact that crypto has completely failed to live up to any of its promises.
No-one can tell me anything about Web3 except that it's the future, it's the next wave, everyone is investing in it, everyone is moving into the space, it's going to be huge, you'd be a fool to miss out. But ask for details, or for a single example (just one) of a Web3 application that's unequivocally proved itself or that can't be better served by an existing pre-blockchain technology and... crickets.
Replace "Web3" with simply "blockchain" and I could have written the exact same paragraph five years ago. It's hard to keep the hype train going when you've been saying the same thing for five years and the "future" still hasn't arrived, but rename "blockchain" to "web3" and suddenly it sounds like you having something new and the hype cycle can repeat.
Give it another five years and I expect the cryptoheads will be pumping another trendy new term to mask the lack of innovation. It's the future, you've got to believe me! It's going to blow up! Any day now.
Every now and then I'll be shopping and the security device by the door will beep as I'm walking out, even though I haven't stolen anything. I always just assume there's been a mistake, e.g. the cashier forgot to deactivate my security tag, and walk straight on out; I'm not going to waste my time being searched when I know I haven't done anything wrong.
This doesn't happen very often but as far as I can remember I've never been challenged when I do it.
But what I find really interesting is: based on what I've written above, isn't it trivially easy to guess my skin color?
Most stores have explicit policies not to chase people even when they visually observed shoplifting. It creates too many problems — it’s easier and safer to just turn the video over to the police.
Those security devices are generally there to scare potential thieves not actually detain or prevent them from leaving, so your anecdote doesn’t actually show anything interesting.
> But what I find really interesting is: based on what I've written above, isn't it trivially easy to guess my skin color?
Nope. Maybe it would be if I the reader were in a country where people are stopped exiting a store based on race, but thankfully the vast majority of the world isn't like that.
An aside, but is it a standard thing to write # to mean "pound" when you're talking about pounds as a unit of weight? Like as opposed to "800lb"? I knew what you meant, it's just I've never seen that notation before so I'm wondering if you just made it up or if I'm out of the loop somehow.
A few decades ago, it was very common to see at the deli counter, in the handwritten prices on signs jabbed into lunch meats and such. And on the price signs above the vegetable bins at the supermarket. In the US, anyway.
