True, that’s a very valid concern.
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At the time of an unprecedented global electronics shortage? Are these guys completely insane??
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Yeah, it would be nice if they had recycled them, instead of destroying them for drama.
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I did not post the one about what was thought to be crypto mining with PS4s…so I will now 
I can only imagine what PS5s are being used for
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Playstations can’t run a mining protocol normally; Sony won’t let users download anything but games and apps they have approved.
The PS would have to be heavily modified to be used in crypto, and it isnt really a PS anymore at that point IMO.
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Early versions of the PS4 could run a linux. Sony disabled that after a while because they were getting used in code-cracking clusters, but who knows if you can’t still make it happen with some skill and a soldering iron…
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My sister has gotten interested in cryptocurrency, so she asked me to come onto her channel for an interview so I could teach her about it. Skip to about 6 minutes in since the audio messes up a lot in the beginning.
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Bloomberg only gives you 5 seconds to read if you aren’t subscribed. Can you summarize what it said?
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It does? I could read the article without issue…
Main takeaway: Ethereum is replacing the “proof of work” concept they adopted from bitcoin with a “proof-of-stake” system. In a proof-of-work enironment, essentially the one who works the most gets the most, which is very meritocratic, but in the context of a blockchain it leads to a lot of lost work, since the workers are competing with each other. This is the major criticism on bitcoins currently: They use up ridiculous amounts of energy just for producing currency. On the other hand, it also gives the currency some real-world backing.
In a proof of stakes system, to put it rather bluntly, the one that bets the most gets the most. Workers form together in a colaborative group, staking a certain amount of coins on the validation of a block chain. The chain is then evaluated by some members of the group (instead of potentially millions of times as is the case currently where everybody is just trying to be the fastest), while the rest in their group verify the validation. If everything checks out, the whole group gets coins. If it doesn’t… well, it doesn’t say in the article, but I can only assume that the group looses their stakes. As I understand it, higher stakes get assigned more validations, so the more you’re willing to loose, the more you can gain.
In other words, if I understand this right, the system seeks to replace competitive work with cooperative gambling…? for the sake of efficiency (and we’re not just talking a bit of efficiency here. They estimate that the elimination of the competitive mining process will get the energy consumption of the entire system down by 99.9%). In the real world, this would be horribly, horribly wrong, but I guess in the world of cryptocurrency it might work?
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I would have never succeededI wouldn’t call it gambling. It’s more like a deposit you earn interest on, and the only way you lose your funds is if you try to hack and change the ledger your computer is approving. Everyone else has a copy of the ledger, so they will know yours is false and you lose your deposit.
The only way someone could succeed in cheating the system then, is to have more than half the money staked, giving you a majority, and the likelihood of any one person having that many billion or even a trillion dollars is low.
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Ah… that makes more sense. The article was somewhat vague about the exact rules of the system.
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Currently, there is $378 billion worth of Ether in existence, so someone would need over $189 billion in ETH to take over the network, once it changes to a proof of stake system.
For context, Elon Musk is currently the richest person alive and his net worth is $186 billion, so even he would be shy of enough money to do it.
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I wouldn’t be afraid about private individuals, though. I’d be worried about corporations and governments…
Still, a similar thing is already possible with the current system, so that’s not a new drawback.
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Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be possible for anyone to get half the ETH in existence because so much of it is already locked in staking, smart contracts and held by private individuals.
With proof-of-work you just need to buy millions of powerful computers to take over the network, but with proof-of-stake you need more than half of a limited resource that is already owned by too many different individuals.
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All the technological advancements going on in cryptocurrency is extremely reminiscent of what happened in both seasons of Waking Titan.
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The is a free course from a former MIT prof(currently head of the SEC) in this article