1127
Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying (www.thenerve.news)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
451 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 4 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Wasn't Nano predicated on those lines? I remember reading transactions could be done locally, even off-line, validated beetween the parts and only later added to the global ledger.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    That requires a global ledger. Blockchain is an appallingly bad way to implement one.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    What I understood then was that the local ledger of a given user of the coin would authorize and register the transactions done on/off the recorded balance and, when network available, would broadcast such transactions to the global ledger.

    The global ledger was the total sum of transactions, not imperatively required to authorize transaction by transaction.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    Nano uses "proof of stake" instead of proof of work to decide the order of transactions, and who receives block rewards.

    The main problem with PoS is that it's essentially the same as Federal Reserve bonds: all the new money goes towards people with extra money to freeze. This is part of why inequality has spiraled out of control since the Nixon Shock. Proof of work literally burns most of the profits because of difficulty adjustment.

    A more specific problem with Nano (formerly RaiBlocks) is that the entire supply was centrally issued, with a pinky promise from this private organization that they only issued coins by CAPTCHA. If they were lying, then they could have issued 51% of the supply to themselves for permanent control. The only way we'd be able to detect it is if the price kept going down for years.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] -1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Funny, that you even know about Nano!
    ...it's one of the often overlooked projects because it doesn't have a ton of fuck-off-money and instead tries to focus on a solid protocol.

    Nano has a lot of interesting attributes, but I fail to see how what you describe would work in practice.
    If both parties want to make sure there are no shenenigans at play, they need to know about the most recent state of the respective account chains, which essentially requires them to be online for agreeing on said transaction.
    But overall Nano is very fast and efficient by design and only a failure in terms of "gainz for Lambo".

    As we're here in a thread about AI I should remark that machine-to-machine-payments - in this case: agent-to-agent-payments - would work pretty well with Nano as currency because of the transaction finality (typically less than 1 second) and the feeless nature of transactions.
    If AI agents are looking for the most viable way to transfer tiny amounts of value fast and without fees they might find Nano and use it - who knows...
    ...and just like Nano showed that efficient ways to create digital money are possible I'm hoping for efficient AI models that are economically and ecologically worthwhile.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    What I understood then was that in person transactions could be done, as the local ledger of each user would authorize and record operations on and off the available balance and wait until network availability to syncronize with the global record.

    Returning to the subject at hand: I can imagine very specialized "AI" being useful for scientifical research, where very knowledgeable people use it as a tool to facilitate processes but are nonetheless capable of reviewing whatever results it produces.

    Not gigantic datacenters required for this but small, purpose made and perfected, locally run, even if on higher specifications hardware to do so, but machines built for a given task and purpose. The economic viability on it be damned; it's a tool for research, it is not made to earn money.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    To put it bluntly: if you do an offline transaction, you're prone to fraud.
    If you expect the senders account chain to have balance x (because that's your offline record for that) and the sender has sent all funds to a different address after you synced that account chain, you receive money that isn't there - kind of like an invalid cheque.
    I have no clue how that would work in practice, because to know a random account in advance, you'd have to sync the whole amount of account chains there is (called block lattice in Nano's case).
    With a mobile device that's hardly feasible and without a mobile device I don't see how you'd get in contact with people to make such an offline transaction.

    That kind of specialized AI is what I imagine to be a use case for locally run AI, too.
    After all you don't want to build processes on an AI, where you have zero control over what happens behind the curtains.
    That includes feeding potentially sensitive data back to it as well as being unable to control the training data set, its learning, version numbers, etc.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent