The Giant Beastcast: Episode 302

This is why you should never play 'devils advocate' because you are literally substituting yourself for The Devil. You do not in fact have to voice the bad guy in any conversation, its just bad faith talking points.

Good for Alex for actually making the proper point and standing by it. I know Jeff isn't trying to state that NFT/mining is good, but how do we solve it? Maybe don't give it the mouth service, instead go straight to the global affects its having. Inform your listeners maybe? There are many ways to talk about it, I think its best to inform giantbombs larger listening audience.

One of the dark side of technology, is the dangers of always romanticizing about it.

When I was young , my mom’s euphemism for vomiting was “calling dinosaurs.” I always dug that one.

Man, I just can’t with this NFT stuff. I work in Motion design and it’s everyday with that stuff. So wild people are just willing to go with it despite many reasons not to do it.

@depecheload: It does require the same amount of ridiculous energy as mining does.

Yes and no. Mining is just the act of validating a block of transaction into the blockchain. It takes the same amount of computational power whether there is 1 or 20 000 transactions inside the block (deploying a contract or sending a mint command is a kind of transaction). So minting an NFT doesn't add or remove to the amount of power needed to validate a block, that is decided by the difficulty of the network. I would need a longer post to explain how the difficulty is adjusted each block but basically it scales with the amount of computational power available in a way to get a fixed averaged validation time between each block (10 minutes for Bitcoin, 15 seconds for Ethereum).

Just to add a little bit of precision AND fire into the whole thing; the energy consumed by validating (i.e. mining) is not the same for all cryptocurrencies. Since we're talking about NFTs and most of it live there, note that the Ethereum blockchain's power consumption is about 1/3 of that of the Bitcoin blockchain.

I saw a lot of people freaking out about mining using as much power annually as Argentina, but that's only for Bitcoin, which as nothing to do with NFTs. It's more like mining Ethereum takes about 33% of the annual power consumption of Argentina! By the way, Bitcoin + Ethereum only account for around 75% of the power consumption of the top 20 coins, so if they both take 133% of Argentina's power, the whole pack takes a nice 177% of Argentina's power need!

But wait, there's more! Estimating power consumption is incredibly hard, the upper and lower limit of that error range is huge! In fact, the numbers used to compare it to Argentina [Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index] have an error range that could mean it is actually 3 time less than we think. Or, 3.5 time worst! Yay!

Realllllllllllllly loved the back and forth between Jeff and Alex about NFTs. I'm on Alex's side of the debate but appreciated Jeff's advocation for curiosity and the possibilities as well. I don't think we'll achieve those possibilities, and certainly in no way that's worth the toll, but nonetheless, appreciate the two perspectives. What a great debate. This show can go from funny to thoughtful to silly and back so smoothly.

Say what you want about Metallica but Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets are fantastic albums.

@stradalemc:I'm sorry, but you just sound like this

Am I a bloody peasant for liking Cherry MX Black? May be "standard normy keys" but I haven't found a switch I like more... This scene is getting into craft beer territory, for real. I got me a Ducky Mecha SF with MX Black switches last year and called it a day. Can't imagine wanting more, it feels fantastic. I get hobbies and all (I use eurorack synthesizers) but the arrogance around components (jest or not) is just annoying as fuck.

Hey, why do half of the comments I post get errored out and removed? Used to happen every once in a while, now I habitually copy my messages before hitting "post" because I know its a 50/50 shot of actually submitting. Any ideas?

Like, I just typed two paragraphs, then edited. Only to see it didn't show up after submitting. Come on now.

@depecheload: I like your screen name.

having done some further reading- i have landed the controversial opinion that NFTs are, in fact, the worst (hyperbole for emphasis). granted i don't have a collector's impulse- nor the income or ability to play with financial instruments. but it seems that by attaching scarcity to a object that naturally has none (a digital good is not intrinsically limited as 'scarce' unless it is imposed)- and doing so by burning real, limited energy- you're not improving the object, you're just turning it into a vessel of financial speculation- at great cost. why people would want to do that to things like art- is beyond me. it'd be pretty fucked if you liked pink floyd's 'wish you were here' more because you had a NFT version of it. the emotional resonance doesn't flow from the resale value- or at least, if it does for you- you might not understand the thing you own. or rather you're probably not buying it because you care deeply about the song itself. after all it's the token that will get you paid- not the work itself.

NFTs seemed destined to become purely a plaything of wealthy- and just added as an additional line item on the planet's tab. we don't need another one of those. and because this is evergreen (not talking about public companies here, but the message is the same)-

What is this animated Push Warren and Jeff thing?
I can't find any links in the comments.

Edit: NVM I found it googling "myheritage giantbomb"
amd holy crap that's a sweet Warren.

I was right there with Alex during Jeff and Vinny's "dad's tools" segment.

I had a blast with Story of Seasons: FoMT! At first I thought that's what Vinny was talking about but I'm pretty sure he played a Harvest Moon game. Anyways I'm just very excited for the new one. I mean look at this cow.

Hey stop letting Jeff talk about Bitcoin, it's coming off like apologisim for all that crap. No matter how much Jeff says hes impartial.

@retroshaft: I don't know the numbers, I just know that they're terrible for the environment and anyone engaging with them is a shit human and I hope they lose everything.

https://joanielemercier.com/the-problem-of-cryptoart/

Jeff, is there any way you could maybe give us like 10% more Seth Rogen and 120% less Joe Rogan?

Not sayin just sayin

love too know what car the Internet Man drives and use it in an argument online

If anyone has seen the ancestry warren thing. I NEED that in my life. Thank you in advance.

I mean Drew should absolutely sell off an NFT of blinking white guy.

@deadactionjones: https://www.reddit.com/r/giantbomb/comments/lv88mn/warren_brought_to_life/

They’ve really gotta stop with the environmental impact of mining crypto. Video games, their development, distribution, and playing, uses more electricity than bitcoin. Our toys are destroying the environment more than cryptocurrency.

Also, not all cryptocurrency involves mining. Check out Nano. All coins pre-mined, transactions are free and fast. You can totally accomplish decentralized digital currency through blockchain technology without using much electricity. However, the same can’t be said of video games, which are only getting more and more energy intensive.

@awidebrant:

Bless

Stay after the credits here, folks.

I appreciate Jeff. I don't want to listen to an echo chamber where everyone shares exactly the same view on every single vaguely controversial or political topic.

@palemamba: I wouldn't necessarily disagree. It used to piss me off, but I find most people in the real world are still perfectly willing to engage in reasonable debate and consider opposing viewpoints so I just put it down to an internet thing.

Some other notables

Barf: Booting, yuked (puke with a y)

Drunk- Housed, Shitfaced, Hammered

Dook- baby on the way, taking a shit

@larmer: so just because one thing is bad or worse we shouldn’t talk about crypto’s environmental impact? Especially given that crypto is useless to most people and doesn’t function in any way like an actual currency? These false currencies are commodities and energy hogs at that and we should never stop talking about that. At least video games bring people enjoyment, unlike crypto, which just serves to line the pockets of wealthy technolibertarians. Both have energy problems. They both deserve discussion. One of them is a complete con job.

@wiseblood: I have one of those new Pine64 USB-C versions of these, and it is absolutely fantastic.

Video games bring people enjoyment?! Lol

I recently swore off buying games, due to the majority of them being a complete con job that just server to line the pockets of wealthy technoCsuites. Instead, I'm DCA'ing my previously allocated game money into Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrencies, as they give me more enjoyment, and have less environmental impact than the average person leaving their appliances (including game consoles and computers) plugged in to vampirically siphon electricity 24/7. In the process, I get to passively watch the numbers go up, and learn about the tech that will run our future.

Maybe it's less of an echo chamber and you just hold some really unpopular opinions that are without merit?

@depecheload: That's not my experience.

I love Jeff B, but the NTF talk was bad. It’s fine to not know shit and wing it when it comes to certain things with video games or whatever, but any related to Crytocurrencies is a grift plain and simple. He got duped like many others because on its face this stuff is interesting and cool tech, but since it’s inception all cryptocurrency turns into a scam or a get a get rich grift.

Man, for once I agree with Alex about something. NFTs are a load of bullshit. Jeff's whole "well they're so new, how can anyone have an opinion?!" Is silly. We know the blockchain tech is stupid. We understand digital goods. We understand human scarcity behavior.

EDIT 2021-11-18: I no longer stand by what I said in this post.

Original:

@nantukoprime:There are many cryptocurrencies in use right now that don't use any sort of mining process to secure the blockchain(s). For example, Nano and Iota come to mind (I own some Nano, but no Iota). I believe both use the "Directed Acyclic Graph" data structure for fast and efficient transactions, with a representative voting system to achieve security/consensus. (The rest of this post is not directed at you)

The power consumption of these newer technologies is negligible (ie. sustainable long term, even on a global scale), and they have the added benefit of increased decentralization, which is kind of the point of all this crypto stuff in the first place. There are even plans for Ethereum, one of the major power-consuming crypto platforms, to move away from mining and instead adopt the vastly less power-consuming "proof of stake" method of maintaining blockchain security.

It would be nice if these newer, "greener", crypto technologies could become dominant. But the people who have gone all in on the old power-intensive technology (Bitcoin/Ethereum miners, etc.) are incentivized to maintain the current status quo in which they dominate. And many people who are outraged about the environmental impact of the outdated power-intensive technology are really opposed to the entire idea of cryptocurrency, or else they would be happy to know that alternatives exist, and are actively being improved upon, which permanently solve the present power-consumption problem.

Crypto is here to stay, so anyone who is deeply and primarily concerned about the environmental cost should support and advocate for the advancement of the underlying technology, rather than dismissing the entire concept outright for ideological reasons.

http://cryptoart.wtf/#

There you go, a horrible and depressing look at how freaking wasteful this cryptoart trash is.

@ssully: I really don't know all that much about crypto but I do know I was using bitcoin to buy drugs eight years ago. The idea that cryptocurrencies don't have any use as a real currency is bizarre to me because at that time all I knew bitcoin as was a currency. No one was talking about it as a get rich scheme or an investment, it was just a decentralised currency which people were using to make real world transactions. I still own some bitcoin from that time, though not nearly enough to make me rich.

I hope someone from GB gets a chance to take a peek at the GTA RP stuff. I don't like GTA online in general, but I find find the RP scene fascinating, everything from the work that was/wasn't done to the game to facilitate the role playing to the amount of people currently diving into it.

I mean that's literally what's happening right now, here, dude.

@depecheload: What unpopular opinion have I expressed here?

@ape_dosmil: You disagreed with the opinions of arts and humanities majors smugly pontificating on complicated financial and technical topics and/or supported somebody being allowed to voice such disagreement. As such, you are literally and directly responsible for the holocaust and must be purged, Nazi.

Note: This should not be taken as a defense of anything the crew has expressed. Listening to them talk about the areas of my expertise often feels like listening to 13-year-olds ranting about what’s wrong with the world, and I find myself skipping those conversations when it gets to be too much.

@relic: Thanks for reassuring me I'm not going crazy. The thing is I didn't even express any particular opinion about NFTs and I don't actually have any strong feelings about them one way or the other. My only point was that Bakalar stated what seemed to me to be a perfectly reasonable point of view, in a perfectly reasonable fashion, and I can't for the life of me understand why people feel he deserves to be shouted down for it.

I don't have any issue with others presenting an opposing point of view in a reasonable fashion, that's healthy debate. All too often though, it feels like people are arguing that there is only one valid opinion and that to even consider any other point of view makes you a bad person. It's like the smart people in the room already decided what the ideologically pure take on a topic is, so we should just tow the line. I found it refreshing that one of these topics came up on the podcast and Jeff actually gave some consideration to the opposing arguments.

As always, I'm very grateful to hear Jeff's less-mainstream or less-popular opinions on tech. It's so easy for people to just spew out the same boring "NFT bad, crypto bad" takes that I've seen hundreds if not thousands of times already, but I love that Jeff tries his best to make the conversation interesting.

Wow the idiocy is strong here. NFTs are a good thing, and inevitable, Im not going to get into that. As others have noted, the energy consumption is not related to blockchain as a whole, and a lot of mining is done on renewable sources because it is the cheapest. Also lets compare it to the USA cutting down millions of Acres of forest to print $1 bills, plus the energy to transport and create them, then literally burning them in a couple years when they wear out, rinse and repeat yearly.

If they both have energy problems, why is the discussion only about how wasteful one of them is? The problem is not discussing, the problem is absolutist statements like the one you've made and I've bolded above that are both hypocritical and based on zero fact. How can a commodity anyone can buy, even with $1, be "a con job" that lines the pockets of the wealthy? Guess what, the entire video game market is putting literal billions in the pockets of millionaire and billionaire stockholders and shitheel hedge funds that own stock in every video game publisher you can name but has that changed the buying habits of any of the crypto-socialists complaining about how much energy blockchain uses? I'm betting not.

Telling future generations that we wasted millions of kilowatt-hours of energy playing video games "because it was fun", should a climate disaster happen, is going to sound as clownish as Boomers sound when they effectively say "Well, we shredded the social safety net we grew up with so we could have nice summer homes and a second car." One waste of energy is not magically more valid than another just because you like it. They're both wasteful and if you defend one and bemoan the other, especially with a one-dimensional understanding of the latter, how is that anything less than hypocritical? "The waste of energy that doesn't benefit me is wasteful, whereas the waste of energy that facilitates my hobby is completely valid". Please...