May I please ask whether an unlocked bootloader is still bad for privacy and the risk of data loss/theft, if the phone is enrypted?
My understanding is that while being able to mess with the phone (e.g. including installing a new OS) in the presence of an unlocked bootloader, a properly encrypted phone at least protects the data on it.
Did I get that wrong?
They’ve charged Brian Thompson with terrorism for what he did - or at least caused - to tens of thousands of people each year?
Finally they start to make sense!
You’re dead wrong.
Have you ever heard of Bitcoin mining farms? Their electric energy consumption dwarfs a league of mainframes.
Am IBM Z16 may need several dozen kW at full load: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/systems-hardware/zsystems/Z16M-A01?topic=requirements-general-electrical-power
Fully equipped with 8 PDUs and 4 BPAs a single mainframe is limited to an electric power of 173 kW.
Well, the Bitcoin miners are estimated to use around 175 TWh of energy annually, which equals an electric power of around 20 GW : https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin-energy-consumption/
This is several orders of magnitude above that of all the mainframes in the world - unless there are more than 116 million mainframes of that type in operation and running at full load.
But unless you use Monero or other crypto with similarly strong privacy all you do is leave a permanent trail for agencies to investigate.
Using shell companies on the Cayman Islands might be the safer approach.
…and the hate is strong.
I agree that scaling power comsumption is unsustainable - both ecologically and ecoomically!
But power consumption is no inherent attribute of crypto, but a design choice.
Bitcoin just refuses to adjust.
Ethereum did that not very long ago.
What I’m trying to say is: there are designs available that operate at a very tiny power consumption.
Don’t lump all crypto together with Bitcoin.
XRP is fast, but neither instant (usually around 4 seconds) nor without fees:
https://xrpl.org/docs/concepts/transactions/transaction-cost
The cherry on top is the skewed token distribution.
Thanks, but no thanks!
All of what you say applies to most cryptocurrencies.
But I’m aware of at least one digital currency that is
It has also zero inflation, is decentralized and designed with incentives that increase the degree of decentralization over time.
It also has no built-in limits regarding transactions per second.
Consumer protection without middlemen/centralization is hardly possible.
I’m hesitant to drop a name here, because I don’t want to come across as a shill, but if you’re interested we can discuss the attributes of this gem.
edit: ah, the good old “I don’t like what I see, but I have no arguments, so I just downvote without engaging” approach. Or does it just sound too good to be true?
You know what, I’ve changed my mind: https://nano.org/en
Sure!
I was merely trying to raise awareness for the need to bring privacy protection to a level beyond E2EE, although E2EE is a very important and useful step.
Yes, like Signal!
Which does not only use end-to-end encryption for communication, but protects meta data as well:
Signal also uses our metadata encryption technology to protect intimate information about who is communicating with whom—we don’t know who is sending you messages, and we don’t have access to your address book or profile information. We believe that the inability to monetize encrypted data is one of the reasons that strong end-to-end encryption technology has not been widely deployed across the commercial tech industry.
Source: https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/
I haven’t verified that claim investigating the source code, but I’m positive others have.
Signal doesn’t harvest, use, sell meta data, Google may do that.
E2E encryption doesn’t protect from that.
Signal is orders of magnitude more trustworthy than Google in that regard.
It’s fair pointing out the lack of (sufficient) storage for electric energy, but I’d say the average price of electricity in Finland for the past week indicates both capabilities of renawables and lack of storage.
I stand corrected regarding ultimate disposal and apparently they are planning to use it in a clever way.
Thank you for letting me know!
Compared to fossil fuels I tend to prefer nuclear as well, because even though mining uranium has quite some ecological impact including emitting carbon emissions, running a nuclear power plant doesn’t have carbon emissions and that’s important.
What worries me is that there are nuclear power plants around the world and despite the first nuclear power plant having been built 70 years ago, not a single ultimate disposal place for the radioactive waste has been found/created.
Having “cheap” electric energy for 3-4 generations and putting a burden on the next 40,000 generations just does sound like a bad deal to me.
Until we have more wind and hydro, keeping nuclear running might be a price we have to pay.
Not being able to dispose of some more (thousands of) tons of radioactive waste is making the problem only quantitatively worse and not qualitatively.
It’s a great example to show electric energy based on wind, water, solar is the way to go - not only because it’s more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels of any kind or nuclear, but it’s economically better as well.
Thanks for sharing!
What if their authority recognizes you?
Not of it’s neither A nor B ;)
Would you trust ChatGPT to know?
Solar panels can have more than 200 watts peak per square meter and provide around 200 kWh per year and square meter, although these values vary a lot depending on where the panels are installed.
Given these numbers, generating 200 TWh annually (which is more than the current electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining devices) would require 10^9 square meters; that’s slightly more than 31 square kilometers.
Don’t misunderstand this as defending the electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining! I’d rather see this electric energy being used elsewhere.
I merely wanted to show how much electric energy can be harvested using solar panels.
Yes, there’s a queue called mempool.
Clogging up the network is possible, but costs money (BTC), because transaction fees need to be added to the transactions and those fees need to be higher than those of the highest not yet processed transactions if “regular” users’ transactions shall be delayed.
Miners prefer transactions with higher fees (to be precise: higher fees per occupied block space), because they earn them when creating the block successfully - together with the BTC that get issued when a block gets created.
You’re adding to the confusion.
kWh (as in kW*h) and not kW/h is for measurement of energy.
Watt is for measurement of power.