The energy spent on bitcoin’s proof of work is not tied to the volume of transactions though. At a technical/protocol level, the same amount of mining would be needed if there was $100 trillion being stored or $1 being stored.
Although higher prices make larger mining operations more enticing and profitable.
The worst, especially where I live in the SW. Most of the trees are evergreen so there was no relief during the winter. My office window overlooks five neighbor yards and I have each one's lawn care schedule on my calendar.
My bull case is this: over the next few decades, cryptocurrency will find its use case. Even if it’s just another asset class like Gold or Silver that some people and institutions put their money in as part of diversifying investments.
That alone is a huge global market and it’s barely started.
I think a best case scenario is something like the Lightning Network grows in scale and popularity and becomes a defacto standard for online and mobile purchases.
The Lightning Network has no chance of gaining mass-adoption. It has high start up and capital lock-up costs, proportional to on-chain transaction fees, which only grow as Bitcoin/LN adoption ramps up.
It has high upkeep costs, requiring you to have your LN node online to receive payments, and for your node to have access to the LN funds via a connection to the private keys, which is a security liability.
To monitor for fraudulent channel closes in order to be able to react in time to challenge them, it also requires you to have an always on-line node, or a trusted third party delegated to do that on your behalf. And if you want rapid/automated reaction to fraudulent channel closes, that node needs to have access to the private keys to your LN funds.
Then there are routing issues when the topography of the network changes with every transaction, and where the existence of routes is dependent on sufficient capital being locked up in channels.
There's a reason why there's 100 times more BTC locked up for use in Ethereum dApps than for use in the LN. Ethereum-based scalability solutions could, ironically, provide BTC with the scalability needed to gain mass-adoption as an instrument for peer-to-peer payments.
Disagree. LN providers will exist, just as exchanges exist today. The most likely candidate is the payment card networks. While I dislike this future, they probably offer the best solution for consumers interacting with layer 2, and its always on requirements. LN isn't just a toy, its a new way of transferring value peer-to-peer. Payment/state channels are the best candidate to scale this tech. Anything else -- sidechains sharding or block size increases is just kicking the can. Not every transaction must be recorded on a blockchain forever. Layer 2 is how we will achieve this, while retaining the massive value that Layer 1 provides. I also find technologies like cut-through transactions in mimblewimble compelling for scaling without recording everything.
Currently 5x the price to transfer a fake bitcoin token on eth to a BTC L1 tx, whereas transferring a real bitcoin on lightning might cost a few satoshi.
I think some elements of eth are interesting, but are unlikely to actually achieve whatever it is they want to achieve. Proof of Stake isn't secure.
Lets see if they are able to retain consensus with EIP-1559. I suspect it will cause another schism.
These are not using the recently launched scaling technologies. For example zk-Rollups, which are now operational on Ethereum mainnet, can process 2500-3000 ERC20 transactions a second on-chain. Once these gain a critical mass of users, Bitcoin, in the form of WBTC, can be widely used in payments by way of Ethereum's zk-Rollups.
The LN's limitations are too many, and it has thus far failed to gain traction for that reason. Zk-Rollups have none of the limitations of off-chain payment-channel networks.
zkrollups, like all rollup technologies just kick the can down the road. Not every transaction needs to live on a blockchain! This is the fundamental point that folks miss. LN is about true 'off-chain' in that a blockchain is not needed to provide a probabilistic model to funds.
Do you see how this is similar to MW cut-through, in that a probabilistic model is used to store funds on chain? Imagine all the ZKrollup solutions and throw away the sidechain.
Rollup is just another name for sidechains. I agree, the sidechain model works today. The BTC Pegged liquid network also does zero knowledge (confidential transactions) exchanges of BTC between exchanges. But ultimately it is still kicking the can down to another blockchain.
Rollups are not 'off-chain', They are on another chain. We need to think beyond this for true scaling.
LN not having data on-chain imposes severe constraints that make LN inherently more centralized and less secure than zkRollups.
If you're really set on payment/state channel networks like the Lightning Network (Bitcoin), Raiden (Ethereum) or Connext (Ethereum), you can put them, ON A ZK-ROLLUP!
You get a 100X scalability boost, without increasing the block size, which makes payment/state channel opens/closes a couple orders magnitude lower, which massively increases a payment channel user's options and improves the functionality of the payment channel network. ZkRollups also reduce the cost of on-chain payments which lets a user switch to on-chain for an application that the zkRollup-based PCN is ill-suited.
All-in-all, reducing the cost of on-chain transactions, as zkRollups do, have significant advantages, so there is absolutely no reason to not adopt them.
And Liquid is a centralized sidechain dependent for its security on trusted third parties, and completely incomparable to zkRollups, which have 100% of the security of the mainnet and are only reliant on 51% of the hashrate being honest for security.
I deleted an unofficial Reddit app from my phone, since I found I was wasting too much time on it. I figured for the occasions I wanted access to reddit (mostly from searching for topics on Google), I’d just use the web version.
But the web UI, combined with Google AMP, made it unusable.
I’ve gone back to the app but with iOS screen time restrictions.
That is until they become even more greedy and ban third party apps. Probably by the end of next year. The reasons will be 'privacy of users' and 'letting users access reddit via a unified interface'. Or some bs like that
As an ad-supported service, I wouldn’t be surprised if Reddit refuse to serve clients that don’t show ads. On the other hand, I don’t think their API that Apollo is using includes ads. Same deal with third-party Twitter clients. I wonder if their are examples of similar ad-supported services that included ads in the API, and required the developer of the third-party client to implement ad support?
Reddit should make an API feature to allow the 3rd party app, the ability to display the ads. Then, Reddit will do profit sharing of each ad shown. This would give the 3rd party app incentive to maintain the app.
How is it that Google create/rebrand/close so many music and chat services over the years. While Apple have a single message service (iMessage) and a single music service (Apple Music) that have been consistently branded with constant growth and show no signs of being shut down?
As a consumer I have no idea what’s going on with some areas of Google’s products. It’s a major turn off.
Agreed that it is annoying, but its interesting to look back at how we got here. Google Play Music (GPM) launched in 2011. To get music on here, I'm guessing that team had to sign contracts with the various publishers and record studios. The onboarding and licensing terms of those were likely entirely around this music streaming service.
Then you have Youtube. It's been a video hub for anything, and other those 9 years since GPM launched, it has become a place where lots of people listen to music (watching music videos or the like). You have companies like Vevo that publish music content there. I'd guess Youtube has different contracts with those companies that have evolved over time about how music can be played.
So over these past 9 years, 2 products that had little overlap, have started to overlap more and more. As youtube expanded, it started butting into GPM's world. That likely was odd for Google for contracts and licensing of that content. Youtube Music (YTM) likely allows them to do it all under one silo now. Plus, YTM lets you do background music or videos, which is not something you could ever really do with GPM.
> but its interesting to look back at how we got here.
Oh, please, I worked at Google as well, and this is typical Google’s inability to have attention span and coherent leadership for anything longer than 6 months. One VP did one thing, then another one another, then it turned out that it’s stupid and inconsistent. As. with. any. other. non-core product! Basically Google’s top leadership doesn’t care enough to impose coherent strategy across different divisions, and thing like this happen all the time (Android/Chrome OS, Chat/GVC/Hangouts/Allo/Duo/RCS/Meet, Gmail/Inbox, Nest/Google Home, and so on).
Contracts seem like a very weird motivation for this. Why completely overhaul the user experience by getting rid of an entire application for consuming music and trying to shoehorn it into another, instead of just keeping two separate entities with separate licenses?
Even if the motivation makes some sense, the user experience is worse and I have very little faith that Google will maintain YTM long enough that I should invest in using it. The way Google does things means that in five years it will probably be on its way out in favor of the next rebrand that will get some product manager a promotion. Spotify, meanwhile, is still kicking after 10 or so years with no signs of slowing down or forcing users into a completely different app. i’ll stick with that, personally.
>Plus, YTM lets you do background music or videos, which is not something you could ever really do with GPM
It doesn't. It forces you to watch videos (if you're steaming to your home stereo or other casting enabled device) and prioritizes the video versions of everything, even if the video isn't officially from the artist and us just some random person's resubmission.
The user experience is almost impossibly terrible. It seems like the kind of curated experience one would concoct if they were trying to prank someone with an intentionally frustratingly hostile UX.
I have the opposite frustration here, where I queue up some music videos on my TV and inevitably after 1-2 songs, I'm staring at static album covers when I know there's an awesome music video that should be playing instead
I'm not sure why the licensing would impact the app in any way. They could swap the backend, keeping the better app. The background video is just one feature to add compared to trying to fix the YTM many problems.
Point taken. Maybe this was just one of many factors? I could also see that Google had products that were overlapping (Youtube and GPM), and they decided to merge them, and this is the way they did it?
I definitely had friends that used Youtube as a poor-mans spotify and would just keep the videos playing in the background on their desktop.
> I could also see that Google had products that were overlapping (Youtube and GPM), and they decided to merge them, and this is the way they did it?
If it's the way they did, it was one of the worst ways anyone could think of. It baffled me how so many smart minds can work at Google and take so many terrible decisions at the same time.
This was just one in several equally stupid decisions they did. They could have dominated the messaging market by now, but they threw out that chance several times.
Sometimes I think it might have been on purpose. Maybe they are afraid to dominate too many markets at the same time and avoid a anti trust lawsuit? Because otherwise it literally makes no sense. Either this or they need to feed their stupid hierarchical loop giving senseless promotions to whoever creates a new thing that nobody asked for by destroying another thing that people were starting to use and like.
I just read that YTM has only 256 bit AAC just like YouTube. Going down in audio quality is a step in the wrong direction. There's just no point in installing 5G in so many countries when the encoding bit rates are going down for services.
Non audiophiles don't require more than 256kbps which is about the highest you can do for AAC anyway. Sure 320kbps can on some occasions be better on consumer hardware but I am not sure most will notice a difference.
So maybe 320kbps but I am really skeptical of people who need more.
Obviously there is a lot more to digital audio than bitrate.
Pretty sure I remember Hydrogen Audio did a bunch of ABX tests that showed nobody (including so-called "golder ears") could distinguish 160kbps (or maybe it was 192) VBR MP3 from uncompressed - assuming a good encoder was used.
I’m absolutely not an audiophile and I don’t know what Spotify does, but their audio quality has gone down the drain of late. I suspect streaming services are all trying hard to reduce costs by converging towards quality levels similar to what we had with FM radio and early MP3s, i.e. pretty shit overall but good enough to feel that pop/dance “phat bass”.
I assume so. Spotify has a feature somewhat like this, but I keep it turned off because I find it annoying and distracting. It’s a bit silly to try to justify a huge move like this based on such a trivial feature, in my opinion.
I'm not sure I follow really. Any music player I've used plays in the background. I throw in some headphones and it plays without the screen being on. I'm not really sure how else it can go in the background but I know I'm missing something. lol
> Play videos on your mobile device while using other apps or when your screen is off. Background play is available on YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube Kids mobile apps (if these apps are available in your location).
They only allowed background play on Youtube with a subscription.
Hah, just like Porsche having an idea of more horsepower for a monthly fee (or pay per fun afternoon's drive) or Musk's self-driving subscription idea, now it's "Pay if you want to be able to browse Instagram while listening to music"/pay if you want to be able to turn your screen off.
Friend of mine who isn't me still downloads MP3s on torrents and has no cloud subscriptions. I'm sure he's smug about this.
I believe it's a subscription feature for YouTube Music as well. The link you provided indicates that this requires a YouTube Premium subscription, though a bit more digging on that page and https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/6313552?hl=en suggests that the minimum required subscription is actually YouTube Music Premium (this is included as part of YouTube Premium).
I've often wondered about what percent of battery drain on smartphones is directly attributable to this business model choice and therefore exactly how many smartphones have ended up in landfills before they needed to because Google ultimately prioritizes a few dollars over the environment.
Apple has had iTunes, and for a time a music “social network” Ping. The original messaging tool was called iChat before it was iMessage. Apple has also had multiple Internet services that were more or less the same (iTools, .Mac, iCloud). Even Contacts used to be called Address Book, and Wallet used to be called Passbook.
Google still does worse but renaming things is pretty common.
That’s not quite right. Messages on iPhone was always messages. Mac’s version was called ichat and was separate. Apple then cancelled it and merged it into messages. Messages itself never had a name change and was always larger than ichat.
Likewise, the itunes music store still exists! It is a place where you can buy and download music. It’s not the same service as Apple Music, which is a streaming music service.
>Likewise, the itunes music store still exists! It is a place where you can buy and download music. It’s not the same service as Apple Music, which is a streaming music service.
That's actually an interesting point that I've never considered before, even though I was aware of it.
iTunes has always been kept separate from Apple Music, with no evident plans to merge those in sight, while Google Play Music was used for both streaming and purchasing music. I don't think it ultimately affected the demise of GPM, but it is still an interesting topic to ponder.
But as that article briefly mentions, the iTunes Store continues to exist and can be reached from the Apple Music app. I suspect this will change in a future macOS release, though I don't work for Apple and have no inside info.
I am a personal gsuite user, and migrated multiple companies to gsuite over 10 years now (?). That means I tried to force everyone on to hangouts / chat / meet / duo / allo / etc etc. It's not just a turn off in a personal space. It's at the point I have given up on trying to get folks to standardize on google's products.
Google just did a slack competitor, but to click the screen share button (very common in slack to want to talk and screen share to collab) you are forced over in to meet land, which forces you out of your chat and defaults to video (not wanted). It's just such a total mess its totally incredible.
Ha, I remember my days trying to get friends and family to use Google services only to have them shutdown. No more. I tell them to stay far, far away from anything Google.
> How is it that Google create/rebrand/close so many music and chat services over the years.
It's not a rebrand. It's a rewrite. People need them promos.
In many cases, however, rewrites are actually warranted. As underlying infra gets replaced it becomes very expensive to run and maintain legacy services.
Rewrites are warranted, but rebranded every time you rewrite is not. Being able to replace core components while keeping the same brand and feature set is what takes real effort. Throwing everything out and making a completely different app with is imo a bit lazy and bad for the user.
If you truly must change things, gradual piece by piece changes is far prefered than complete 100% replacements like GPM -> YTM.
If they had slowly migrated GPM behind the scene to use Youtube over the years, and then after 2-3 years, just changed the name, I'm sure users would've been far less alienated.
I don’t think Google set up a predictable product iteration unveiling structure. One day I expect to see the PlayStation 6 for example, and one day I expect to see an update to the MacBook, and so on.
One day, do I expect to see an unveiling of a new Gmail UI? None of it is predictable because it feels like they do some serious a/b tests and just silently roll stuff out. They lack a structured presentation timeline. Currently users have no predictable expectations.
When that’s the case, just rename stuff, rebrand stuff, get rid of stuff, who the fuck cares. We didn’t promise the user updates, or even iterations, we simply promised them a one time product.
That’s the only thing that I can think of behind all of this. The simpler answer could just be their product team is not the best of the best for a company that works pretty hard at getting the best.
Your two examples at the top are both hardware, those work very differently. Websites used to do massive updates, but many have learned that it just leads to a lot of angry users. Slowly updating one component at a time works much better in my experience, and it's far less change for the user to adapt to at once.
> As a consumer I have no idea what’s going on with some areas of Google’s products.
You are their product. They sell advertisers access to you. Everything else is a sideshow and they will eventually get bored with it and let it rot. Google has had a lot of good ideas over the years. They let devs create amazing things with the constant flow of ad dollars. But then those cool things don't make as much money as selling ads, and the devs want to move on to create a new thing, so the 300lb idiot baby that is Google wanders off and squats on something else.
I also have to wonder if Google is stuck in the doldrums of being a mid-life startup. Their initial team of rockstars have probably all retired to roll around in their millions. A whole new crop of money and status seeking folks have taken their place. Wall Street is expecting growth every quarter. There is constant pressure to refocus on revenue producers and grow the stock. They seem far detached from their initial roots under Sergey and Larry.
I have a Pixel phone and pay for Google Play Music since I have a large collection that I have uploaded. It's been extremely disappointing. I have tried switching to Youtube Music but the interface sucks. I'm tempted to switch over to the iPhone since I'm already unhappy with Google in other areas (showing news articles repeatedly for health issues that I searched for one time, not allowing me to turn off gmail for a Google account on Pixel, etc). Google has become extremely user-hostile of late.
In previous stories on here about Google's tendency to start stuff, shut it down arbitrarily, and compete with itself pointlessly, I recall seeing comments purporting to be from longtime Googlers saying that the reason this happens is at least in part due to Google's incentive structure. They reward people for creating "new" things, whether they're the same as something they've already got or not, and allocate very few resources for existing products that aren't already the company's bread and butter—getting put on something like Hangouts or Voice was considered to be almost a punishment detail, based on some of the comments I read, and could torpedo your chance at any kind of promotion.
What the person you’re replying to means, is that Apple Music was added on top of iTunes as a new service rather than iTunes being scrapped completely. If Google were to do the same thing, then google play music would still be around and not be getting killed in favor of youtube music.
That’s a fair point. Though in this case aren’t google play music and youtube music substantially similar services?
Google’s reputation is that they will have 2-3 services with the same functionality. Whereas there are pretty legitimate business reasons you want want to make a streaming business distinct from a legacy content purchasing business.
Also I just happened last week to rip in Apple Music some of my teenager years CD before packing and storing them.
This is still an option. Likewise the playlists I created on the go on my iPod Nano in a 2008ish trip reliably got migrated from versions to versions up until now.
So there's iTunes (2001-2019, but arguably renamed to Apple Music, so not actually dead), and Ping (2010-2012), the latter of which had approximately three users.
Like for like, Google Play Music (2011-2020) isn't quite as long-lasting, but more to the point, I'm not sure Apple has simultaneously maintained two competing services before ultimately canceling one.
Then the GP commenter mentioned "chat services," which makes the position unassailable. Google seems to have launched and folder a dozen or two chat services over time[1].
You can make and receive FaceTime calls from any recent Apple device to any recent Apple device (e.g. Mac to iPhone) which is nice, but FaceTime’s real advantage is call quality. It’s noticeably more clear and seems to handle poor/unstable connections much better.
I can FaceTime with people halfway around the world with more clarity than I can talk to someone on the same WiFi network using WhatsApp.
The blue and green chat bubbles are the sender’s chat bubbles, not the receiver’s. So it’s the iPhone user with the colored bubbles, non-iPhone receives and iPhone receivers are white/gray.
It has a couple of really good use cases as it works on non-phones (macs and ipads). Little kids and some older people don’t have phones. I like the bigger screen for non-casual video calls.
Also, I was on a project with a colleague who had a poor internet connection and we found FT worked better than zoom. FT video quality seems to be the best of the services I’ve used but personally I don’t care about this part much.
I wouldn’t call these “killer features” but they are enough, with the integration into address book etc, to make it flourish.
I’ve worked in the games industry and this is pretty much my advice for people who are interested in it: Just make as many games as you can.
Don’t get hung up on some big new MMORPG game you’ve got in your head. Just start by making Pong, then Space Invaders, then Pac-Man. Then make a dozen small prototypes of your own ideas, each time based on what you’ve learned.
You get practical development experience but more importantly, you learn that iterating and experimenting is where good ideas come from and where bad ideas are discarded.
Once the business model and psychology of content aggregation and habitual user feedback loops was discovered, there was no going back. That model is just too powerful and too economically successful. It sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
Unless your community is paid for by some benefactor, you usually run out of money convincing people to pay for it, or end up copying the structure of Facebook/Pinterest/Twitter/Instagram etc.
I’m so sorry you have to live with that system. I’m in Australia and had my first child not that long ago. After multiple hospital visits due to ongoing complications during pregnancy, an induced labour and an emergency c-section followed by a week in hospital for my wife to recover...the only thing we had to pay for was parking at the hospital and a few meals for myself at the cafeteria.
The whole ordeal was stressful enough but the financial aspect was never in our minds. I can’t even imagine having to add financial stress on top of that.
While the film doesn't focus on any particular person, it covers society at large. It portrays the build-up of a modern, global society and eventually shows shots of ancient Egypt ruins. We are no different. One too all of this will be gone.
Although higher prices make larger mining operations more enticing and profitable.