[1040] Chainlink
└ posted on Monday, 10 December 2018, by Novil
Here is the obligatory link to our ongoing Kickstarter campaign for the Sandra and Woo: 10 Years anthology and the art book The Art of Sandra and Woo!
- Sandra: You’re a big Bitcoin fan, huh?
- Ralph: Yes! It’s not my favorite crypto currency, though.
- Sandra: There are more?
- Ralph: Yup. 2068 in total.
- Sandra: Two thousand sixty-eight?!!
- Ralph: Yup. And this one’s my favorite, Chainlink.
- Sandra: “Chainlink provides reliable tamper-proof inputs and outputs for complex smart contracts on any blockchain.”
- Sandra: What the hell does that even mean?!
- Ralph: Chainlink is recommended by leading economists Porcius Onzi and Shahan Cam!
- Sandra: I’m sorry, but I already invested my savings in tulips and Beanie Babies.
![[1040] Chainlink](/comics/2018-12-10-1040-chainlink.png "[1040] Chainlink")
Ralph has come a long way.
At least he’s not dealing drugs anymore . . .
P. Onzi and S. Cam ahah
Appeal to authority: P. Onzi and S.Cam.
Well, currencies have *always* had the value people agreed that they should have, and this value was typically determined by the organisation that issued them; bank notes originally amounted to a promise that the bank who issued them would, upon demand, exchange the specified number of golden dollars for the note. Gold in turn got its value by consensus … and by government. A nice stable government means a nice stable agreement on what currency is worth.
The 2000? blockchain currencies seem to have often been backed by some private company’s shares … not so stable.
Bitcoin value seems now to be in rough alignment with the cost of the electricity required to mine it (find a unique solution to the specific mathematical problem.) And I am utterly horrified by just how much electricity that is. Climate change doesn’t need this kind of help.
I only listen to influencer Peter Yousef Ramid.
Hey, anyone interested on my signed second edition 1990’s comics by Rob liefeld?
So is this strip good for Bitcoin?
Tulips and Beanie Babies, hm? That is some fine economic snark there.
Did Beanie Babies ever recover from the Market Crash of late 90s/early 2000’s?
Sandra said what the hell !!!
And all 2068 of them has no real value or backing at all… Even air is more valuable.
@ dragonsister:
dragonsister wrote:
Thanks for the explanation of the names, but currencies don’t necessarily work like that: There are examples in which currencies took a dive despite the respective government not doing anything that would normally be classified as devaluing their currency (unless you go for really long-winded explanations). Even gold and silver haven’t been stable in value over time, though baring extreme circumstances (like mining asteroids made of precious metals) it seems unlikely they would fall too far in value. And even trying to maintain a currency at a fixed value can be problematic in economic terms, as evidenced by the problems of some of the countries that have tied their currency to the dollar (or that used the dollar as their currency outright).
As such it would seem possible for bitcoin to fall below the cost of electricity permanently. At that point the miners may tinker with the algorithms to increase their reward or reduce the amount of electricity needed, or it may just go into a death spiral as everybody sells their bitcoin in fear of its immediate collapse (if miners were to stop mining) and from which it may never recover.
@ dragonsister:
For reference, fiat currencies have always been backed by military force, regardless of what other backing (or, more rarely, actual resource) they may be established to represent the value of in peacetime.
Current ones are no different. This is, in fact, the reason that powerful governments have wealthy warhawks sitting in congress on their councils, occupying their (figure)head offices, and occasionally sitting in judgement of “high crimes and misdemeanors” or what have you. (Read: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government are generally all concerned with money and maintaining its value, whatever that happens to mean to them philosophically, and it usually means maintaining the military.)
Of course, this only has meaning as long as the people of a state or nation collectively value the currency they support as a means of exchange in the economy they’re beholden to. If the popular support for that currency stops regionwide, that’s when the people in power either switch modes to martial law to enforce its use (this would be the relative root of all authoritarian ideology), or attempt to adapt to whatever change follows even if it includes an end to their being in power (the true root of progressive ideology).
But, that so rarely happens these days, that it is all but impossible, and in the face of a stubborn public, barely worth considering. To coordinate such a thing would require more resources and resourcefulness than the public can agree upon, because of all its preexisting divisions (and, generally, the excuse that because they are not economists, they can’t consider the ramifications of such an act properly and so default to remaining loyal to the existing standard and the rule that supports it).
You tell him Sandra! And also do not forget to inverst in South Seas Company Stock
Meanwhile, Woo references the “is this a pigeon” meme
Well blockchains are not worthless, but they might be overpriced…
Beanie Babies sounds more reliable than crypto anyway
Actually, “Chainlink” or a similar solution must exist to make “smart contracts” work with real data and actions.
A simple “smart contract”: if a hamburger at McDonald’s is on sale, then purchase one and deliver it to me. To get the price of hamburgers and to trigger a delivery, a “smart contract” must access data from the real world (McDonald’s prices) and cause a real world action (purchase and deliver with Uber Eats, etc.). “Chainlink” gives us these real world connections both reliably and securely.
Without a “Chainlink” solution, it will take a long time before you and me see useful applications.
dragonsister wrote:
Actually, from what I heard, the electricity required to mine it is variable, because the difficulty to mine a Bitcoin is automatically adjusted depending on the number of people mining at the time.
No, it doesn’t make sense to me either, but then very little does on this subject.
coyoteBR wrote:
I’ll take it if you give me five bucks.
Ten if I’m required to read it.
Yet they’re AAAAALL doomed.
Novil I am begging you. BEGGING you. To make a story about Zoey getting a girlfriend. I HAVE WAITED LONG ENOUGH.
@ Nils:
If everyone stopped mining Bitcoins, that would make existing Bitcoins more valuable, not cause them to collapse. The end of mining is built into the algorithm; only a certain number of Bitcoins can ever exist.
@ dragonsister:
Conceeded but it would be nice to actually get something which is completly anonymous (meaning government big brothers and banks cant trace what you buy and where) and inflation proof.
At the moment governments and banking have too much of an influence over economy and it would be nice to bust their monopoly on it. Especially central banking needs to have it wings cut down significantly.
That logo on his smartphone reminds me of that App that doesn’t do anything, but costs 1000$. Only people who love to show off buy it. That was on purpose wasn’t it? 🙂
@ EvilGremlin:
You know, air is actually super valuable. 😉
@ Paeris Kiran:
If you google the Miracle of Wörgl you’ll find something that satisfies all of your wishes.
@ AnotherBear:
Ralph was never dealing, his brother was.
Hmm. One person I know is using and relying on Bitcoin for their income, is a criminal extortionist currently bombarding an old disabled man I take care of with daily email threats to publicly expose his porn viewing habits.
I’ve read the blackmail emails; they’re deliberately vague, and contain no real information aside from his email address and a password he re-uses too often online.
The criminal wants his payment in bitcoins, because that’s not traceable by law enforcement.
@ TachyonCode:
If by fiat currency you mean government decreed currency then you are right because the government control the military. However intrinsically worthless tokens have been/are used as currencies independent of any government. At one time meany British mill owners paid their workers in tokens they issued themselves. At another time Marks & Spencer gift vouchers were a convenient and cheap way to pay for low value international purchases. No military force involved at all. There are other examples.
@ Old Brit:
“Many” not “Meany”. Although …
I wish there were an “edit” button on these comments.
@ dragonsister:
Bitcoin mining and all cryptocurrency mining is not even a drop in the bucket of worldwide energy usage. What is bad is the inability for anyone to get a decent graphics card without paying small fortune. This cripples gamers, video editors, and researchers who rely on complex math computations (like climate scientists).
Beanie Babies sounds like a good investment for me!
I also find it slightly amusing that Novil is like 6 months late with this strip, as majority of audience does not even hear anything about Crypto-currencies right now.
Funny thing, tulips actually ruined the Dutch economy once. History is weird.
It’s kind of annoying that people are still repeating the “currency backed by military” myth. Because we have a bunch of great examples of countries with big militaries whose currencies took a much bigger dive than the Bitcoin ever did or will. The only thing “backing” a currency is your local grocery store. Nothing else. If anyone thinks that the military would move in on a grocer that refuses to accept dollars, they need to see a psychiatrist.
I’m wondering how many people invest in altcoins without having a single clue as to how they differ (or don’t, in the case of litecoin derivatives) from Bitcoin. Not that it matters. Almost all major altcoins follow the price of Bitcoin. As I’ve already said, they’re more closely linked to each other than any two fiat currencies, including ones pegged to each other by international agreements.
@ Ratfox:
The cost in electricity doesn’t “vary”, it simply increases. There are two factors that contribute to this:
1. The amount of Bitcoin given “from air” every block decreases gradually, and will eventually become 0 once all 21 million Bitcoin are mined. Since this is currently the main source of value for mining (it should eventually be overtaken by transaction fees), this reduces the amount of Bitcoin-per-electricity, even if the electricity-per-block remains the same.
2. Bitcoin is designed to ensure one block is created every 10 minutes. This gives enough time for all the different miners to agree on having the same block chain. If more than one block is created in that time frame, Bitcoin increases the difficulty, making it harder to create blocks.
The best analogy I’ve gotten for this is that creating a block is like scratching a lottery ticket. Each lottery ticket requires a certain amount of electricity, so you get big machines that can scratch multiple tickets at once. A difficulty increase is simply reducing the amount of winning tickets. Kind of like asking for a higher minimum roll on dice. So it causes each block to cost more electricity.
However, while the difficulty can increase, it does NOT decrease in response to a lack of blocks. If at any point the number of running miners is too few to mine a block, the result would be a slowdown in the network, not a reduction in mining difficulty.
Where the cost in electricity DOES vary widely, is in that electricity itself costs vastly different things depending on the country. Anyone who thinks fiat currency is stable, should try pegging it to things with real intrinsic value, like a Joule. Or a Big Mac.
@ Hinoron:
Bitcoin is traceable by law enforcement. EASILY traceable. Altcoins like Monero and ZCash specifically advertise “Unlike Bitcoin, we are not traceable”. There have already been multiple cases of the FBI tracing dumb criminals through Bitcoin. It shows a lack of technical knowledge on the part of the criminal.
@ MidoriLuna:
i believe they have a great value if they are a misprint but i am not completly sure
@ MidoriLuna:
ys yes they did
So if Chainlink is a scam, how will smart contracts access the 3rd party data feeds and API inputs to give them real-world value, while also maintaining the decentralized qualities that make blockchain useful in the first place? Picture not reading Nick Szabo’s “The God Protocols”, or watching any of Sergey’s presentations on the purpose of Chainlink’s blockchain-agnostic oracle solution, and instead writing the dialogue for this cucked-out comic strip.
So… does the Kickstarter advertised on this strip accept… bitcoin?
What about Cloud and Sandra relationship? 🙁
@ Hinoron:
I average about 3 of those a day. The ironic part is I don’t have a webcam on my work computer, and I wouldn’t use my work computer to watch porn anyway. I can’t believe anyone is stupid enough to fall for that.
I wonder if Powree once more have made some small alterations making Sandra look a little bit older…? Or is it just some random details in this strip that makes me think so?
@ dragonsister:
Climate change, at least the bit where we *possibly* could makea difference amongst all the other factors, can easily be mitigated. It just requires the ever-unpopular Nuclear Option.
Never mind that we can now build stuff that can take a major earthquake *and* a follow-up tsunami of biblical proportions and *still* survive with only “minor” damage. Never mind that there are other reactors that can take the waste of “conventional” reactors and burn it up quite happily, simply because they *could* be configured to make Plutonium,which *can* be used to make bombs, but also can be used to make semi-independent energy sources to , say, actually try to colonise other planets. And stuff.
But yeah CO2 Baaaad… We all going to dieeeeeee from a meter sea level rise, and thingies.
Written by a cloggie who lives *below* sea level, and whose country has seen a * 3 meter* sea level rise since the Roman Era.
But seriously… we need to voluntarily throw ourselves back to the Stone Age to solve a simple engineering problem our ancestors could manage with a shovel and some elbow grease… sheesh….
@ Grikath:
Your countrymen have done a great job of extending your country, and mine, but having seen for myself the effects of a storm surge where the effects were limited by high cliffs, I fear the utter devastation should a seawall holding back four metres of water be breached.
How much material will be required to add a further metre to the height of the sea defences? Where will it come from? How long will the project last, and what will it cost.
Does anyone uses cryptocurrencies non ironically today? Cause I feel like it’s just pseudo currency for people, who just want to sell business and then they collect naive users of such currency.
Roborat wrote:
I received those to non-personal accounts like feedback@company.domain, domain@company.domain, admin@company.domain … I’m not even sure who is the person who is supposedly watching the porn OR which computer is the camera supposedly connected to. The company server, which not only doesn’t have any camera OR monitor, but is in server hosting in room too cold for anyone watching porn in?
Old Brit wrote:
You are right, raising the sea defenses is not sustainable in long term. The only real sustainable option is nuclear. Nuclear … or more than six billions of people dying, because if we reduce our energy consumption, there wouldn’t be enough food for them. Yes, it’s a surprise to some, but producing food currently requires burning lot of fossil fuels to power the seed drills, harvesters and other technology, as well as trucks to move that food to people. No, replacing this technology with people using manual tools and maintain the production is not possible. In past, when this technology didn’t existed, it only worked because the world population was WAY smaller.
Not that it ever gets to people actually dying from hunger. Much sooner, people would just revolt or possibly go to war. Hey, don’t we already have people in France protesting against CO2 taxes?
cryptocurrencies can get back to me when its easier to use by the common man then by criminals trying to hide profit from being taxed.