The rise of better home internet connections worldwide will make this even more attainable for more people. At least on my low-level EU country that has been always lagging to progress tech-wise, we've seen great progress on fiber internet adoption, so I have hope of acceleration.

[1] https://umbrel.com/umbrelos

[2] https://apps.umbrel.com/

The CO2 emissions heavily depend on the actual use of renewable which nobody can be sure about. In some cases like bitcoin mining using fuel that would otherwise cause CO2 emissions, you actual have a net gain. (See companies like https://www.upstreamdata.ca/)

So even by those arguable arguable CO2 emissions it's actually less than 0.1% of the world's total.

I wish people that have knee-jerk reactions about this, actual think about the big picture and what actually causes high CO2 emissions and offer way fewer benefits than censorship-resistant money.

The luxury fashion industry for example for a long time has had a big negative effect, from drying up whole lakes, to child labor to effectively destroying villages for what... anyhow.

`ssh -D 1080 -C -q -N root@your-vps`

This reminds me the saying "Never admit a wrongdoing and you'll never be wrong".

It's great that we get several of those new startup banks (Monzo, N26 etc.) that provide superior experience and slowly show what horrible things traditional banks were getting away with.

That aside, the main problem isn't centralization but rather the trust level. The point is to not have to trust someone isn't serving you the false data. Contracts must be created and ran only when the data can be cryptographically verified to be true.

There are no trustless oracles if any of the required data are outside of the settlement system (e.x. blockchain). Even when the data are inside, you still have cases of collusion that make things problematic.

People are trying to sell something that's close to impossible. Especially when they try to add infinite flexibility on it. Even with the currently low stakes there have been incidents of "oracles" getting compromised. There are several strategies to try and camouflage a centralized oracle to a faux decentralized entity but eventually if stakes get high enough, your entity will become a target and it'll become once again obvious what's happening.

Anyway, if you are really interested in actual related news and facts just follow https://www.theblockcrypto.com or similar.

That paper is about a side-effect based on the design of "Decentralized Exchanges" on Ethereum and similar systems. That's why people should always dive in the details of those blockchain solutions; not only you have implementation issues, but even design issues where the "solution" falls apart when game theory is accounted for all actors and interactions with the network.

Unfortunately, the complexity of such "decentralized solutions" makes it easy to miss a lot of issues. Even with audits that cost thousands of dollars per case, you still have several cases where serious vulnerabilities go unnoticed.

You are better off selling manually on an exchange (0.1-0.25% fees) and transferring to a sane bank with debit cards and minimal fees like N26(EU) or Charles Schwab(US).

Have a fiat buffer, but control your holdings and don't get milk by fee-vampires like Coinbase.

The only reason they are accepted at the moment is that it's free money, especially for the initial coin holders(founders/friend investors etc.).

For some reason people now accept fully pre-distributed coins. At least Ethereum went through a PoW phase to allow for some non-ICO distribution.

So while they market decentralization and trustlessness, they are one server-compromise away from getting fed a completely false view of Ethereum's blockchain state and losing all their funds.

If that's an attempt on web 3.0, we might as well just skip straight to web 4.0.