I think windows is a pretty good middle ground. Yes it’s annoying that you might need to install a 3rd party tool to give you a right click menu option to take ownership of any file/folder, but at least you can do that and it’s easy. And for normies that don’t have Linux-fu they’ll get into a lot less trouble than if you give them Linux.

MacOS on the other hand, if there’s something Apple decided users are too dumb to be allowed to do (which it turns out, is a lot of stuff), then you just can’t do it, period.

Would honestly be better than the current options

All first world governments have some degree of corruption from money in politics, but don’t kid yourselves: USA is much worse than most

Hmm I don’t think that’s necessarily what OP is proposing. There are cryptos where transactions are anonymous.

Banks are already paying for servers to process and store information.

Yes

A few validators or collators (quite cheap for a private network) provided by several banks would cost a fraction of what they pay now

How? They’d be doing extra compute work for no reason (validating already valid transactions), and storing extra data (lots of hashes) for no reason, so it can only make infra costs more expensive. Plus the added complexity meaning you have to hire an extra team just to understand it.

Don’t mix blockchain with the speculative world built on top of it. That’s only an unfortunate use of the technology.

That speculative world as shitty as it is, is the only proven use case of the technology, if you take that away then blockchains are even less useful

All my points? That’s a bit rich

You make a good point that PoS would solve one of the issues I raised which is electricity usage.

In theory it could also increase throughput and reduce costs, but: a) in practice that hasn’t happened yet despite years of development, b) it’s never going to be as efficient as a centralised system because of the extra overheads necessary to decentralise it, so that point still stands

All my other points still stand as well, plus the additional problems PoS creates to do with centralisation of power

Ok so firstly you’re not the OP I was replying to, so neither of us know for certain whether they were talking about replacing the banking system with a decentralised currency vs keeping the existing centralised private banks and just having them use a blockchain as their database. I assumed the former because of their wording (“replace the banking system”), and because the latter offers no advantages that I know of.

Secondly if you think a blockchain would offer some advantages over other more efficient write only databases, I’d be interested to know what those are, because to me if you’re not running a decentralised system then you’re only getting the downsides of blockchain (such as it being single threaded, slow, and space inefficient) without any of the upsides.

For some background, I’m well aware of how both blockchains and crypto work, having been obsessed with them for a little while in 5 or 6 years ago like many of us were before becoming disillusioned. I’ve also got professional experience as a developer on both immutable databases and banking ledgers.

WebP was barely competitive with JPEG

Citation needed

So what, we’re not supposed to use any library that’s ever had a vulnerability? You better go uninstall literally everything on your computer then

It’s just the typical Lemmy hivemind hating anything made by a large tech company, purely because it’s made by a large tech company, even when it’s actually really good

JPEG-XL is better

Citation needed

A banking system running on Blockchain

Is an astronomically terrible idea. It:

• would use as much electricity as an entire country
• payments/transfers would be both much slower AND much more expensive than via a bank
• would have no protection against fraud. You got scammed? Your money’s gone. You paid for something online and it never arrived? Too bad
• would have no way to stop money laundering
• would have no way to help people who forgot their password, they’d just lose their life savings permanently
• would tie up a bunch of capital, preventing reinvestment and growth. There would be no way to get a bank loan to buy a house for example
• the list goes on

Eh? On Linux you also aren’t supposed to log in as root, and you also have to individually set file permissions.

This issue is unrelated to windows, it’s a safety feature that all modern desktop OSes have

All of my Bluetooth devices work flawlessly these days. What are you using?

Most software is a terrible pile of unreadable code with no tests and horrible architecture choices, that somehow manages to keep working just through the power of years of customers finding bugs and complaining loud enough to get them fixed.

If you write any automated tests at all, you’re already better than most “professional” software companies. If you have a CI/CD pipeline, you’re far ahead.

Was it ever good?

I don’t think you understand how fractional reserve banking works. The first paragraph of that Wikipedia page already clearly contradicts you. The banks can still only lend money they have (otherwise how would they lend it? Where would it come from? Only the central bank can print currency). What fractional reserve banking is saying is that banks can invest some portion of the customer deposits that they hold into non-liquid assets, often in the form of loans to other customers, but it could also be invested in other things eg government bonds. The interest banks earn by doing that helps pay for the interest they pay to customers on their saving. They also have to carefully manage their liquidity: maximising returns while still holding enough liquid assets to cover any potential spikes in withdrawals.

Even when investing customer funds, banks still have to meet captial requirements set by the regulators which basically say that their risk-adjusted assets have to cover the liabilities of customer deposits, so that for example they can’t just invest all the deposits in Bitcoin as that would pose too high a risk of insolvency. The reason SVB went insolvent recently was that they successfully lobbied the Trump administration to relax capital requirements for banks of their size, then made risky investments that lost money and they suddenly had less money than they owed their customers.

Can you tell me more?

My superpower is that I can plug in USB A the right way up on the first try pretty much every time

Ability to use the internet well means you have a lot of information at your disposal and can educate yourself out of believing in fairy tales