I was searching info on a crypto scam and saw that now reddit has jumped on the crypto bandwagon too? Everything must be on a blockchain for some reason
That’s not karma. Those are community points, which are subreddit-only points that have been on the blockchain for years.
If you’re not on the crypto subreddits, you’ve probably been blissfully unaware they exist. But it sure gets the crypto subreddits excited, especially when they can announce that their pet coin is moving to a New And Improved Blockchain ™.
This is the kind of content I’m here for.
Burn baby burn
How does blockchain make karma more secure and useful? Isn’t it just a count of upvotes stored in a database? Or is community points something different?
By putting them on the blockchain it would at least make them a public database, where you’d be able to see if Reddit admins tried to do any tampering.
Except that if you control the majority of computers that said blockchain is stored on, you can just edit the chain. And now that’s the “official” story.
No, you can’t just “edit the chain.” You’d need to fork it with new rules to have it accept whatever arbitrary transaction you wanted to insert. Furthermore, even if the blockchain was set up in such a way as to make that easy, it would be obvious to everyone what had happened. The blockchain is a public database. Reddit’s back end is currently a private database. If Reddit changes a karma score or whatever over on their current private database, how can you tell? How can you prove it? If they try to do something like that with a blockchain everyone will see it.
Assuming it even works - you speak of “controlling the majority of computers” as if it’s something that’s easy to do. Reddit’s “Community Points” tokens are on the Ethereum blockchain. Under its current consensus algorithm you’d need to control 66% of the stake. The current amount staked is 21921671 Ether, which at current prices is 41.4 billion US dollars. You would have to buy on the order of 50 million Ether to overcome the existing stake, and there simply isn’t that much available for sale so the price is literally incalculable. They’ve made it a very hard blockchain to break.
So people can’t trade it in for a fuck spez hat on the dark web or something like that maybe?
Community points are different. They are only used within a community, mainly in crypto communities.
The idea is that instead or in addition to worthless upvotes, you can send users a sort of tip for their comments and posts. The tip is a digital coin, and the recipient can give it to other users or sell it for real money (presumably to another user who will use it to give someone a tip).
Obviously if real money is involved then blockchain is preferable to trusting reddit admins. And the idea isn’t totally stupid, IIRC there is/was a similar internet currency that you could use to “buy a coffee” for your favorite content creators in the pre-Patreon days. But I have no idea if the reddit version is implemented sensibly.
Such a scam. Also completely believable - remember Reddit’s NFTs?
blockchain != crypto
the technology is no more the scam than eggs are a cake.
- Linked to Ethereum mainnet.
- Earn and Spend points
- Tips
- Network fees
It’s a crypto currency, and ethereum is a blockchain. Blockchains have little use outside of cryptocurrency. A cake mold to a cake would be a better comparison.
You’re wrong there. The only use case of blockchain is cryptocurrencies .
false, as proven by the simplest of research such as provided in reply to my initial comment.
It isn’t, as your link shows, no other successful use other than cryptocurrencies or things explicitly tied to cryptocurrencies exist. There’s theoretical uses, sure, but nothing practical. Ipso facto it’s just for cryptocurrencies.