Ubisoft's Blockchain Experiments Are Bad for the Planet 

Yea I get really confused how some people on Twitter are saying how cryptocurrency will solve climate change. Like the majority of sources I’ve read say the exact opposite.

@@PaperWolfe They're saying it because a hedge fund that invested in Bitcoin (ARK Invest) came out with a paper recently that said that blockchain will incentivize more green energy investing Because that's how it works apparently

@@GyroCannon That's like the guy who said that through bitcoin, we can eliminate billionaires (because it's impossible to have a billion BTC) lmao

Skyscrapers are environmentally friendly though because they reduce sprawl and the need to drive. It's suburbs with green lawns slapped on them that appear environmentally friendlu but actually aren't.

@@PaperWolfe The majority of sources have ties to the oil industry, and the top 5 companoes are responsible for an astronomically high % of global emissions. Plot twist: none of those companies are related to block chain.

Good point! It's better for consumers though.

@@griflet1 No it isn't. It just means if you get scammed there's nothing you can do about it because there's no authority who can step in and set things right. Scams are the main purpose of Bitcoin these days for exactly that reason.

Bad take, even your example is incorrect... It's about digital asset ownership, right now, you don't own those cards, you just rent them. Magic could as a centralized entity create cards and give them to players. Game devs could create games which leverage those cards IE: D&D game. And let players bring their cards Game devs don't have to ask MTG for permission, or even connect to their servers since they are just using assets the end users own and they can automatically validate their authenticity and ownership. This is just a simple example to try to fit your use case, but there are tons more, and the best ones are yet to be thought of, just like it did for the internet.

its like a blatant lie tbh

It's also good to point out that sometimes the decentralized verifiers can come to different conclusions. When the verifiers disagree and there's no authority then which ones are correct?

Destructiveness is common across every industry, that's just the nature of the process, but for people who care about games it's especially insulting because digital space is supposed to democratize everything and make it available to everyone. How can you turn a non-physical realm into capital?

This is just highlighting the symptom though. The problem is the same across all businesses: The execs only have fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. It's explicitly their LEGAL responsibility. And if they don't set aside that responsibility for sustainability issue, they'll just get replaced. Knocking on their doors won't change anything. It's the job of government to fine/tax this kind of behavior, so it will hit their bottom line, so effectively it becomes their legal responsibility to care about sustainability.

This is not remotely relevant, it's blame shifting by oil companies. What % of global emissions are the top 5 companies responsible for, and are any of those related to block chain?

@@thespider7898 Here's the thing. Oil companies suck, for sure, but a major player in the gaming industry running head-first into a bunch of projects that are explicitly energy intensive in a moment where we should be using less energy wherever possible is a terrible fucking thing.

@@nerd_nato564 it’s not as important as you seem to think it is, the world isn’t going to turn into a melting star and kill all of humanity because people are using fossil fuels to mine bitcoin

Whether your transact or not, the miners, of which there can be 20 or 20,000,000, will verify the next block regardless. Although verification is an essential part of blockchain technology, it's kind of misleading to imply that anyone who's not a miner is somehow just as responsible. Like we all have iPhones made from slave-mined coltan. No one's stopping buying smartphones... If we all went vegan, we could easily offset all crypto emissions and then some...

@@snowballeffect7812 Just waiting for some mindless idiot to reply to you with three words only "VEGAN IS GAE." They don't have arguments against it so they slap the same line at everyone.

No... It's public knowledge that the Blockchain tech they are using uses around 98% less energy than ETH, which already uses drastically less energy than this video asserts thanks to it's L2s just like the one Sorare implemented

@@snowballeffect7812 What a stupid comment. You are comparing a for-fun, for-profit economical system that has extreme environmental consequences with a communication tool that is basically necessary in the world we live in today. I can guarantuee you would not give up your phone or go vegan to offset your cryptomining emissions. The matter of fact is that CRYPTO IS USELESS. It's ONLY use it to make a few people extremely wealthy, and make the majority a little poorer. But let's be real, only a tiny percentage of people get into crypto to "own their favourite football player card"; 99% does it to make money buying and reselling a virtual commodity. So as long as you have freaks with warehouses of GPU's, driving up GPU prices for everyone all over the world while also fucking over our planet, crypto deserves all the hate it's getting. Oh and; in law, if you willingly associate with a criminal behaviour, you are still complicit: so yeah, buyers are just as guilty as miners, because they know what miners do and how it affects the planet.

@@jonaza2105 "that has extreme environmental consequences" where is the evidence for this? you have been completely brainwashed. What percentage of the financial market is crypto? What portion of that is NFTs? What is the rest of the financial markets impact? What is your impact as an individual? "I can guarantee you would not give up your phone or go vegan to offset your crypto mining emissions." All my phones have been hand-me-downs for the last 15 years. I made my entire family cut out beef and we rarely even eat chicken anymore. *Are you also implying that slave labor is necessary for phone manufacturing? You realize that companies can actually pay their workers and our phones would be only slightly more expensive, right? I'm sure your intent wasn't to white-knight for child slavery, but that's what happens when you don't think about your answers before you post them.* And you know what? crypto has increased my principle 6x. Why don't you calculate the value over time over emissions and come back to me with that value? "Oh and; in law, if you willingly associate with a criminal behaviour" so when chevron murders natives and dumps toxic gunk into south american rivers and you buy their gas, do you self flagellate? You seem to think your hands are clean when buying crypto (rather than mining it) is one of the cleanest investments you could make. " communication tool that is basically necessary in the world we live in today" how many videos are actually created vs viewed? how much bandwidth is just going to waste on idle machines and bots and CDN redundancies and inefficiencies? What make your logan paul video more valuable than an asset that has doubled in price over the last 7 months? Do you think your RU-vid playlist is worth 7 times more than my 70k crypto portfolio? You have just bought into the media hype. NFTs are the new in thing to hate. Everyone has already forgotten about it. Instead of acting like a flat-earther or climate change denier, why don't you actually do some research? Joe Scott did a great video on the topic you should have watched, instead.

If this was Gamefaqs I would say: "bump"

@@luischavesdev whats bump

Do you not realize that this is outsourced PR?

try sterling

This is ether very lazy or a deliberately narrowed scope, because it is true that the technology that Bitcoin, Etherium and Ubisoft currently use is causing massive unclean energy consumption, and it is true that Proof Of Work is why. BUT HOW DID HE NOT FIND PROOF OF STAKE?!? To look at what Ubisoft is doing and make sweeping statements about the state of Blockchain technology itself shows ether a lack of care for this subject or a willingness to mislead us. (This is my 4th PMG video so I'm not sure.) Proof Of Stake lets validators be voted through a system that not only saves nearly all of the energy cost but also allows the masses to pick their validators individually allotting them some amount of newly minted cons. (Charity's and Not For Profits often become validators.) Not to mention the way Proof Of Work can be used as an actual value in ways that offset their original cost in energy, such as the server hosting example PMG gave in this video where the actual server uses the work thats done as tokens and creates the value from that rather than wasted math and power.

I'm sure their plan was to promote the problem out of the department it abused.

Block chain doesn't significantly impact the environment, nothing does when you consider that the top 5 companies are responsible for 70-75% of global emissions. Shockingly none of those 5 companies are related to block chain.

In other news: we couldn't afford phones or cars or pc's if we didn't have basically slaves that extract the materials. Start working at 5 years old and die at 25. So we get to choose what we are mad about I guess...

@@sssenseiii it would take about $11 billion to end world hunger. But $100 billion goes missing each year tax evasion of the richest few. We could afford quite a lot without slaves. The world is bad for we have made it that way.

@@NyJoanzy you can't end "world hunger" lol

the gaming industry needs to be vivisected

While I hope that this is true, don't get your hopes up.

Given the apparent short lead time on this video (the text exchange with another person was dated early May), it's still a tiny bit too early to determine if this thing has happened yet.

Hey, if I understand correctly, they did! On May 19 I see a bunch of articles saying that Sorare is now using a scalable solution based on Ethereum 2.0 (which, if I understand correctly, will have a lot less cost). Apparently they were also covering the cost of all transactions, which was costing them an estimated $600k/month, so they were definitely motivated to move to a cheaper solution xD

@@chess123mate Yes, ETH 2.0 is based on Proof of Stake, which cuts power consumption by 99.9%.

Yes, they are

Two main reasons. Firstly, aknowledging the problem is always better than not doing so, given that it can impact people's perception of issues and solutions. But secondly, they don't actually do nothing. They are often disappointingly slow, but they do sometimes do good stuff. A few comments here point out advancements in energy efficiency, which would result in less impact and consumption than currently exists.

Just the fact that he actually allows himself to be interviewed and featured in this video is surprising enough, although I don’t exactly know what’s actually happening in the background or how these things works.

@@NeroVingian40 probably because saying something is worse than not saying anything since it can be taken as an admission of guilt. Plus the whole making a scalable model thing to reduce power consumption is actually true, since they did do it

And that is also my issue with "environmentally neutral" things. We don't need stuff to be neutral, we need it to be positive. The situation is already bad and we need it to improve, not stay like it is.

What environmental impact lol

@@HappyBeezerStudios We'll if theoretically everything if is environmentally "positive", as in carbon sinks, then we would have to start burning fossil fuels for the sake of the environment. Obviously this not anywhere on the horizon rn but it's all about a balance and neutral is good, because it's easy to balance.

Sexual abusers? What happened? :0

@@laurenajaero346 what cave have you been living in?

It doesn't really HAVE to. It's thriving already thanks to speculators.

@@GyroCannon there is a small difference between widely accepted and thriving, but you are correct, the potential for profit seen is more than enough to keep it stable.

It's just Bitcoin and ethereum. Every other blockchain is close to carbon neutral even some going as far as to be carbon negative. The media skews everything making it seem like the actual gaming NFTs are built on Bitcoin but they're in reality built on Solana or cosmos which are both close to energy neutral.

@@milomaz1 Ok, cool, still uses far more energy than just... credit cards. And that's not even getting into how stupid replicating the scarcity of super expensive art (which is just money laundering anyways) with fucking PNGs (which anyone can have an identical copy of by simpling opening up a web page that contains that image, or if you want something easier to access, hitting the other button on your mouse.)

@@milomaz1 So you didn't even watch the video.

He didn't mention alternative consensus mechanisms to Proof of Work that don't have the enormous environmental cost.

Bitcoin mining can incentivize renewables in a very unique way. You can't feed more power into the grid then it uses without raising the voltage and damaging everyone's equipment. Battery storage is lossy and prohibitively expensive. So as someone who wants to make money making a solar/wind farm you're always going to have the problem of excess capacity. Running miners can subsidize renewables and there are cases where it is already done. Also it doesn't have to be that way for bitcoin or ethereum to work. It's just that people are competing for profit. Also if you consider the issue in it's totality it's nothing but a red herring. A misdirect. More anti-bitcoin propaganda. Not a lot of people are talking about how destructive all the air-conditioning is or zoning laws designed to make walking nearly impossible. But everyone is talking about how bitcoin uses as much electricity as X country. If fewer people competed to be miners the same transactions would be performed with nearly no environmental impact. If the electricity came from renewables and nuclear there would be no emissions and ultimately it's not bitcoin that is driving us over the edge in our fight against climate change just the lack of action from the people with all the money and power. Bitcoin making renewables more viable is a net positive in my view.

@@kkonstantinosss2 you need the number of miners to process the volume of transactions I thought?

@@jacobscrackers98 Ok, still don't see a reason to involve blockchain in gaming.

@@nerd_nato564 Decentralised gaming (not that I trust a big company like Ubisoft to implement that properly) is a nice plus but not really necessary, unlike decentralised money, so I basically agree with you. I was just saying.

The time of sugarlumps has passed, for issues like these!

Corporations are not legally required to make as much money as possible. Corporations are beholden to their shareholder who might want them to make lots of money but the law doesn't require them to. This idea was made up to excuse awful behaviour but its just an excuse.

I believe that figure is from the organization offsetra.com . The answers to your questions are probably there.

No he didn't. They also made it seem like transacting with eth is somehow related to miners. Whether your transact or not, the miners, of which there can be 20 or 20,000,000, will verify the next block regardless. Although verification is an essential part of blockchain technology, it's kind of misleading to imply that anyone who's not a miner is somehow responsible. Like we all have iPhones made from slave-mined coltan. No one's stopping buying smartphones...

​@@snowballeffect7812 If everyone stopped using Bitcoin, Bitcoin miners would not make money, so they'd stop mining. Therefore, yes it's your fault if you voluntarily engage in a system where 70% of the mining is done using coal power and every transaction costs a huge amount of CO2. (Now, I wouldn't call it your fault if Bitcoin was literally the only option, or if your work/life demanded that you use Bitcoin, but I doubt that's the case.)

Tired of these damn tokens and token efforts to go green

What about HDDs?

Oh good, proof of stake, so those who hold the most of the "currency" exert a greater influence in it? Sounds equitable, and worthwhile for the average user.. I remember having this exact conversation with a colleague over 3 years ago about how proof of stake was "coming soon".

@@bleees1637 Do you really think it likely that anyone would hold more than 50% of the system's currency AND want to destroy the system's economy losing all that value though? Proof of Stake doesn't really have any security concerns if you ask me - not any that proof of work doesn't share at least.

Or you know how about, stop doing all this, stop scamming people, stop trying to make money off your virtual currencies, just stop all your bullshit and reduce the energy PERMANENTLY.

One article mentions that expenses of Visa and MasterCard were like half of Bitcoin's yet they process around a half million times more transactions (though each of Bitcoin's transactions tend to be much larger). So, per transaction, I think it's reasonable to argue that they are literally a million times cheaper.

it’s a nice technology and could be used for highly sensitive data... (it’s not *that* energy intensive at first, but it grows exponentially the more items you add) sadly... it’s used for speculative shit.

who else are you supposed to go after, the whole point of blockchain is to dissolve responsibility lmao

Whataboutism. And cryptocurrencies are just another plot of the rich. No revolutionary potential.

Especially after they were in one of previous videos about recyclable materials. Just why... :-(

And SEGAs NFT plans!