Metz

I would not say that i fully trust our politicans, but there are significant checks and restrictions in place.

I mean, we had an all-encompassing totalitarian state that had absolute control over the country (or at least parts of it) 2 times in our history. We kinda learned the one or another thing from that.

And about the direct democracy thing. There have been and continue to be efforts to introduce more options. And I was an advocate myself for the longest time of my life.

But after seeing how some of the population behaved during Covid and how they are currently behaving in the East (where an ultra-right wing party has taken power) I'm not sure it's a wise idea to give more direct power to an uninformed, easily manipulated mob.

But thats a topic for another time.

You are the one that does not seem to understand. There is no such thing as voting on issues at all in germany. We elect the political party we believe will tackle the problem in the way that aligns with our desired outcome. But the ordinary citizen has no say in the matter directly.

There is no voting on tax rate, zoning, abortion or whatever. Nowhere in germany. Neither localy nor nationwide. The only thing that could possibly be comparable would be a referendum where, for example, you have to collect 1 million votes and then you can submit this to the state as a request. But there is no guarantee they will even accept it.

Its kinda weird for germany too. After having a total surveillance state twice in our history you'd think we had something against it. And we are in general very privacy minded. But the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.

For germany:

How do they know you are a citizen?

Everybody has an identity card. And you will be sent an election letter which you then show there. It has your Voter-ID and district number on it.

How do they know in what political division your vote should be counted?

Well the voting happens inside the respective districts. Plus you have the number on your letter.

For local referenda, how do they know what issues you are eligible to vote on?

No such thing in germany.

Even outside the elections, it is far too US-centric. I mean, it is lemmy.world after all.

I'm sorry if I sound more pissed off than I actually am, but it is indeed quite a bit annoying.

"Synchronous 26" and "Synchronous 320" sounds super weird. Are you combining RAM with different clock frequencies / timings? that can and often will cause problems like instabilities and crashes. i would take out the one you added and try the games again.

We're talking about fractions of a cent here per post. Of course, this all needs to be worked out in detail and variables and scaling needs to be added / calculated. So for someone that posts only 2-3 times a day, costs and delay are practically unmeasurable low. but if you start pushing 100 posts out per minute, the difficulty of the PoW calculation gets up.

A delay of a fraction of a second to do the PoW for a single post is not a problem. But a spam-bot that is now suddenly limited to making 1 post per minute instead 100 makes a huge difference and could drive up the price even for someone with deep pockets.

But I'm not an expert in this field. I only know that spambots and similar are a problem that is almost as old as the Internet and that there have been an almost incalculable number of attempts to solve it to date, all of which have more or less failed. But maybe we can find a combination that could work for our specific case.

Of course, there are still a lot of things to clarify. how do we stop someone from constantly creating new accounts, for example?

would we have to start with a “harder difficulty” for new users to counteract this?

do we need some kind of reputation system?

How do we set them accurately enough not to drive away new users but still fulfill their purpose?

But as said, not an expert. Just brainstorming here.

Can't this simply be circumvented by the attackers operating several Lemmy servers of their own? That way they can pump as many messages into the network as they want. But with PoW the network would only accept the messages work was done for.

Long before cryptocurrencies existed, proof-of-work was already being used to hinder bots. For every post, vote, etc., a cryptographic task has to be solved by the device used for it. Imperceptibly fast for the normal user, but for a bot trying to perform hundreds or thousands of actions in a row, a really annoying speed bump.

See e.g. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

This combined with more classic blockades such as CAPTCHAs (especially image recognition, which is still expensive in mass despite the advances in AI) should at least represent a first major obstacle.

Oh for fucks sake..

And it is the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. just lol.

Well many others are still here..