this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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I'm just pointing out that they're still there. If it's a scam then at this point it's one of history's biggest and longest-running.
And whether any particular cryptocurrency qualifies as a security in any particular jurisdiction is a complicated question, some do and some don't. This is about cryptocurrency as a whole so calling them an unlicensed security would not be accurate.
Calling them a "currency" wouldn't be accurate either.
And the fact that they still exist as a fraction of a shadow of their former hype doesn't perish the fact that they have accomplished none of their stated goals.
Not as an untracable currency, not as a store of value, not as a medium of exchange, and most especially not as a thing to make government-issued money obsolete.
Cryptocurrency as a whole isn't worth the disk space it occupies.
It isn't a "shadow", its current market cap is near its historical high point right now.
If you have no use for it then by all means ignore it. But calling it a bubble that has popped is simply factually inaccurate. Other people evidently find value in it.
And that's their problem. The price is up because anybody with sense and no morals wants to sell off their holdings for as much as possible before the next "market adjustment" leaves them hodling the bag.
I have no interest in the specifics of why the price is up or down, I'm not a speculator. That's not the point of all this. The only point is it's still there. Which it is.
But it isn't. It was never there in the first place. Even the tulip bubble still had tulips at the end, but crypto is just creaking along like a zombie on the inertia of hardware investments.
By "hardware investments" I take it you mean mining rigs? You're two years out of date, Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022. It doesn't depend on special-purpose hardware any more, or any hardware of particularly significant quantity. Bitcoin still does does but it's a shrinking share of the total cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Again, if you aren't interested in cryptocurrencies then feel free to ignore them. But making confident pronouncements about them when you're not familiar with how they work or are used is not that. Poetic and emotional language is no substitute for knowledge.
No, I'm talking about hardware as in the corporate infrastructure. Exchanges, wallet operators, customer service, etc.
Almost nobody does their own crypto, they just make an account at Coinbase or something. This defeats the purpose of crypto by re-centralizing it, making the network susceptible to another Mt. Gox situation.
People are only using crypto because so many people are using crypto? Okay.
Right?
If you're effectively forced to go through a corporate bank equivalent anyway then what even is the point? You might as well invest through a local credit union, at least it will still be around when the hodlers finish divesting and let the remains of the crypto market collapse into insolvency.
You're not forced to, though. It's an option.
I have no idea what you're trying to argue here. One the one hand you say crypotocurrency is moribund, but on the other hand now you're complaining about how there's a huge infrastructure for people using it.
This whole thing is a weird offshoot from a discussion on AI, for that matter. What's the relevance at this point?
An option that nobody uses isn't really an option.
It's clear that you're not getting my point, and I'm not sure how else I could explain it. Both of those things are true, crypto is dead and the zombified corpse that remains is still trying to sell worthless tokens to what few gullible marks remain before the market gets wise and the bottom falls out.
The relevance to AI is that large language models are following the same trajectory. The whole market is propped up by big tech investments, and the firehose of money they have pointed into that bonfire will only last so long as it takes them to realize that that language models aren't useful enough to justify their expense.
And it's clear that you don't know how cryptocurrency is actually being used, so it's not a useful analogue to AI. Except to the point that you don't know how AI is being used either.
The things that LLMs are being used for are already justifying their expense, otherwise they wouldn't be used in the first place. There's no "bubble" to pop on the usage side of things where jobs have been replaced by it, AI isn'tgoingto"go away." It's possible that some of the big providers like OpenAI or Anthropic might go out of business or get bought out, that's always a risk for first movers in a field like this, but if they fail it will be because others have stepped up to provide those services even more cheaply.
No, they aren't. The things LLMs are being used for aren't significant enough to justify the costs. OpenAI is the most capital-intensive startup in Silicon Valley history and burns through almost a million bucks a day in data center operations alone. Its net income was -$540 million in 2022 and 2023 looks to be closer to losing a whole billion despite nonupling their income. They'll need to double their revenue again without raising costs just to start breaking even.
That kind of money-bonfire never lasts long.
I literally addressed this in the comment you're responding to. The individual service providers don't matter, especially not first movers. This is an entire industry, it's not just one company.
Precisely. It isn't just one company blowing billions.
You only mentioned OpenAI. That's one.
If that's what you actually want, you can ask Google's LLM to list them for you.
@FaceDeer
Kind of an overstatement. It hasn't even been 20 years. If it were a scam it'd be nowhere near the scale and timeframe of, say, Papal Indulgences.
This isn't anything to do with your wider argument btw, just me nitpicking. Didn't know you'd relocated to fedia.io, was that during the downtime?
Heh, I suppose I can grant papal indulgence as a scam. Were I feeling edgy I could one up that and label the church as a whole as a scam. But since the usual accusation leveled against cryptocurrency is "ponzi scheme" I looked that up and noted that Madoff's the current record holder for one of those at a mere $65 billion.
Yeah, the kbin.social week of downtime was the final nudge I needed to set up an alternative account here. But honestly I was getting very frustrated with kbin.social's flakeiness already before then. I appreciate Ernest's work, but something like kbin can't be a single-person show in the long run. I hope he does well but now I don't have to reload the page every time I want to vote or comment.
Heh love your wording there. I actually started that train of thought with various "relics" like the vial of Christ's blood, statues weeping tears etc some of which were eventually debunked iirc.
Ponzi schemes are quite possibly as old as granaries (or the pyramids), but I think a better contender for scope is something like the Mississipi Bubble which was absolute madness...
Kbin really is a work in progress. I'm sticking with it, but I have backup accounts for the times when it's too buggy.