AI Becomes Silicon Valley’s Next Buzzy Bandwagon as Crypto Boom Fizzles | Hacker News Reader

AI Becomes Silicon Valley’s Next Buzzy Bandwagon as Crypto Boom Fizzles

wsj.com

It has always been a buzz world, since 2014 or so. But AI has real world applications, unlike the vast majority or all of crypto.

that's hindsight. crypto had a sell when it was up and coming. and then when the rubber hit the road, all the benefits didn't hold up to scrutiny.

The new AI wave isn't proven quite yet. I wonder if it will have to make a "BTC is a store of value a la gold"-esque marketing pivot too.

Is it hindsight? I've worked in crypto since 2016 and I knew it was all BS and all scams back then. Seven years later, it hasn't contributed anything to society except more sophisticated scams.

> it hasn't contributed anything to society

It paid journalists.

Yep.. only hindsight if you were walking backwards with your eye closed. I've not see one real use case. It's all just a "greater fool" exercise.

PS. A lot of people have been saying crypto is all scam and BS back in 2016. Probably even much earlier. It's not just me.

There are a lot of BS, scammy projects. And it sounds like you've worked for them (and apparently don't have an issue with that, or you have no other options).

That doesn't mean it's all BS and scams.

It's all BS and scams.

If you are interested, I would be open to having a discussion with you about crypto. Show you a bit about how I've been using crypto for last couple of years. Since 2016, I am living in Belgium as a refugee (asylum seeker as they like to call us). I have had no functional bank account for the last 5 years. The first two years, I had only one option. To use a government-backed bank, called Belfius. etc...

Long story short, I just wanted to put out there that crypto's usefulness can not be found unless your life depends on you finding an alternative financial and economic system not under control of a single state or government.

Thinking about the opportunities that crypto unlocks.. For the next 5 years, it would be an uphill battle for me, a black man from foreign origin, to start a company in real life, under Belgian law. If I were to do it on the Ethereum blockchain, it would be a matter of days or months. Moreover, the use of crypto technology for nefarious actions says more about the human and the team conducting those kind of morally abject behaviors. Not the math.

I think you mistake your current context with opportunity. It's absolutely true that you can do what you can now thanks to the crypto economy. That doesn't stand for the proposition that the crypto economy presents any sort of business opportunity. It actually suggests the opposite, imo. If the only opportunity in crypto is for the severely unbanked, then there isn't much opportunity in crypto.

Find me an example in the art market where a creator receives royalties without the involvement of more than one business partner. Be it a curator or dealer or PR agency or trademark office or other legal entities. With a smart contract, royalties are sent back to the creator, straight to a software wallet.

That removes friction on the ladder of steps required to climb for a seller to reach a buyer. Efficiency is beloved by the real economy. Especially the media and entertainment sector.

I'm not the one who decides on market moves. I'm just using open sourced tech tools to generate income. Someone else in Hollywood or Paris might use the same tools in an attempt to cut costs and reach global audiences/wallets.

Let's see what the business community comes up with. The beauty of it is that the underlying technology is openly accessible and freely usable. No patent, no registration fees, no distribution rights, 24/7 reliable on-chain transaction settlement... For real life businesses in this digital age, those are pain-points that could be addressed by something like an Ethereum Layer-2 blockchain.

I'm talking from the viewpoint of an entrepreneur that could be running a company in the real world. By business opportunity, I understood what are the key improvements from crypto that could help start/grow a business.

One last thing, Shopify.com is about to enable sellers on its platform to use crypto tools, concerning the Direct-To-Consumers type of businesses. Isn't that enough illustrations to show that there might hint of a business opportunity in the crypto economy?

I mean, I still haven’t heard of the core tech of crypto being invalidated in any way. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Ripple are all still genuine projects with solid principles. To me, it still looks a lot like the .com bubble era of the 00’s: there was a veritable Cambrian explosion of mutations on ideas, and now you’re left with what was fit and what wasn’t. You can’t say crypto doesn’t work when the only people who have truly “used” it in any way shape or form thus far are scam artists. Crypto may nonetheless be dead because of optics and public opinion, but that is a signal that needs another decade to measure, and meanwhile there is still genuine work being done out there. Seems silly to claim it’s dead now, when everytime popular opinion is that “we finally buried it” it pops right back out of the dirt.

That's just it. The only people who truly used it were scammers.

There is no real world use for WEB3 or NFT. Storage is expensive and the carbon footprint is nuts. It's not faster and it's not more secure. It can be hacked and it's not decentralised (ask Canadian Truckers about how safe their bitcoin was from government intervention)

People keep bringing back Amway, that doesn't mean it's not scammer rubbish.

I don't think there is no real world application for Web3 or NFTs, that seems pretty short sighted. Sure, there are scams, but legit innovations as well. I mean, the MoMA liquidated 70 million USD in art, including a Picasso, to buy NFTs.

I'd be interested to see what the NFTs MOMA bought are worth now. The NFT market is a fraction of the size it was during the highs of 2021.

Most NFTs lost 90%+ of value. People are finally waking up to the fact that the jpeg is still stored in a centralized server - often controlled by the NFT issuer. When the NFT issuer shuts down, so does your NFT. Now your NFT points to a broken URL.

Most are on IPFS, but about 10% are 100% on-chain

IPFS is too slow. Imagine trying to load 1,000 images from IPFS. People won't tolerate it. Hence, IPFS cannot scale.

On-chain also can't scale because you're not suppose to put something like a JPEG on the blockchain.

The carbon footprint is no longer nuts. Ethereum went to proof of stake last year, which has a cloud-like carbon footprint.

Only bitcoin still has an insane carbon footprint.

Yes, now Ethereum is a security because it went PoS and it promises yields for staking.

But Bitcoin still consumes electricity of an entire small country.

The main use case for crypto is creating ponzi schemes, skirting security laws, and other types of scams. The dotcom boom was not like this.

People keep comparing the dotcom boom with crypto as if they're similar. They're not. One had extremely clear use cases and already contributed to society through easier to access information and faster communication. Crypto does not have.

> The main use case for crypto is creating ponzi schemes, skirting security laws, and other types of scams. The dotcom boom was not like this.

I'd say the dotcom boom was quite a bit like it:

- Completely overvalued companies without any real utility scamming investors claiming to revolutize X by doing it "on the internet".

- Evading regulation and breaking local laws, playing cat and mouse with law enforcement (e.g. Napster, Megaupload).

But yeah, unlike with crypto there were also more reasonable use cases.

There are plenty of reasonable arguments out there telling you real issues with crypto which just haven't been addressed because they don't matter in scams.

Alone the Bitcoin incentive to consume unlimited cheap energy.

50% attacks are really and are ignored.

I have plenty of arguments no one was answering reasonable. Instead people say stupid things like Bitcoin solves inflatiin because BTC are limited but just ignore that mBTC etc exist and it still lead to inflation or deflation as everything else.

Or all the green washing garbage people try to sell. Uhh Bitcoin can push renewable and wasted energy. No we just incentive burning gas for Bitcoin instead of thinking about how to make it economically and sustainable useful for us....

Is it dead? Nope but has it ever reached a reasonable thing? Nope it got hyped into the sky due to money scams but it's not even were it should be to be used like we currently use it.

The biggest issue for crypto is the hype

I mean, if people lose faith in their central banks, it's good to know that there are alternatives out there. That is and always has been the only value proposition of crypto. That your contributions to society aren't exclusively payable in blood money of the giant country cartels. The billions of unbanked are likely to feel this the hardest. The leverage a bank can generate on them is modern slavery.

I'm not sure what part of Ripple makes you think it's genuine tech on solid principles. Every year I'm still pikachu-facing that people still buy into it. It's mostly vapour and doesn't even pass as cryptocurrency in my book. Shills like to mention their relationship with banks, none of which (will likely ever) have anything to do with XRP, which according to their own marketing has a whopping total of 150 validator nodes.

I am glad you feel the same, I mostly included it because it seems like a project people still display faith in. I didn't want to play "favorites" with what I think are the only reputable crypto projects out there.

> I wonder if it will have to make a "BTC is a store of value a la gold"-esque marketing pivot too.

I think it's already happening. Fully autonomous cars or a Bing-like AI that is actually reliable are probably still decades away, if ever possible.

Instead, AI related companies are already pivoting towards enabling and assisting humans for specific use cases.

E.g. „We'll have LIDAR-based crash prevention and assisted driving in most new cars by 2030“ instead of „We'll have fully autonomous driving within the next years“ or „This AI based tool will reliably summarize key investor information from quarterly reports“ instead of „Ask this AI anything“.

People were saying the same about crypto and web3 6 months ago. Not to say you’re wrong.

About real world implication ? Rather the lack of it, right ?

I think AI will be underwhelming but will have real applications. Crypto has always been a pure pyramid scheme

> But AI has real world applications, unlike the vast majority or all of crypto.

That isn't stopping hustlers from posting a deluge of videos and Tiktoks of low-effort ChatGPT tricks to "prove" the innovation.

As with crypto, those able to leverage AI into money-making (the only reason anyone is funding this), already had the ability to make large amounts of money.

It's butter all the way down. Also isn't wall street as far as you can get from Silicon Valley while still being in the US?

Anyone calling out "clear flaws" as any serious drawback (I didn't click the link but I assume he hit the audience with the 7% drawdown narrative some nitwit at BB concocted) probably hasn't even done enough investigative journalism to, I don't know, try using the damned thing?

Also Fusion keep popping up.

In another year we will be back to Quantum Computing...

I wonder what is going to come first: fusion or Linux on the desktop. /s

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