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Comment by DisposableDave | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for the off-topic.

This whole NFT debacle would be fun for me if it didn't cost me a dear friend; he's been working full-time on his "collection" for almost two years now, convinced he's "just around the corner of making millions" out of it when it's obvious the ship has long sailed. I guess there's more to it than just NFT craze, and he's probably struggling with other things, but his new "know-it-all NFT bro" persona makes it impossible to even approach him with a normal conversation.

Weird rant, I know. I simply don't know what to do anymore.

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Maybe read advice on how to deal with a friend or family member joining a cult. AFAIU, don’t criticise the hobby, and try to maintain contact, so that when he wants out he still has a friend.

Well, speaking of a cult, we have NFT.NYC in a few days here in my city. It has many corporate industry sponsors, takes over the largest hotel in Times Square for three days, and many of the billboards. Cults don’t usually have that level of industry involvement. And many people from all over the world will be coming to have fun with NFTs and try out new things.

I guess Bitcoin can be considered a cult, too. HODL became a religion since 2013, after it became obvious Bitcoin wouldn’t be “an electronic peer-to-peer cash system” and the “store of value” aspect of money was the only one left.

> Cults don’t usually have that level of industry involvement

I think there's a level of money laundering involved.

I imagine it is the same with Bitcoin as well, and also highly overpriced art, and casino gambling, and investments in startups, etc.

> Cults don’t usually have that level of industry involvement

Scientology probably puts NFT-bro-ism to shame with its level of industry involvement... It's just usually less in your face about the cult part.

I thought about mentioning scientology for comparison, to say I don’t remember Scientology taking over Times Square with a lot of industry participants… but then again I am not part of that world so for all I know they could have a huge convention in Vegas every year, with megachurches AND some sort of new books / auditing companies etc.

They don't need to do conventions, they have an entire town in Florida.

Also the Moonies owning a bunch of stuff, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_Church#Businesses, including UPI and the Washington Times.

MLM is also a corporate sponsored cult and puts on ostentatious events. One commonality is how they tell you to remove negative influence, ie skeptical and concerned friends and family, as they hold you back from achieving success.

What about stuff like

Tony Robbins (self-help)

Landmark Forum (self-help MLM)

Billy Graham (Christian revival)

Joel Osteen (prosperity gospel)

etc.

They seem to help a lot of people with just mindset stuff

Joel Osteen is great at helping people give him money in return for absolutely nothing.

If you have to pay to learn something, it's a grift.

There's carve outs for technical fields, for people who are willing to pay a premium for speed, or personalized learning, or putative 'networking' of course.

So college is a grift probably. Overpriced scarcity with education most people can get from the library for a buck fifty (to quote Good Will Hunting) or on the Internet these days. But enough people are still told to go to college and so much of it is subsidized by the government that it remains an institution that faces little market competition. And getting into an “ivy league” school is so prestigious that even super-millionaire celebrities with great networks feel they have to bribe admins so their kids can go.

https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/pictures/college-a...

And public school is just a day care center to keep kids out of trouble so both their parents can work for corporations 10 hours a day. We’ve essentially created a prison environment for kids, and instead of fixing issues in it, we overdiagnose them with ADHD for fidgeting and prescribe amphetamines. Even Paul Graham noted these things: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Also banks are a grift, for many people. The “American Dream” was co-opted where you are sold the idea now of “owning” a home, but to do so you “rent” money issued by a bank, and then work 30 years to pay it back with a lot of interest. The government has to print more money eventually or people will work harder and harder and default. Money printing is actually what frees people up from having to slave for corporations as much (as we can clearly see happened after 2020 with the great labor exodus).

Figuring out for yourself why college and Landmark Forum aren't the same grift is a useful life skill.

They were replying to the comment:

  If you have to pay to learn something, it's a grift

Your response applies equally to it.

Seemingly that statement is just not logically true (just need to find one counter example)

Perhaps corrected by saying: _sometimes_ it's a grift, or _often_ a grift, or IMO it is a grift.

Those things are bad too.

> Cults don’t usually have that level of industry involvement.

Sure they do[1][2][3].

Mixing business and faith is critical to cult recruitment: industry allows the cult to establish "legitimate" footholds and develop stable income sources using the cheap (and often free) labor of its believers. This should ring a bell.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_Church

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NXIVM

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology

It’s not weird. What you’re wittnessing is gambling addiction. Seek out advice how to approach such a person and suddenly everything will make sense.

some ppl do enjoy collecting art, toys, coins, pokemon cards. but if he tells you he’s about to make millions, he might just have a gambling problem. Like stocks which can elicit same behavor.

As someone embedded in the space and tending to be an apologist for the technology here: I'm really sorry for your friend. I think due to the polarization and frenzy, the parallels to gambling and gaming addiction and the broader context of mental health is something that isn't talked about enough in a constructive manner in "investment" circles. Many aren't aware how much they're putting on the line not necessarily financially but emotionally, mentally, and identity.

Crypto, and now AI, are likely the great differentiators between those who seek get rich schemes and those who lever up humanity through innovation, hard work and grit.

If I had the ability to migrate to another planet, the last thing I’d take with me would be an NFT image of some stupid primate.

Are we still doing “AI is the new crypto” here? I’d like to think that we’ve moved past this by now.

just wait until they start really attacking AI. they'll roll out the same playbook.

1. dangerous new technology

2. that uses far too much energy (more than the entire country of X!)

3. do we really know how it works?

4. controlled by a shadowy cabal of super-coders

5. followed by a litany of anecdotal stories about victims of AI

6. and increasingly frequent and increasingly negative coverage of those getting rich off of it

they also used the same playbook against the internet, and open source, and mobile/social networking. probably the original cell phones too, at some point.

edit: oh, i almost forgot

7. turning the tables on any goldenboy/girl they previously pumped, then will viciously dump when the going gets tough or the inevitable fraud occurs. (unless of course they donated $40million+ to politicians)

i'm under 40 and i've seen this cycle about half a dozen times.

That's been the exact playbook.

Also mock what it's been used for, find the "worst" example.

If not mock, as you say, label it as dangerous.

If you want to promote adoption of something like NFTs it's up to you to present the compelling use cases, not get mad at the detractors. The reaction to the reaction here is even more predictable.

The playbook against NFTs is that they did nothing useful. That seems to still be the case. ChatGPT is useful, some of us are just not sure how useful it is yet.

Of course if your criteria is "do something useful" (whatever that means exactly), a whole lot of things in both the digital and physical worlds would have a hard time justifying their existence.

i'm not pro NFT, i wouldn't touch that stuff with a 10 foot pole.

consider, however, that "BUT I'M TELLING YOU IT'S USEFUL!!! WHY WON'T YOU BELIEVE ME!!!" is the exact position the FUDsters want to put you in re: AI.

they're constantly on the offensive, no matter what the target is.

You're making an analogy with something (ChatGPT) that isn't analogous.

ChatGPT kan be useful or useless and NFT:s would have the same value or qualities otherwise.

NFT:s can be useful or useless and ChatGPT would have the same value or qualities otherwise.

The one playbook that exists here is defending NFT:s in lieu of it defending itself by being actually useful. (Which is not me saying that they are not nor that they couldn't be. Just that shouting that everyone is dumb and that your product is in fact awesome isn't a good look, is it?)

You're getting downvoted but you shouldn't be. There's already discussion about ChatGPT's energy usage, and once this starts scaling more, there's going to be more and more people concerned. Hell, I'm already a bit concerned with its energy usage, and I'm already struggling being a fan of crypto while also being concerned for the environment (didn't use to have to be, crypto didn't use a ton of energy 8+ years ago).

It really hit home to me when I saw something (that I can't find right now for some reason) about ChatGPT-4 being much more complex and would need X times more resources than ChatGPT-3.5 for the same queries (the number I don't actually remember, but I want to say 2 or 3x). Gave me a bit of a pause from me asking it to generate a bunch of sitcom scripts on random silly concepts for my private, personal amusement (Seinfeld in particular seems to work pretty well).

I was able to find an article on Bloomberg[1] talking about how the increase in AI is also increasing its carbon footprint, so yeah, it's coming. Also I saw this article[2] that estimates ChatGPT's usage in January alone to be equivalent to he power used by 175,000 people. And that's before ChatGPT-4.

People who are fans of AI right now reading this, eventually you're going to have to come to terms with it being responsible for a ton of carbon emissions as well, as it takes up more and more resources and scales to billions of people as they use it more and more in their everyday lives and the models and computation get more complex.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-09/how-much-...

[2]: https://towardsdatascience.com/chatgpts-electricity-consumpt...

this has always struck me as a weird argument. one could make a very rough comparison to the energy required to run a gaming PC for an hour, and the energy (inference + amortizing the training run) to run a conversation with ChatGPT for an hour, they're probably order-of-magnitude comparable. But there is no serious concern by anyone for the climate impact of PC gaming. It's just fundamentally that computers require electricity to run.

If the dreams of companies making large sequence models do come to pass, and they really do scale up to where training and running large sequence models is a significant portion of world electricity usage, then of course it becomes a real problem, but the same would be true for any large electricity-intensive industry.

the people writing this FUD have never seen the inside of a datacenter or understand how anything really works. they're just FUDsters, professional shit-stirring stooges. it doesn't matter if the tech in question is total garbage or the next coming of the internet.

It's a flawed argument. Consider the profit equation (revenue minus costs). The argument ignores that crypto is designed to have a minimum in cost (and that minimum is high). For most other computing applications, compute cost is just a cost and does not have a fixed lower bound. In other words, crypto is designed to be an energy use competition, AI is not.

i'm getting downvoted because we're in an NFT thread and people think i'm pro-NFT (lmao. lol. etc.) instead of anti-dipshit-FUDster "tech journalists".

There's one crucial difference between AI and Bitcoin when it comes to energy usage.

With AI there are strong incentives to make everything more efficient and use less energy. This is already happening: people are finding ways to run AI models on less powerful hardware (see LLaMA etc), and AI providers like OpenAI have managed to run things. Lee efficiently - that's presumably how they could drop the price of an API call by 1/10th for GPT3.5 compared to GPT3.

With Bitcoin efficiencies don't actually help, because the entire system is designed as a competition. The person who burns more energy wins more value. If the tech becomes more efficient the miners just increase their activity, so energy usage doesn't meaningfully decrease.

I'll agree with you on Bitcoin mining specifically, but other aspects of cryptocurrencies I wouldn't. For example, the Lightning Network is a layer built on top of Bitcoin is all about increased speed and efficiency.

Then there's Ethereum, which just completed a major upgrade to convert its Proof of Work method to Proof of Stake and now uses a negligible amount of energy compared to other things, as shown in this article on their site[1].

And there are newer cryptocurrencies like Solana, that started as proof of stake to begin with and can handle at least 8500[2] transactions per second (compared to only 4 transactions per second with the much older bitcoin, and 30 transactions per second with Ethereum).

That's a hell of a lot more efficient as well, and also seems to be more efficient than ChatGPT is per query, as Solana's energy use per transaction is 3,290 Joules, or 0.00091 kWh[3], versus the conservative estimate of ChatGPT (3.5)'s estimated energy usage on this article [4] of 0.00198 kWh, or 7,128 Joules.

So I think that overall, crypto is still incentivized to become more efficient. Bitcoin is not, as more people care about the security provided by proof of work there than they do about energy efficiency, which is unfortunate.

[1]: https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/

[2]: https://crypto.news/solana-transactions-per-second-hit-an-al...

[3]: https://solana.com/news/solanas-energy-use-report-september-...

[4]: https://towardsdatascience.com/chatgpts-electricity-consumpt...

That's why I said Bitcoin.

That's just a poor attempt at some cheap poisoning the well from you.

The grand difference between the NFT craze and ordinary collecting, is that the latter is not primarily driven by cultish behaviour or the want for Internet Money.

I'm sure NFT, just as crypto, apps and The Internet eventually presents new findings or "just" novel ways of doing stuff. But so far, we have people confused by things _they_ don't understand, setting themselves up for a great loss.

The cultishness in it is the incessant: this is the way. This is new and nothing like this has ever existed before.

When it totally has! Manias and scams have come in all shapes and sizes and will continue to do so.

The reason y'all are buying in to this, is because the sucker's goin' up. Just like with crypto. Just like with dotcom stock and a ton of other things. The fact that there _are_ useful things that came out of the dotcom era, is not a proof of the viability of _your_ mania.

Crypto is useful. A very long time ago there was a conversation about killer use cases. People on the ethereum side of the room thought programmable chains were it. People on the Bitcoin side said it was micropayments and script based post dating.

I said that it was likely paying for compute resources that would be a killer use case. Implementing 402s would be that manifest: https://github.com/lightninglabs/aperture

Now we’re moving deep into the AI markets, this will be a thing, combining both.

That said, con artists will still try to hustle others.

> I said that it was likely paying for compute resources that would be a killer use case.

As if we didn't have ways to pay for compute resources already.

> Now we’re moving deep into the AI markets, this will be a thing, combining both.

Of course it won't.

> That said, con artists will still try to hustle others.

Indeed. By saying things like "innovative ways to pay for compute resources" and "our AI-enabled crypto bullshit is a cuting-edge thingamabob"

I’ve found that when I don’t state things as fact on here that I don’t end up getting as much ire, but sometimes I just know what I do is true and am too lazy to explain it in my glee in seeing it manifest.

Time will tell, but as of now there are still no killer uses for crypto, other than hustling others.

hot air is still hot air. Yahoo! being a useful web directory doesn't mean that Pets.com is going to be good because it's "Web-powered".

Right now the majority of AI startups are hypeware.

I think I know what you are trying to say, but there night be an issue with your metaphor. The whole point of an NFT is that you don't have to take it with you as you owning it is chain state.

Out of curiosity (not into crypto so very little knowledge), what do you have to take with you to be able to view the NFT?

The NFT does not contain the asset itself, it’s just a meta-document that points to the asset. So if that pointer is a URL, the answer would probably be “a good chunk of the internet”.

I’d reckon the simpler answer is more likely a jpeg or mp4.

This is dependent on what the NFT actually gives access to or is linked to.

90% of NFTs probably are just ownership certificates of JPGs so if that is what you want to "view" then the answer probably is "a JPG".

Other NFTs though might be some sort of online game char, access tokens to a live feed or just symbols of on-chaining offchain consensus. In those cases the answer isn't that straight forward. But generally I'd remark that an NFT in itself only has utility as long as you have access to its underlying chain, so if you cannot take the interaction with the chain with you its not going to be very useful. OTOH, if your sole purpose is looking at pretty pictures then one will probably best just compile JPGs to a folder. But that doesn't mean that one owns those pictures or that there are NFTs involved.

If I’m 50 light years from here, the colored coin on a backwaters planet has zero meaning.

It’s a continued fallacy that a physical thing may be secured by a crypto transaction (entry to a DAG).

Now, immediate identity and exchange of contract value, such as on Lightning, may be useful for compute resources, but only in the moment of inference.

Crypto was built to service AI, and more specifically, GAI. This is crypto’s “killer” use case. Everything else done with it is a sideshow.

Funnily I agree with these points. But I think they go a bit overboard with regards my initial comment.

Ownership does not imply security of the underlying object, digital or physical. Point in case, I owned my car when it was torched by anti globalism riots. Same principle applies to NFTs. Actually the real revolution of NFTs as "JPG ownership certs" is that they democratize art in that everybody can look at the linked JPG in full resolution but only one wallet can own that NFT.

> Crypto was built to service AI, and more specifically, GAI

Wow. Retconning history has reached new highs. I mean, it's easy to do it, because crypto origins are in such a distant past of * checks notes * only the past decade.

> The whole point of an NFT is that you don't have to take it with you as you owning it is chain state.

"Hey guys, I own this valuable piece of `something`. You have to trust me, as it's 50 light years away, and all I have is a pointer to an address on a chain that is also 50 light years away"

Okay, so you are 50ly away from earth. There are only two possible scenarios here

1. You and "your guys" have low delay comms to home which means you have network sync and so everything is dandy

2. You and your guys have delayed comms so everything relating to state back on earth is time delayed (ie: you live in the past when it comes to things related to earth) in this case it only makes sense to talk in the context of that past, for which you actually again happen to have chain sync so everything is dandy.

> You and your guys have delayed comms so everything relating to state back on earth is time delayed (ie: you live in the past when it comes to things related to earth) in this case it only makes sense to talk in the context of that past

So there's literally no point. Because that valuable thing is needed now, not X years in the future when the sync happens.

The whole chain thing literally relies on fast internet available everywhere everytime

You don't seem to understand how relativism works so I will not continue amusing your strenuous try at a counter argument. You have gotten your answers from me and others in this community. Either actually comprehend them or leave it alone.

Your friend is an addict and should seek gambling addiction groups.

Yup, that's what happened to a former friend of mine. 2020 Rolls around, stock market goes crazy, everyone starts talking about something called "options". Few weeks later everyone lost a little bit of money and tapped out, not much, just a few hundred here and there. Except one friend, who blew all their savings for a high they never got again. Went hook line and sinker for GME, shitty IPO scams, NFTs, you name it. They got burned over and over. Eventually broke off contact with the friend group because of money.

> but his new "know-it-all NFT bro" persona

A bit like the emerging ai bros. Every few years we get these types bubbling up. I admire their commitment but some need a break.

I keep hearing about these ai bros. Can you give me a specific example of one?

My problem too - you can’t really babble some unverifiable stuff (macroeconomic predictions, societal changes for crypto) in AI. If you don’t know how it works you are sol, bro or not.

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