Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

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I think crypto, metaverse, and generative AI are all really different -- and I agree with the original poster. Generative AI seems much more likely to be a game changer.

Crypto was something I always struggled to make sense of. My son asked, "why didn't I buy bitcoin when it was a few cents?!" -- The simple answer was it didn't seem like it had much use. The value in crypto eventually came in the form of a pyramid scheme. Admittedly, I do use crypto to do transactions with untrustworthy people (don't have to worry about chargebacks and things like that). But it's hype was around it being a speculative commodity. For normal people -- it's just not all that useful.

The metaverse is different in that I do see the theoretical value in it. But it seems a LONG way off. I haven't seen anything that really makes me think, "wow -- this is it". It doesn't seem like we're close. And honestly I think generative AI maybe a prerequisite to deliver a truly valuable metaverse.

Generative AI is useful now and represents a huge leap over the state of the art, not that long ago. I worked with RNNs and LSTMs to answer questions not that many years ago, and honestly I wouldn't have predicted this level of effectiveness for LLMs for probably 20 plus years -- and I certainly didn't know how we'd do it. But more importantly I'm finding it valuable today. As I noted in another post -- ChatGPT-4 already has shown better differential diagnosis skills than my family's doctor. I use it literally every day already. There are things that I want it to do that would make my life 10x better -- and I could see a clear path to get there (like, if that was my day job I think I could put together a project plan to deliver it).

I just don't think these techs are comparable at all.

People seem to see new developments as black boxes that you can't analyze. Like they see something new and ask themselves "will it work?" and then say it will work or not based on whether the last thing worked... with zero nuance.

Let's try to analyze crypto on its own as an example: yes, crypto was a new frontier in money supply, but what makes it critically different? And are these critical differences actually desired?

Crypto was critically different in that it would decentralize the financial system.

Was it desired?

Centralized institutions are unfair and can be in-equal, but they are actually really great. When the financial becomes unstable, these institutions intervene and settle things down (see the Great Depression). When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it. How would crypto handle these situations?

No one could figure it out. So if crypto was trying to sell something that no one really wanted, how the heck could it work? ...then it crashed... because there was no centralized control. It's not like we haven't had this happen in history already.

> When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it. How would crypto handle these situations?

So far the crypto orgs have called a centralized institution called law enforcement...

That doesn't return your money to you like the credit card though. The irreversibility 'feature' of most cryptocurrencies makes it really hard to recover funds stolen through fraud... I guess that is a desirable feature for anybody performing fraud though.

Of the things that make cryptocurrency something I want to avoid, the irreversibility part is the biggest problem.

Nothing is ever irreversible, it's just a question of how expensive it is to make the database writes. Ethereum forked the whole currency to undo a write (the DAO hack) and if the legal system can find a hacker they can make them reverse their transaction.

…But having someone with admin access over the network and can fix mistakes is just a lot cheaper than refusing to build that in for ideological reasons.

Most (but not all) things in life are technically reversible. But some things are so difficult or expensive to reverse that they are effectively irreversible nonetheless.

I'm guessing you avoid cash for the same reason?

if you can locate the physical person who stole your crypto, you can always use the rubber hose method of returning your money. I bet it works.

VR doesn't need to replace social media for it to be useful.

AI doesn't need to replace doctors for it to be useful.

Crypto doesn't need to replace your credit card for it to be useful.

If none of these things are useful to you, that's fine, other people find them useful and that's okay.

Think "and" instead of "or".

I agree. VR will have killer apps in particular domains, but that doesn’t mean it will be used by everyone all of the time. For example, I work in ocean mapping where we have large amounts of point cloud data that need occasional manual editing/QAQC in an environment that matches the dimensionality of the data. My colleagues are working on some very interesting VR point cloud editing tools [1].

[1] https://ccom.unh.edu/vislab/projects/point_clouds/

I agree!

But that's not how any of those things are being sold.

I think crypto is great for anonymous digital markets. It would be great to disrupt the financial industry, but that's a really big thing. For the markets, I think NFTs is a really good use case. That's a way for artists to have digital galleries, receiving international payments, work can get traded, all independent of the marketplace itself. No company behind that. Books, audio content, ..., and so on are also easily the target of a next generation. I don't believe in this tokenization of physical goods, because then you have a company behind creating the link between token and good. But for purely virtual goods, I think it is great.

In a Blockchain world, how was there anonymity with crypto?

I’m guessing the answer is that not all crypto is on blockchain, but I actually have no clue.

Monera supposedly is untraceable somehow. And you can do things with passing private keys and mixers even on bitcoin.

You have to analyze the entire system including what they use the untraceable currency for.

Someone's sent you a billion dollars in Monero the IRS doesn't know you have - okay. But now when you use it to buy a mansion, won't that be obvious?

Thats basic money laundering and HSBC is ready to help you.

The desire to have untraceable money isn't always because you're trying to do something illegal or immoral.

Privacy is important to people, and that even extends to privacy from your government. You never know when your government might change from a responsible, fair entity, to a oppressive regime.

If you do buy a mansion with unreported billions and you're buying from a reputable buyer, then you'd expect the government to know about that sale, but if you're stock piling assets in case you need to flee from your government to survive, having anonymous money that's easy to transport is valuable.

Has nothing to do with my question but I agree with everything you said.

> You never know when your government might change from a responsible, fair entity, to a oppressive regime.

Truer words were never spoken. It is hard to get this across to people with the completely understandable "I didn't do anything wrong so nothing can happen to me" attitude.

As Beria said, "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime"...

Yeah, it's weird that people can perceive anonymous transactions to be only valuable to ne-er-do-wells at the same time that large swaths of the US are criminalizing access to abortifacients.

> It would be great to disrupt the financial industry

Only if there was something at least as good to replace it. Cryptocurrency isn't that.

Disruption just for disruption's sake is a Bad Thing.

> NFTs is a really good use case.

Honestly, I still don't see how. None of the explanations make any real sense to me.

NTFs seem silly. You own a digital asset on a block chain. But anyone could use a jpeg, it just has no real value to have so-called ownership.

Small correction: NFTs that point to images is one example of how to use the NFT standard, not what an NFT is.

The NFT discussion always ends up at "its just a link to a jpeg", when there are NFTs that have nothing to do with images.

Can you give me some examples of these other kinds of NFTs that are useful then?

California's DMV investigating them for licenses/registrations is an example that hit HN's front page earlier this week.

This is interesting because I haven't heard of this. Would it be something like your license is controlled by you? Somehow you have to keep it private though. Having someone control a position on the blockchain wouldn't seem to be that different than name and password. You can use that to prove who you are, and you can lose that just like you can lose control of your crypto wallet if you forget your password or someone guesses it or hacks your machine.

One workaround would be to store the license/registration tokens in multisig wallets, requiring both the licensee and the DMV to approve of transfers (or add a third signer and go with two of three). A fair bit more centralized than what's ideal, but the very concept of a state-issued license or registration is already implicitly centralized anyway.

> > NFTs is a really good use case.

> Honestly, I still don't see how. None of the explanations make any real sense to me.

I don't really think NFTs have a real use case, but i can see why it might. It is effectively a digital certificate of authenticity that cannot be faked. But like a physical certificate of authenticity, it is worth as much as the general market would place trust in it. And it isn't much, since collectors of digital goods currently do not value authenticity (realistically) - they value the actual digital good, and thus, a copy is as good as the "real thing".

Therefore, collectors can only really exist for physical goods, and thus NFTs don't actually provide much value, beyond the ability for someone to speculate with it.

What’s the point of disruption without a solution?

Like let’s say my sink keeps leaking so you suggest smashing it. Great, you fixed the leak, but I have no sink now.

Now if you came along and said you’d smash my sink and then replace it with a better sink, I’ll allow it.

People are not hung up on the disruption part. People are hung up on having no sink.

Crypto would be extremely useful if it were wholeheartedly adopted by the government of a medium-sized country. The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are as good as the gold standard, maybe slightly better, and could be better than fiat; the problem is that no one pays their taxes in it so no one uses it as a real currency. Likewise, NFT’s could be used to implement property titles if a government ever agreed to enforce them. Then things like smart contracts and whatnot start to look a lot more interesting. The problem is that the entire crypto economy is a fake play-money ecosystem with no power over physical reality.

This went from +2 to -1 overnight, and I'm not complaining; I'm just curious if I got downvoted by the crypto haters or by the crypto supporters. Such is the risk of expressing a nuanced opinion on Hacker News I suppose.

The thing you're missing is there are no incentives for a sovereign nation to give up the ability to mint their own currency and control its supply (monetary policy).

There’s a reason I said “medium-sized country”. The US, EU, and apparently now China wouldn’t be interested because they are world reserve currencies, or aspire to be in China’s case. On the other hand, you could probably make a case to voters for cryptocurrency to replace something utterly dysfunctional like the Argentine peso. Crypto doesn’t really do much for a country with functioning and trustworthy governing institutions, but not every country has that.

> The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are as good as the gold standard, maybe slightly better, and could be better than fiat

The fundamentals of cryptocurrency are just as fiat as any other currency, including the gold standard.

> Centralized institutions are unfair and can be in-equal, but they are actually really great. When the financial becomes unstable, these institutions intervene and settle things down (see the Great Depression).

Interestingly, there is a well respected school of thought in economics that pins the blame for the boom/bust cycle on artificially manipulating interest rates via that exact centralization.

> When someone steals from my credit card, I just call up my bank and they fix it.

I'm not really sure how that is an example of "centralization." A private lender with whom you've entered into a loan agreement does not control the supply of the currency. They could just as easily be lending you gold or bread. I'm no cyrpto fanboy ... couldn't really care less about it ... but in theory there is no reason that a bank couldn't lend you Bitcoins or something. If there is a problem with the currency that's going to bite you regardless of what the currency is.

I think the strongest case for crypto was using it as a hedge against inflation. Inflation being an increase in the supply of fiat currency. Something that, whether you subscribe to the "Mises school" of economics or not, is irrefutably caused by the central bank creating new currency out of thin air, thus diluting the purchasing power of the existing money in circulation. I propose that that is "irrefutable" because, in order to debunk it, you would have to demonstrate that the law of supply and demand is false and/or that currency is not a commodity subject to the same "rules" as every other.

I don’t disagree that the boom/bust cycle could be created by centralization, but I also don’t care I suppose. I mean, there’s no perfect solution out there so a boom/bust is a reasonably mild price.

A large reason why crypto, at least in the current implementations, can provide decentralization is by removing discretion from any authority and making transactions permanent. That’s in contrast to our current money system, because it’s merely numbers that ultimately can be manipulated by central authorities and accessible by law enforcement, that ultimately means that transactions are not truly permanent and that allows us to repair mistakes after the fact, a feature not really afforded by crypto. It’s a very helpful feature.

I also consider a consistent amount of inflation an important feature of any successful economy. Without inflation, I would be incentivized to hold my money whenever I expect deflation, which is terrible because it’s basically me hoarding value from society.

Runaway inflation is absolutely disastrous and I don’t see how crypto could have been considered a hedge against it if its entire value is backed purely by speculative demand. Contrast that to the USD or other currency where that is backed by the full faith and credit of a government. Obviously that is meaningless of we’re talking about, say, Argentina but the US has successfully been the same, largely dependable, and boring government for 245 years and through earning a reputation with time that the USD can be treated as a reserve currency.

I don't think crypto, as most chains implement it, is at all vulnerable to runaway inflation.

A functional crypto can go downhill for a lot of reasons. Technical failures. Association with scams.

But I am not sure how a tightly controlled supply over time, or asymptotically fixed supply, coin can have runaway inflation - if everyone starts demanding more of the coin for goods and services, there just isn't more of the coin for that.

Generative AI basically unlocks the metaverse, since all the 3D environment can now be generated. The metaverse changes people's context and senses with generated data. Interestingly AI will paint a new world for humans to learn and experience new situations more often, more easily on a broader spectrum. Exciting !

> Interestingly AI will paint a new world for humans to learn and experience new situations more often, more easily on a broader spectrum.

This is ignoring the instinct built over generations that humans don't want to "experience a new world", they want to explore it with other humans.

We are social animals. Facebook is so successful because it started out as a way to connect more with people you already knew or were acquainted with.

The "metaverse" and all its AI-generated worlds add little to no value in that direction. Wake me up when the metaverse makes it trivial to host a garden party and cook for the 5-10 attendees.

> This is ignoring the instinct built over generations that humans don't want to "experience a new world", they want to explore it with other humans.

I think humans want to explore it with intelligent beings, not necessarily “humans”. These new technologies have the potential to create agents in the movie “Her” sense that are compelling to interact with. The metaverse applicability seems clear.

Here's another scenario I envision now:

You and your friends jump in the metaverse every Tuesday night to play some virtual game, e.g., go hunting or rob a bank. Timmothy is out on vacation this week so won't be joining -- but now you can spawn up virtual Timothy, which is trained on a bunch of Timothy's data (see the other HN post about the guy who trained his bot on his friends group chats). Now Timothy is with his friends in this virtual world and he behaves mostly how Timothy does.

Virtual timothy plays better and without complaining. Weeks later the gang dreams of virtual tim. A week later they start playing, but this time without Tim.

Ok this scenario, but my wife.

> now you can spawn up virtual Timothy, which is trained on a bunch of Timothy's data

Not just no, but hell no.

If I'm going to play with a robot, I absolutely don't want it to replicate a friend. Even more, I would be furious if any of my friends replicated me like that.

When I'm playing with my friends, I'm doing it to play with my friends, not simulacra of my friends.

It won’t start with Timmothy. It’ll start with John Cena or Donald Trump. You’ll get to play with virtual celebrities. Then domain experts, like tennis camp with Serena Williams. Or story telling with Steven King. Or Fortnite with Ninja. And it will slowly find its way down the popularity slide to friends.

And you will protest it. Just like my MIL hates Facebook and thinks calling is so much more efficient than texting. But the younger generation will find this as natural as TikTok.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_Magnus_(mobile_app)

I wouldn't protest any of those things (assuming the celebrities consent to it). You're right that such a thing holds zero interest to me, but I don't find the idea objectionable. Celebrities are essentially "virtual people" to begin with (that is, celebrities are playing a role in public appearance -- you aren't seeing their true selves).

But I find the idea of replacing actual friends with simulations to be inherently objectionable.

I think that's what people do on a normal day, but all of the technical formats and decisions (vhs/dvd/streaming video/etc) have been pioneered by porn.

So, pretty much what you said, but probably having sex with anime girls instead.

> I think humans want to explore it with intelligent beings, not necessarily “humans”.

I think the majority humans want to be with humans, not just intelligent beings. Some don't, of course, and there's probably a decent business catering to them.

Honestly I don’t think content generation is a limiting factor for a compelling meta verse. IMO the constraints are more to do with fidelity and the quality of the experience.

There are currently so many weaknesses and limitations with the medium of VR that it’s just not particularly appealing for folks to spend a lot of time using it, and I think that’s why you don’t have great content gen.

I do think generative AI has some really interesting possibilities for interactive media - but I don't see how it unlocks anything.

It's clear there's a market for well-designed and compelling VR chat. VRChat[1] has a large community and had a very active developer community[2]. Facebook had no luck in attracting users in a proven market - there's no reason to believe their products would be more popular after hooking a generative agent up to it.

If you are looking for "the metaverse" in a generic sense - other people are already doing it better than Facebook (and have been for some time). It's been unlocked for years. Facebook hasn't even managed a capable clone, much less broken new ground.

[1] https://hello.vrchat.com/

[2] Until they banned all modding - here's a video of a user using sign language and subtitles: https://twitter.com/TheFoxipso/status/1551640725455982593

> It's clear there's a market for well-designed and compelling VR chat. VRChat[1] has a large community and had a very active developer community[2]. Facebook had no luck in attracting users in a proven market - there's no reason to believe their products would be more popular after hooking a generative agent up to it.

Facebook gets to take 30% of VR Chat's gross revenue (they sell premium features) on standalone and the desktop Oculus store.

Apple likely makes more profit off Roblox than Roblox.

we had SecondLife, ut dies everythibg metaVerse does, 20 years ago.

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