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Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

> I love the tongue-in-cheek paradox myth that the Bitcoin whitepaper was written by a future god-AI to increase demand for GPUs (and thus boost supply) so we are able to assemble the future god-AI.

I know it's a joke, but the hole is the god-AI couldn't have been that smart, since cryptocurrency-mining quickly switched to ASICs, which muting the demand increase for GPUs.

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Well, humans switched from using using brains to store all their memories once they could dump data onto external media via writing. Much like how crypto switching to ASICs frees up GPU capacity for AGI, writing freed the brain to develop higher GI.

But not before ramping up development and production of GPUs.

> But not before ramping up development and production of GPUs.

Did the GPU manufactures ever embrace cryptocurrency? IIRC, they actually tried to discourage it (e.g. by butting throttling into mass market models to discourage their use for computation).

Also, the graphs here show a long-term downward trend, with only a short-term sales blip 5 years ago due to cryptocurrency: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sales-of-desktop-graphics-....

Desktops is a very very key word there, I believe that’s why they repeat it so much. And it’s all tongue in cheek, and we all largely understand mining drove up gpu demand

Production MAYBE, I'm not sure what makes you think bitcoin would have ramped up the development of GPUs. What part of the last 10 years of GPU development looks bitcoin-focused to you? They're still very very focused on rendering and machine learning, not computing hashes.

I think there are some derivative coins that extended the viability of GPU mining, but I've been out of the game for a decade.

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