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Comment by gitfan86 | Hacker News Reader

People got burned by crypto, they promised that it would replace Fiat money but all that happened is that they lost all their money investing in NFTs or Web3. So now they are jaded against any new hyped technology, and have no interest in investing, and are actively hoping it fails for FOMO reasons

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You can’t throw a stone very far without running into an IRL businesses or ATM that takes crypto (In my small town there are many), congress is writing laws to legalize it, a presidential candidate is running on it, and the Fed is creating a “coin”.

When businesses stop accepting dollars and your employer starts compensating you in crypto will it stop being a “scam” or will the goalposts move again?

That is wonderful that there are Bitcoin ATMs. The profit generated by the owners of those ATMs isn't a scam, it is real revenue.

The scam is comparing some ATMs to what is happening in AI. Trillions of dollars are going into AI and actually useful things like self driving cars are coming out.

Curious what year do you imagine that will be?

(I don’t expect it to see it in my lifetime.)

Eh, anything AI is clearly in a massive bubble.

The real world actual usage of neural network software is increasing. People are finding uses for it. They are replacing or augmenting search and lookup. Translation, proof reading, and copy writing is actually useful. AI assisted coding is exploding and people are paying for it. People are using it for design and product prototyping. They are amazing at data analysis, which is very useful for enterprise and finance (lots of money here). It's used for medicine research and drug discovery. It's used for legal document analysis. So much actual real world value here. So much gdp impact possible.

Most cryptocurrencies are just straight up scams. Some people are getting some usage of Bitcoin as a store of value and for cross border transactions. This is increasing slowly. Stablecoins also have some usage for store of value and cross border transaction. They are also used for trading and arbitrage, which you can argue about whether that brings value to the world. The rest of the crypto market is struggling to find an enduring use cage. I'm saying this as someone who is marveling about Ethereum and Solana, but I don't value trading immaterial NFTs. Ethereum and the like are struggling to do anything that reaches into the real world. None of the cryptocurrencies outside the top 10 have found any real world use case that people care about.

So AI != crypto

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