this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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They are, though. The total market cap across cryptocurrencies right now is about $2.75 trillion.
I'm just pointing out that they're still there. If it's a scam then at this point it's one of history's biggest and longest-running.
And whether any particular cryptocurrency qualifies as a security in any particular jurisdiction is a complicated question, some do and some don't. This is about cryptocurrency as a whole so calling them an unlicensed security would not be accurate.
It isn't a "shadow", its current market cap is near its historical high point right now.
If you have no use for it then by all means ignore it. But calling it a bubble that has popped is simply factually inaccurate. Other people evidently find value in it.
I have no interest in the specifics of why the price is up or down, I'm not a speculator. That's not the point of all this. The only point is it's still there. Which it is.
By "hardware investments" I take it you mean mining rigs? You're two years out of date, Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022. It doesn't depend on special-purpose hardware any more, or any hardware of particularly significant quantity. Bitcoin still does does but it's a shrinking share of the total cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Again, if you aren't interested in cryptocurrencies then feel free to ignore them. But making confident pronouncements about them when you're not familiar with how they work or are used is not that. Poetic and emotional language is no substitute for knowledge.
People are only using crypto because so many people are using crypto? Okay.
You're not forced to, though. It's an option.
I have no idea what you're trying to argue here. One the one hand you say crypotocurrency is moribund, but on the other hand now you're complaining about how there's a huge infrastructure for people using it.
This whole thing is a weird offshoot from a discussion on AI, for that matter. What's the relevance at this point?
And it's clear that you don't know how cryptocurrency is actually being used, so it's not a useful analogue to AI. Except to the point that you don't know how AI is being used either.
The things that LLMs are being used for are already justifying their expense, otherwise they wouldn't be used in the first place. There's no "bubble" to pop on the usage side of things where jobs have been replaced by it, AI isn'tgoingto"go away." It's possible that some of the big providers like OpenAI or Anthropic might go out of business or get bought out, that's always a risk for first movers in a field like this, but if they fail it will be because others have stepped up to provide those services even more cheaply.
I literally addressed this in the comment you're responding to. The individual service providers don't matter, especially not first movers. This is an entire industry, it's not just one company.
You only mentioned OpenAI. That's one.
@FaceDeer
Kind of an overstatement. It hasn't even been 20 years. If it were a scam it'd be nowhere near the scale and timeframe of, say, Papal Indulgences.
This isn't anything to do with your wider argument btw, just me nitpicking. Didn't know you'd relocated to fedia.io, was that during the downtime?
Heh, I suppose I can grant papal indulgence as a scam. Were I feeling edgy I could one up that and label the church as a whole as a scam. But since the usual accusation leveled against cryptocurrency is "ponzi scheme" I looked that up and noted that Madoff's the current record holder for one of those at a mere $65 billion.
Yeah, the kbin.social week of downtime was the final nudge I needed to set up an alternative account here. But honestly I was getting very frustrated with kbin.social's flakeiness already before then. I appreciate Ernest's work, but something like kbin can't be a single-person show in the long run. I hope he does well but now I don't have to reload the page every time I want to vote or comment.
Heh love your wording there. I actually started that train of thought with various "relics" like the vial of Christ's blood, statues weeping tears etc some of which were eventually debunked iirc.
Ponzi schemes are quite possibly as old as granaries (or the pyramids), but I think a better contender for scope is something like the Mississipi Bubble which was absolute madness...
Kbin really is a work in progress. I'm sticking with it, but I have backup accounts for the times when it's too buggy.