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Reminder: when a corporation says “useful” they mean “profitable.” I’m not on the crypto bandwagon, I just want folks to take anything a corp says with a grain of salt.
“I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff” - Michael Kagan, Nvidia CTO If I sold shovels and meth users liked to dig swimming pools in their back yards at 3:00 am I might say my shovels weren't doing anything good for humanity, but I'd be happy to sell them shovels.
Reminds me of when a sushi chef apologized to me for the sea urchin tasting nasty: "Sorry, it's out of season. It's not fresh." "Why do you sell it out of season?" "People still buy it."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Users of cryptocurrencies obviously find them useful, or hope they will be in future" Do they hope they'll be useful in the future because they think they're great technology that everyone should benefit from... or do they want them to be useful because they bought in early and want to get rich?
In most cases it's both. Like the people who were early to the Internet, they believe in a better world and they hope their early participation will be rewarded.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me of when a sushi chef apologized to me for the sea urchin tasting nasty: "Sorry, it's out of season. It's not fresh." "Why do you sell it out of season?" "People still buy it."
“Search isn’t a business!” Blockchain and Web3 ended up mostly being zero sum games. But that doesn’t mean it’s not capable of being so much more. Who remembers the silly and tags? The Web has come a long way. And personally, for all its faults, I find Web3 better than Web2 in terms of economics - rather than giant server farms and Big Tech monopolies, we have UniSwap and Aave Marketplace and Filecoin etc. The networ…
Dumb question. But if the network is owned by the participants, then why do all the networks have a centralized authority managing them? The participants rarely have autonomy.
> “All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society. AI does,” Kagan told the Guardian. No, the crypto mining industry collapsed because the largest GPU-mined cryptocurrency (Ethereum) removed the ability for people to m…
“I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff” - Michael Kagan, Nvidia CTO If I sold shovels and meth users liked to dig swimming pools in their back yards at 3:00 am I might say my shovels weren't doing anything good for humanity, but I'd be happy to sell them shovels.
Like if industrious meth users were buying up all the bulldozers so nobody else could get their socially-productive stuff built, and measurably increasing the national consumption of fuel, then yeah, probably something would be done about that after like, the third or fourth multi-year meth-construction wave.
"oh but it's renewable" yeah not always, like that investment group that bought a shuttered coal-fired power plant in new york (Greenidge) and brought it back online to use it to mine crypto. After their permits were denied, another group went and tried to buy an operating powerplant (Fortistar).
https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2023/01/uncertain-fate...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558705/new-york-crypto-...
And even if it's renewable that energy could be offsetting carbon somewhere else on the grid, or stored, or doing literally anything productive (aluminum manufacturing, etc) instead of just generating random nonces and seeing whether they'll validate.
Even in best-case scenario, where the energy is literally going unused: why would we want to build a crypto farm to soak up excess hydro energy or whatever instead of an aluminum plant? it's socially maladaptive behavior brought on by speculative fervor and socially irresponsible misallocation/incentives/lack of regulation.
Building a Pollution Machine that turns coal into random numbers you sell for money is a Captain Planet villain plot.
> “All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society. AI does,” Kagan told the Guardian. No, the crypto mining industry collapsed because the largest GPU-mined cryptocurrency (Ethereum) removed the ability for people to m…