Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 377 posts

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#71

Post by ben_w »

copymoro wrote: post #29
hfsygcf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“user of cryptocurrencies”. It’s scammers, ramsomers, speculators and illicit drugs all the way down.

[flagged]

A Ponzi scheme pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.

The US economy has problems, but I don't see how that's supposed to be one of them.

I don't think it's even (in 2023) a good model for BTC, although the adverts I saw for it when I first heard about it around the $250 price absolutely were that, and there are plenty of clone-coins that still do today.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#72

Post by miohtama »

simonw wrote: post #10
cat_plus_plus wrote: post #9

Who is "society"? Users of cryptocurrencies obviously find them useful, or hope they will be in future. The alternative to cryptocurrency and blockchain contracts are global alliances that make trading in dollars easy in all important markets and enforce contracts across jurisdictions. Billions of people who are not part of these alliances are left out and the rest are reliant on US/Europe remaining leading superpowe…

"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?

Wouldn't this be the same question for all venture capital?

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#73

Post by everfree »

DeepYogurt wrote: post #45
everfree wrote: post #34

> “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…

It's entirely possible for nvidia to be sour and also correct. Crypto currencies have done nothing for society but to introduce scam and money laundering vectors.

We could go back and forth for days on whether cryptocurrencies have done anything for society, but it's already been discussed ad infinitum both here on HN and elsewhere.

I only wanted to point out that this article is inane.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#74

Post by miohtama »

logicalmonster wrote: post #64
fasterik wrote: post #32

I think a more defensible phrase would be "net negative to society". Crypto has its positive uses, but you have to balance those against the negatives of slow transfer speeds, speculative bubbles, scams, energy consumption, and carbon emissions. Also, it needs to be said that Nvidia is probably just jumping on the next marketing bandwagon by pivoting to LLMs after the collapse of crypto. This doesn't seem like a prin…

FWIW, even though I'd probably disagree with your assessment of crypto overall, I love that your comment tries to take a reasonable position: not just blind hate or love. That's what is missing from many crypto discussions on HN because too many people have hitched their assessment of crypto into their personality and can't try and be even the tiniest bit nuanced. I hate that some people blindly want to boost crypto…

For example, for Argentinians, Ukrainians and Turkish cryptocurrencies are order of more magnitude more useful than Americans. In these societies it is most likely net positive.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#75

Post by pessimizer »

devnullbrain wrote: post #42
xapata wrote: post #28

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."

Unless there's more to the story, IMO the onus is very much on the person who procures seafood every day to explain when a dish is out-of-season.

People don't make decisions based on "onuses."

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#76

Post by cs02rm0 »

hermitcrab wrote: post #54
furyofantares wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kinda right but it's also kinda right that after a decade+ crypto found like 1.5 useful applications and generative AI is finding some mind blowing product launch or demo something like once every 8 hours.

What were the 1.5 useful application - buying illegal stuff and money laundering?

Getting out of Russia.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#77

Post by status200 »

hakfoo wrote: post #31
simonw wrote: post #10

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?

There's some interesting technology and philosophy angles there. ("What exactly is money and how does it work?") But the moment crypto became a speculative asset, it jumped the rails. We get a lot of obviously not-ready-for-prime-time stuff hitting production because it's too lucrative (see any number of DAO and smart-contract schemes that imploded), and there's a systemic allergy to input from the outside world as t…

Quick rant: it was so much fun playing with and testing the ETH ecosystem, it felt like we were really trying to reinvent how finance worked and outsourcing trust to static contracts. It felt like decentralized systems were at least plausible.

Then Elon and the second Doge wave happened... Mutant Ape NFTs getting hyped by people like Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon... Sam Bankman's clear deception and FTX buying sports stadiums... the same centralized actors that we were working to get away from completely hijacked the platform, seized the narrative, and basically tarnished all the fun aspects. It felt like when Facebook no longer required .edu emails and a flood of parents and spammers took over the website.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#78

Post by rvz »

flandish wrote: post #3

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 just want folks to take anything a corp says with a grain of salt.

Exactly. As soon as Ethereum switched to a more emissions friendly consensus mechanism, there was no need to use wasteful GPUs which already were burning up th e planet.

Of course a shovel maker would now see GPU mining as unprofitable. As long as AI is still inefficient in the way it goes by training neural networks, then Nvidia will always be its shovel maker (until someone finds a cheaper and efficient alternative way that doesn't require GPUs)

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#79

Post by justsomehnguy »

psychphysic wrote: post #53
DeepYogurt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's entirely possible for nvidia to be sour and also correct. Crypto currencies have done nothing for society but to introduce scam and money laundering vectors.

Online dark net markets would not be possible without cryptos. They are a pretty big win for those who believe in personal liberty.

Bullshit, they existed both before the crypto and before the Internet itself. It's just a bit more convenient, but otherwise it's just the same as it was: give money to one man, take money/goods from other man and how exactly they settle their accounts is none of your business.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#80

Post by Melingo »

psychphysic wrote: post #53
DeepYogurt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's entirely possible for nvidia to be sour and also correct. Crypto currencies have done nothing for society but to introduce scam and money laundering vectors.

Online dark net markets would not be possible without cryptos. They are a pretty big win for those who believe in personal liberty.

In sense of buying drugs?

Yeah sure still not society relevant.

And look what happens in Germany, it's much better to push for legalization.

People need to stand up for rights

Post reply on HN