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

theguardian.com

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

#81

Post by 21eleven »

We have been doing finance for centuries and governance for millennial. The internet has been around for a few decades.

If Crypto is going to have meaningful impact on either of those two domains it may take a while.

I agree there are many grifter scammy things in crypto.

Fwiw it seems plausible to me that crypto/blockchain could provide value eventually as a realtime, open, highly available database about economic activity. Reliable economic information is valuable, scarce and seldom realtime.

However this depends on economic entities having an initial reason to make certain transactions on the blockchain and it's unclear what they'd get out of doing that.

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

#82

Post by phonescreen_man »

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?

Steem monsters was great for a time. I think it still exists on the hive network.

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

#83

Post by Spivak »

mepian wrote: post #6

Hilarious, I don't remember them saying this BEFORE their crypto profits evaporated.

It doesn’t seem like they’re salty but more that they don’t have to pretend to be pro-crypto anymore.

Put yourself in the position of someone who is fiercely proud of the work they do making GPUs and all the really cool stuff people do with it — video games, cgi rendering, AI, number crunching for scientific computing.

Then all of a sudden the shelves are empty because people want to push boulders up a hill and roll them back down and the people who are doing the cool stuff are getting priced out by the competitive boulder rollers who just want want a better boulder to watt ratio.

It would take the wind out of my sails because it’s harder to wake up and say, “look at all the cool stuff people are doing with the thing we made.”

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

#84

Post by pessimizer »

EGreg wrote: post #36
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."

“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…

> But that doesn’t mean it’s not capable of being so much more.

No, the enormous amount of wasted investment and energy with no progress means that it's not capable of being much more. Crypto somehow managed to start at its best and most productive, and got worse day by day. Buying pizzas or drugs with Bitcoin was so much funner than what crypto developed into.

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

#86

Post by Melingo »

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…

[flagged]

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

#87

Post by foobarian »

paulmd wrote: post #46
labrador wrote: post #18

“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.

and if meth users randomly digging swimming pools used more energy than Norway (1-2% of total electricity usage) then he'd have a point! 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-y…

Let's not forget that Nvidia/GPU mining likely represents a small fraction of total crypto currency mining power consumption since Bitcoin is mostly ASIC.

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

#88

Post by everfree »

furyofantares wrote: post #49
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…

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.

It's not a race. One technology can show its value more quickly than another, and one technology can ultimately provide more value to society than another. That doesn't mean that the other technology is useless, just that it developed more slowly and/or ended up having a lesser overall impact.

I think it's worth putting into perspective though that machine learning kicked off in the 60s, whereas there wasn't any notable progress on the byzantine generals problem until 2009 (and even the concept of proof-of-work wasn't formalized until 1993). Distributed ledger technology is still relatively young compared to machine learning.

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

#89

Post by edflsafoiewq »

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.

Yes, crypto's main use is crime. Its supporters have various arguments for why crime is actually good.

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

#90

Post by partiallypro »

GaveDrohl wrote: post #8

Most crypto currencies don't and probably never will. But those such as Bitcoin that are the most decentralized and censorship resistant are crucial to those living under authoritarian regimes and whose currencies are going through significant debasement. The mad rush to make a quick buck and the propaganda from those in power have distorted the original intent behind crypto. Also, corporations such as Nvidia that de…

That is such a small user base and governments have already shown they can confiscate crypto of they think it's a priority. The main use I see is in the midst of currency crisis, but that is fairly rare.
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