141–150 of 377 posts
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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.
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…
Thanks, I appreciate that. I don't have any financial or personal stake in crypto so I don't have any issue criticizing it and I am pretty pessimistic about it at this point. But the irrational hatred and dismissal of crypto sometimes bothers me more than the irrational optimism.
I don't think the safety net argument works because there is so much physical and political infrastructure that crypto depends on in order to function. To run a cryptocurrency you still need a functioning power grid, datacenters, internet, and chip manufacturing/importing, all of which depend on a pre-existing political system and economy. I find it implausible that we will migrate all of these systems to run 100% on crypto with the current state of the technology. You could argue that it's feasible with some hypothetical much-better-bitcoin, but that's just speculation at this point and not something I would want to stake the future of whole societies on.
I wonder what kind of society Nvidia wants? Crypto (some of it) offers a freedom to buy and spend that is not corporately regulated. Some crypto brings huge investment in energy production; Green where the society structures it to be, not green where the society structures it not to be.
Did they think gaming brought more value to society?
Its nice that AI will 'reinvent nearly every industry', but i suspect it will just become another focusing tool to focus more wealth onto the very wealthy.
> “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…
> No, the crypto mining industry collapsed because the largest GPU-mined cryptocurrency (Ethereum) removed the ability for people to mine it with GPUs. Crypto obviously does not "need parallel processing" in the way that Nvidia GPUs provide it, because Ethereum removed that requirement entirely. Absolutely correct. At least cryptocurrencies like Ethereum found an alternative consensus method that is efficient and env…
What are you talking about? The inaccessibility of the models and the heavy gatekeeping by the big players is leading to more and more open source models that can run on an average gaming GPU or a Mac M1. It seems like every day on HN there is another post on another super-optimized version of something that was once only accessible to those with huge server farms or cloud budgets. You're seeing announcements like Stanford's Alpaca that specifically mention how it can run on low-budget commodity hardware or a few hundred dollars in the cloud.
I'd say efficiency and optimization is one of the hottest areas in large language models right now, although the motivation is less for climate reasons and more for 'I want to do this on my own hardware and have no safety censors' reasons.
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Maybe at the beginning. Right now they're all just trying to replicate the current system with less regulations and with them at the top, nothing punk about it.
If you look at most of the new projects, this is probably true. It's startup-Chads trying to get lots of bucks quickly. But if you look at the original, Bitcoin, it's harder to make the same argument, as arguably, there is no "them at the top" for Bitcoin.
I do not own any crypto myself. The grown-up opinion is of course to view all crypto ""investments"" with extreme skepticism, which is an absolutely sane and correct position. With that said, I like the idea of cryptocurrencies simply because they are punk as f*ck, and I'd like whatever leadership in charge to know that they do not have absolute power to run anyone else's life. Apart from magic internet money, I cann…
Maybe at the beginning. Right now they're all just trying to replicate the current system with less regulations and with them at the top, nothing punk about it.
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Anyone that's bought in during the past few years isn't early. Those that held pre-2017 are the ones that got in early. The rest could probably make better returns speculating in the US markets.
5 years ago, somewhere on the internet: >Anyone that's bought in during the past few years isn't early. >Those that held pre-2012 are the ones that got in early. >The rest could probably make better returns speculating in the US markets.
Ethereum was a better deal during this time, but you'd have to know to buy it. And some people really made bank on altcoins, but again, right time to buy, right time to sell.
There's a limit on how much the crypto market can be worth with people still able to use it as a currency to buy things. Logarithmically we're closer to the top than to the original bottom, though like all markets timing can still yield very good returns, especially if everyone else is hodling like Fort Knox.
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It is possible that there is no idea in the history of mankind less punk rock than cryptocurrency.
Can I interest you in a Johnny Rotten NFT? https://www.johnlydon.com/mr-rottens-nfts/
Not a single popular movement lies as much as the cryptobros and repeatedly get away with it.