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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

#241

Post by sebzim4500 »

helloooooooo wrote: post #213
emsy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people that still have their accounts frozen because they donated to the truckers in Canada. That’s insane. Other countries had or will have similar cases in the future. We absolutely should have a way to exchange money without the governments involvement. The government already has the monopoly on physical force. That ought to be enough. So yes, there is a use case. But you’re correct in that it hasn’t rea…

You’re wrong. All accounts have been unfrozen. They were frozen for less than 2 weeks. Stop spreading misinformative nonsense for you political agenda. This is not the platform for it.

I wasn't even aware that the accounts were frozen. That is horrifying.

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

#242

Post by [deleted] »

psychphysic wrote: post #141
edflsafoiewq wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I suppose you'd have told Ms Parks to shut up and get off the bus if avoiding crime is all that's good for society?

[deleted]

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

#243

Post by epgui »

emsy wrote: post #104
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.

There are people that still have their accounts frozen because they donated to the truckers in Canada. That’s insane. Other countries had or will have similar cases in the future. We absolutely should have a way to exchange money without the governments involvement. The government already has the monopoly on physical force. That ought to be enough. So yes, there is a use case. But you’re correct in that it hasn’t rea…

Crypto aside, it's difficult to point to a less deserving cause than the trucker convoy that paralyzed Ottawa for no good reason (the reasons are no good outside of delusionland).

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

#244

Post by eftychis »

wmf wrote: post #176
mepian wrote: post #6

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

They were never particularly pro-crypto. When miners were buying GPUs by the pallet load Nvidia was publicly downplaying mining and saying GPUs were for gaming.

They specifically were mentioning them in their letters to investors as a positive.

See https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/06/tech/nvidia-sec-settlement-cr...

"Senior executives at the company sought to capitalize on that demand with a specialized line of cards just for cryptomining, the SEC wrote, but Nvidia salespeople and the company’s internal estimates suggested cryptomining was still accounting for “a significant factor in the year-over-year growth in Gaming revenue.”"

They settled with SEC for hiding profit cannibalization from investors.

Also as the article hints on the hypocrisy, Kagan built a company selling to high frequency traders.

I think the hypocrisy and sourness are abundant qualities in this statement.

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

#245

Post by mike741 »

twawaaay wrote: post #201
emsy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people that still have their accounts frozen because they donated to the truckers in Canada. That’s insane. Other countries had or will have similar cases in the future. We absolutely should have a way to exchange money without the governments involvement. The government already has the monopoly on physical force. That ought to be enough. So yes, there is a use case. But you’re correct in that it hasn’t rea…

Oh yeah, and those same people later cry foul when they get robbed of their money because it was not protected in any way. Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections. Fools. There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left. Those protections are not perfect, true, but still orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all. And as to monopo…

> Oh yeah, and those same people later cry foul when they get robbed of their money because it was not protected in any way.

Can you give an example? Do you actually know any of these people?

> Suddenly everybody wants crypto but with protections

Not me, So not everybody.

> There is a reason why money and banking is regulated -- to protect little guys from getting scammed right and left.

The reason is that their protocols are inherently unsafe. Similarly, there is a reason Bitcoin was made to be unregulated -- to protect the little guys from having their share devalued by trillion dollar bail-outs for the super rich.

> orders of magnitude better than crypto free for all

Better for who? Maybe better for you, but certainly not everyone.

> Take a look at The Last of Us if you want to know what happens

The video game??

> It lets you live, travel and do business in relative safety.

Speak for yourself. Not everyone is safe. That's an increasingly rare privilege as the wealth divide grows, and many people attribute this divide to our monetary system.

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

#246

Post by amjnsx »

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?

“ or do they want them to be useful because they bought in early and want to get rich?”

You could say that about any investment surely? Or do we assume all VC funded companies are altruistic endeavours only?

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

#247

Post by helloooooooo »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #241
helloooooooo wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re wrong. All accounts have been unfrozen. They were frozen for less than 2 weeks. Stop spreading misinformative nonsense for you political agenda. This is not the platform for it.

I wasn't even aware that the accounts were frozen. That is horrifying.

What’s horrifying is living in a city where someone has attached a train horn to their truck, and honks it hourly through the night for several weeks.

What’s horrifying is leaving your apartment building in downtown Ottawa and being spit on and verbally harassed for wearing a mask.

What’s horrifying is smelling the literal human shit in the streets waft up through your apartment building’s ventilation system and into your unit.

What’s horrifying is seeing half of your country not care about any of that because “it’s peaceful”.

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

#248

Post by b33j0r »

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.

One of the things I hadn’t considered in the beginning is that it is also a large conversion of resources and power into computation and heat.

Fundamentally, that’s a kind of transfer of wealth in and of itself. My favorite examples were people with subsidized electric bills who kinda scored on that arbitrage until everyone wised up.

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

#249

Post by EdwardDiego »

everfree wrote: post #175
EdwardDiego wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretending that there aren't fundamentals behind the USD is ridiculous. How do those people collectively agree on the value of the USD? By looking at the fundamentals - the economy of the US, the stability of its government, the likelihood that it will make good on its bonds.

None of those factors establish a fundamental market price for the dollar - you're simply listing the price of admission for any state-backed currency. The dollar has declined in value by over 90% since 1933. By your metrics that must mean that the US is in catastrophic meltdown, but of course it isn't.

> None of those factors establish a fundamental market price for the dollar

Neither does the P/E ratio of a company, yet it's still a fundamental used to value stocks.

> The dollar has declined in value by over 90% since 1933.

Relative to which other currencies?

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

#250

Post by bornfreddy »

echelon wrote: post #179
everfree wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO since crypto is a newer technology than AI, I think it's more relevant to ask whether crypto is "AI all over again". AI has followed the classic Gartner hype cycle [1]. There was the trigger in the 1960s-90s, the peak of inflated expectations in 2000-2010 with every other company bragging about "AI this" or "machine learning that" while having nothing of any use to show for it, then finally the "slope of enlighte…

Modern AI is less than ten years old. Digital money is older than crypto. PyTorch: Initial release September 2016; 6 years ago Tensorflow: Initial release November 9, 2015; 7 years ago > In 1983, a research paper titled "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments" by David Chaum introduced the idea of digital cash. > The first artificial neural network was invented in 1958 by psychologist Frank Rosenblatt. In the limi…

> Neural networks really only had a scaling problem to overcome, and most people knew it.

This is incorrect. During 90s NNs were just one of the approaches to machine learning. It was not even clear how far ML as a field could go.

You can twist it any way you want, but AI/ML is older than cryptocurrencies.

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