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Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

cointelegraph.com

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Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#151

Post by Retric »

gbnwl wrote: post #150
Retric wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI has specifically said LLM’s aren’t a path to AGI, though they think they have utility in understanding how society can and should interact with a potential AGI, especially from a policy perspective. Your other examples are giant companies with many focus who can trivially pay lip service to fundamental research without spending any particular effort. Take your link: “Benioff outlined four waves of enterprise A…

Please, before we discuss this further, and I would like to, provide some idea of what would qualify as an "actual effort into AGI" for you.

I exclude things like increasing processing power/infrastructure as slow AGI is still AGI even if it’s not useful. Yes AGI needs energy, no building energy infrastructure doesn’t qualify as actually working on AGI. You’re also going to need money but making money it’s isn’t inherent progress.

IMO, the fundamental requirements for AGI need at minimum: A system which operates continuously, improves in operation, and can set goals for itself. If you know the work you’re doing isn’t going to result in that then working towards AGI implies abandoning that approach and trying something new.

Basically researching new algorithms or types of computation could qualify, but iterative improvement on well studied methods doesn’t. So some research into biological neurons/brains qualifies but optimizing A* doesn’t even if it’s useful for what you’re working on. There’s a huge number of spin-offs from AI research that are really useful and worth developing, but also inherently limited.

I’m somewhat torn as to the minimum threshold for progress. Tossing 1 billion dollars worth of computational power at genetic algorithms wouldn’t produce AGI, but there’s theoretical levels of processing power where such an approach could actually work even if we’re nowhere close to building such systems. It’s the kind of moonshot that 99.99…% wouldn’t work, but maybe…

So, it may seem like moving the goalposts but I think the initial work on LLM’s could qualify, but subsequent refinement doesn’t.

Edited with some minor clarification.

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#152

Post by munksbeer »

api wrote: post #75
bsenftner wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As person with both a finance and economics degrees, bitcoin is a successful fraud. I can list out how they use bitcoin private definitions for standard financial terms, how they do not disclose those differences in conversations with financial professionals using the standard terms and their definitions, and the bitcoin community itself is composed of people that expect someone else did the homework to validate this…

Devils advocate / steel man reply: isn't that what all currencies are? Why does the Federal Reserve US dollar have value? Because people trust other smart people who say they've done the work and trust other smart people who work for the Federal Reserve. Money is a thing people agree upon as a medium of exchange. It is not value itself. Value is the people, places, and things that make up the actual economy. Bitcoin…

Fiat currencies have value because governments enforce using them to pay taxes, and to buy goods and services.

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#153

Post by api »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #103
api wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is full of engineers, founders, etc. who kind of resent that there’s a large class of people who got rich doing nothing and creating no value. I get it but I’d say if you’re mad about Bitcoiners you should be a lot more angry about much of the financial industry and property speculators, two other huge groups that get rich without creating much value (or even by creating negative value). There's a lot of value-fre…

Capitalism isn’t generating so much wealth ifaik, life standard of average working person is constantly going down since 1970s

By what measure?

I know of only one obvious dimension where the life standards of the average person have declined significantly since the 1970s: housing affordability. The entire developed world has a housing affordability crisis driven by cartel-like behavior among homeowners and bad zoning policy among other things. This is a policy failure resulting from bad regulation and undue influence / corruption.

Most other things have stayed largely the same or improved. Food is better and more varied, and while restaurants and some types of food have increased in cost they are still available. Health care is more expensive but also vastly better, especially when dealing with diseases like cancer or heart/circulatory issues. A cancer diagnosis is much less of a death sentence today than it was in the 1970s. Access to information is absurdly, exponentially better. Travel is probably about equally available. Communication capabilities are infinitely better. Appliances, gadgets, and other manufactured goods are significantly cheaper.

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#154

Post by smeej »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #92
smeej wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's as simple as expecting his administration not to be outright hostile to the industry, and maybe even encourage its development. Most companies in the space have had "the government could, at any moment, make it nearly impossible for us to continue operating" as an existential risk, so if that risk goes down, the expectation for further innovation and development soars.

Yes, there will just be more fraud since there will be less regulation and so the fraudsters are drooling.

Maybe there will. But literally everything has fraud, and not every other industry is worth this kind of money, so it seems naïve to attribute it all to fraud.

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#155

Post by ozgrakkurt »

api wrote: post #153
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism isn’t generating so much wealth ifaik, life standard of average working person is constantly going down since 1970s

By what measure? I know of only one obvious dimension where the life standards of the average person have declined significantly since the 1970s: housing affordability. The entire developed world has a housing affordability crisis driven by cartel-like behavior among homeowners and bad zoning policy among other things. This is a policy failure resulting from bad regulation and undue influence / corruption. Most other…

This makes sense, I was thinking about income equality, my bad

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#156

Post by throw0101d »

cft wrote: post #120
throw0101d wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Yuan becomes the reserve currency Who trusts China enough to sign on board with them to do this? > 2. BTC becomes the reserve currency Given what we know of history, why would anyone go towards a new (digital) gold standard? It's a bad system: * https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch... * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/775143.Golden_Fetters that limits monetary and fiscal flexibility a…

> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/775143.Golden_Fetters just wanted to note that they are using a 20-year history window as an argument, while the gold standard existed for about 3500 years before that, across very different cultures.

> just wanted to note that they are using a 20-year history window as an argument […]

The troubles with a fixed monetary supply existed much earlier than that, having historically recorded issues going back almost five hundred years:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine

We call the thing in the 1930s the "Great Depression", but before it occurred there was another time period that held that label, which has since been renamed:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression

It's just most folks accepted that this is how things were "supposed" to be because they didn't know any better, but there was great dissatisfaction on how things were:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech

It took until the likes of Irving Fischer, Keynes, and FDR until the old habits could be thrown off (too late in some places, like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan):

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24945314-the-money-maker...

> […] while the gold standard existed for about 3500 years before that, across very different cultures.

It did not. For most people, most of the time, it was credit that was used in day-to-day life:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5,000_Years

And even the rich often forsook coins:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiable_instrument#History

* https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/30672/1/12%20Chapter%201839%20...

They earliest records of monetary transactions used credit:

* https://www.sfu.ca/~poitras/jesho_UR_14.pdf

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Dynasty_of_Ur

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36854772-the-open-sea

Where gold was perhaps around, most folks were too poor to deal with it. And in a lot of cultures gold was not used at all:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50358103-money

The use of gold was mostly concentrated around the Mediterranean.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249245.The_Power_of_Gold

The Chinese used silver (as the Spanish learned post-1492). The Incas had gold (as the Spanish happily learned) but not for currency (of which they had none) but for ornament/jewelry. Other cultures simply used other things, like non-shiny rocks:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones

It is actually the gold standard—the convertibility between paper money and shiny rocks—that is the historic anomaly, existing between (depending on how you count things) between one and two hundred years:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard

Even the very meaning and nature of what is meant by "money" has changed over the millennia, starting with Aristotle and continuing to the present day:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58933308-the-currency-of...

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#157

Post by bsenftner »

bondarchuk wrote: post #68
bsenftner wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As person with both a finance and economics degrees, bitcoin is a successful fraud. I can list out how they use bitcoin private definitions for standard financial terms, how they do not disclose those differences in conversations with financial professionals using the standard terms and their definitions, and the bitcoin community itself is composed of people that expect someone else did the homework to validate this…

Please do (unironically).

And invite all manner of debate with aggressive non-homework do'ers? No Thanks.

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#159

Post by throw0101d »

gobindoriu wrote: post #132
throw0101d wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin as a digital store of value is fine. It is not. It has multiple >70% drawdowns over the last ~decade: * https://newhedge.io/terminal/bitcoin/price-drawdown During the 1930s US stock market crash, things went down 90% and, a century later, has never been that bad. Bitcoin has had multiple Great Depression equivalent drops in one-tenth the time. Something that is a good store of value should not be volatile:…

How does a new thing become a store of value? Could it be that there is a path to medium of exchange ->store of value? -> unit of account? That could explain the volatility while the market prices it correctly

> That could explain the volatility while the market prices it correctly

Even if we grant that, Bitcoin has probably not reached that point (yet?).

Re: Bitcoin price hits $100K for first time in history

#160

Post by throw0101d »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #145
throw0101d wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin as a digital store of value is fine. It is not. It has multiple >70% drawdowns over the last ~decade: * https://newhedge.io/terminal/bitcoin/price-drawdown During the 1930s US stock market crash, things went down 90% and, a century later, has never been that bad. Bitcoin has had multiple Great Depression equivalent drops in one-tenth the time. Something that is a good store of value should not be volatile:…

> Something that is a good store of value should not be volatile If it mostly goes up, it's still a good store of value, even if the volatility is high. So far it outperformed every fiat currency on the planet.

> If it mostly goes up, it's still a good store of value, even if the volatility is high.

So does the stock market, but if I want to buy a house in 2025, I don't keep my downpayment savings in the stock market but rather in a savings vehicle that protects the principal. I don't want something that goes down (or up) regularly if I want to store value: I want something that is predictable so when I go back to it to spend it (the whole point of currencies) I have a rough idea of what I'll have to work with.

> So far it outperformed every fiat currency on the planet.

The point of currencies is not performance but stability.

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