> Just imagine what we could have done technology wise if all the brain power spent on quant finance and crypto now in the last 20 years was spent on something

> Just imagine what we could have done technology wise if all the brain power spent on quant finance and crypto now in the last 20 years was spent on something else I think over the last 20 years, more brain power was spent on ad.tech. So far, cryptocurrencies only caused moderate harm, like wasted electricity and GPU shortages. But I think ad.tech caused way more long-term harm. Death of traditional media, cancel culture, extreme level of political polarization, anti-vax movement, clickbait nature of most content on the internets these days — all these things are directly caused by big tech corporations maximizing their ad revenues while ignoring all the externalities.