4 ms·

As someone who is genuinely interested in both blockchain and machine learning, I have seen many people in the crypto space suddenly start acting like they know

As someone who is genuinely interested in both blockchain and machine learning, I have seen many people in the crypto space suddenly start acting like they know things about machine learning when ChatGPT came out. Many of them are repeating falsehoods or are unaware of the history of machine learning, including recent events.

saurik 4y ago
As someone who was genuinely interested in distributed computing back 20 years ago, the same lack of awareness of history is extremely prevalent in crypto. That said, I feel like that's true of people in general, at least in tech (I can't speak to other fields much), and it is extremely frustrating: history is important!
- threeseed 4y ago
  To be fair many of the people involved in crypto today are too young to be aware of the history. For me crypto is similar to the late 90's where everyone talked about how P2P i.e. decentralised communication was going to change the world. Remnants still live on today up and down the tech stack but that vision never became a reality. I think crypto will similarly find its way into the traditional finance sector and live on but the utopia of decentralised finance will never eventuate.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    > I think crypto will similarly find its way into the traditional finance sector and live on but the utopia of decentralised finance will never eventuate. To do that it would have to do something, anything, even one tiny little bit better than something in finance. So far it's like quantum computing. Nothing is better solved with a quantum computer right now. Will that change in the future? Maybe. Until it does they simply won't be used. After all, why would they - except as an opportunity to build in-house expertise in a new space, and for the perception of being hip? There is no preordained future where it's accepted, it has to earn its spot.
    - WFHRenaissance 4y ago
      >>> To do that it would have to do something, anything, even one tiny little bit better than something in finance. To be fair, DeFi offers better returns than are commercially available to the average consumer (granted, with increased risk, but still).
      - jlund-molfese 4y ago
        Yeah but those returns are artificially subsidized by VC and retail speculators. They’re, by and large, not the result of non-crypto people or companies purchasing tokens in order to meet direct needs. A conventional Ponzi scheme also offers very high returns, at a very high risk.
        arcticbull 4y ago
        Further, roughly 10% of the entire TVL of the DeFi space was lost last year to hacks and thefts. If you're not getting at least 18% APR (10% risk, 8% inflation), you're better off with series I bonds. Put another way: if this clear yield actually existed, it would be arbitraged into the dirt by Cumberland/DRW and Jump - not left to the retail schlubs.
    - acdha 4y ago
      > To do that it would have to do something, anything, even one tiny little bit better than something in finance. I’ve been assuming that one of the companies in that space will pivot to basically modern PKI infrastructure (signed transactions, etc. without 90s baggage like PGP, decentralized only in the sense of working offline on cheap hardware well enough to replace a paper check with a signature using their phone’s secure element) long enough to declare victory and get acquired, at which all of the cryptocurrency sales guys cosplaying as developers will start claiming that’s what they had in mind all along.
  - 1over137 4y ago
    >To be fair many of the people involved in crypto today are too young to be aware of the history. You needn't have been alive to be aware of the history, you could, you know, read about history.
    - saurik 4y ago
      Yeah, it's honestly amazing how people somehow entirely discount the idea of spending any time at all actively going out of their way to learn the history of anything :(.
nl 4y ago
I'm in this boat too. AI/ML until 2021 and then switched to see if there was anything to this blockchain thing. Let's just say I much prefer the AI/ML community. The culture there was open to new ideas but wanted to see evidence things worked (leaving aside attention seeks like Gary Marcus). Blockchain is all hype and attacking people who ask questions (although the zero-knowledge community is pretty good).

saurik 4y ago

As someone who was genuinely interested in distributed computing back 20 years ago, the same lack of awareness of history is extremely prevalent in crypto. That said, I feel like that's true of people in general, at least in tech (I can't speak to other fields much), and it is extremely frustrating: history is important!

threeseed 4y ago
To be fair many of the people involved in crypto today are too young to be aware of the history. For me crypto is similar to the late 90's where everyone talked about how P2P i.e. decentralised communication was going to change the world. Remnants still live on today up and down the tech stack but that vision never became a reality. I think crypto will similarly find its way into the traditional finance sector and live on but the utopia of decentralised finance will never eventuate.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > I think crypto will similarly find its way into the traditional finance sector and live on but the utopia of decentralised finance will never eventuate. To do that it would have to do something, anything, even one tiny little bit better than something in finance. So far it's like quantum computing. Nothing is better solved with a quantum computer right now. Will that change in the future? Maybe. Until it does they simply won't be used. After all, why would they - except as an opportunity to build in-house expertise in a new space, and for the perception of being hip? There is no preordained future where it's accepted, it has to earn its spot.
  - WFHRenaissance 4y ago
    >>> To do that it would have to do something, anything, even one tiny little bit better than something in finance. To be fair, DeFi offers better returns than are commercially available to the average consumer (granted, with increased risk, but still).
    - jlund-molfese 4y ago
      Yeah but those returns are artificially subsidized by VC and retail speculators. They’re, by and large, not the result of non-crypto people or companies purchasing tokens in order to meet direct needs. A conventional Ponzi scheme also offers very high returns, at a very high risk.
      - arcticbull 4y ago
        Further, roughly 10% of the entire TVL of the DeFi space was lost last year to hacks and thefts. If you're not getting at least 18% APR (10% risk, 8% inflation), you're better off with series I bonds. Put another way: if this clear yield actually existed, it would be arbitraged into the dirt by Cumberland/DRW and Jump - not left to the retail schlubs.
  - acdha 4y ago
    > To do that it would have to do something, anything, even one tiny little bit better than something in finance. I’ve been assuming that one of the companies in that space will pivot to basically modern PKI infrastructure (signed transactions, etc. without 90s baggage like PGP, decentralized only in the sense of working offline on cheap hardware well enough to replace a paper check with a signature using their phone’s secure element) long enough to declare victory and get acquired, at which all of the cryptocurrency sales guys cosplaying as developers will start claiming that’s what they had in mind all along.
- 1over137 4y ago
  >To be fair many of the people involved in crypto today are too young to be aware of the history. You needn't have been alive to be aware of the history, you could, you know, read about history.
  - saurik 4y ago
    Yeah, it's honestly amazing how people somehow entirely discount the idea of spending any time at all actively going out of their way to learn the history of anything :(.

nl 4y ago

I'm in this boat too. AI/ML until 2021 and then switched to see if there was anything to this blockchain thing. Let's just say I much prefer the AI/ML community. The culture there was open to new ideas but wanted to see evidence things worked (leaving aside attention seeks like Gary Marcus). Blockchain is all hype and attacking people who ask questions (although the zero-knowledge community is pretty good).