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Don't be silly. Just because the Crypto/Blockchain promises of grandeur turned out to be mostly nothing, and the "fuck regulation, we are all the <hotel, taxi d

Don't be silly. Just because the Crypto/Blockchain promises of grandeur turned out to be mostly nothing, and the "fuck regulation, we are all the <hotel, taxi driver, you name it>" "gig economy" companies are losing customers as they show their true colours, and the AI bubble starts to burst, that doesn't mean that over-hyped niche "technologies" can't rake in millions of some poor VC investors money. It just requires lateral thought. Pay the completely untrained gig-workers peanuts to review AI written code to create a universal blockchain "bank without borders". I mean what could possibly go wrong?

imiric 1y ago
To push back at your obvious facetiousness, I do think that both cryptocurrencies and machine learning are very powerful and useful technologies. Underneath the scammers, grifters and investors that jump on the hype train for their get-rich-quick schemes, and the general public that falls for it and fuels the hype train, both technologies have solid reasons for existing, and can be generally very useful to humanity. So I reject the notion of throwing the baby out with the bath water as much as the hype bubble around them. What we do need, as with any novel technology, is oversight and regulation. Which is difficult this time around when the grifters are also the ones in power.
- jamiejquinn 1y ago
  ML I get, but what do you think the legitimate value of crypto is to humanity?
  - c0redump 1y ago
    There isn’t any
  - imiric 1y ago
    You seriously can't think of any legitimate value that an entirely digital currency can have? Try asking an LLM. I'm not going to regurgitate what can be easily found elsewhere, or just deduced with a bit of thinking. The constant groupthink negativity around this topic on HN is exhausting. It's just as bad as the hype.
    - stephenr 1y ago
      "Try asking an automated hallucination system without the ability to reason why something is a good idea, I can't be bothered to make my own argument"
      - imiric 1y ago
        "I'm too lazy to think and do my own research, so I'll post a lazy dismissal that agrees with the hivemind."
    - ath3nd 1y ago
      It's hard to see the positives considering current cryptocurrencies are 99% rug-n-pull ponzi schemes with the longevity of a mayfly, and the ones sticking around like bitcoin, eth, etc, are just a long-run-con with a value volatility rivaling only the volatility of the currently in-fashion javascript framework. I mean, most modern financial instruments are fairly similar, albeit slightly more regulated, so what do I know. In a short span, we have witnessed speculative buying of GPUs, crypto mining (aka using shit ton of electricity and hardware to produce NOTHING of value), dropshipping, and my favorite: the tremendous value that NFTs and all other web3 trash brought to society, I can't help but wonder why people are tired of the crypto fads, especially since crypto delivered NOTHING of its promises: - you can buy limited amount of stuff with it and you often need to convert it to "real" money - its unstable and unregulated, so it's just a breeding ground for scammers and snake oil salesmen - It fails hard on its privacy/anonymity promise, as it's LITERALLY the most traceable thing in the world, especially considering wallet scramblers are outlawed in many places So much negativity for no reason, all web3 so far has been super successful and extremely useful for society! /s
    - const_cast 1y ago
      The problem is the crypto isn't used as a currency. It's used as a security, and a very speculative one at that. We don't need more securities, sorry. Also, the benefits of crypto as a currency aren't all that. We already have instant money transfers that everyone uses day-to-day without any hitch. Crypto can do it too, sure. Keyword too. There can be other benefits like transparency or anonymity but: 1. We can already achieve transparency through regulation and largely have. 2. Anonymity for currencies is pretty much bad. We tried that in the past, turns out lots of organized crime.
- hackpelican 1y ago
  I’m glad you implicitly agree that blockchains have failed to find any use case other than cryptocurrencies.
  - imiric 1y ago
    I don't, as that's a ridiculous thing to say.
    - ath3nd 1y ago
      Is it though? Where are blockchains widely used nowadays, pray tell?
      - fdupress 1y ago
        Transparency logs like [Certificate Transparency](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6962 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6962) use permissioned chains (and other things) to distribute trust in the internet public key infrastructure. That's all I can think of, though.
        stephenr 1y ago
        My understanding is that CT uses Merkle trees, which can also be used in a Blockchain, but that seems to be where the association dies. Just because two things use the same underlying data type doesn't mean one is a use of the other.
        ath3nd 1y ago
        My point is: when was the last time when K-means clustering or the Bayesian theorem got a cult, spawned a 10000 fake currencies and were touted as a panacea for all societal problems? The hype behind blockchain, which is just a distributed mathematically sound log of stuff, is just a bunch of misinformation shouted loudly by charlatans and uninformed enthusiasts. It's the same thing with LLMs, they are basically an extremely sophisticated autocomplete, but I'll be damned if I don't see 1911 articles per day that claim they are sentient, and Sam the perv needs just a couple more billion dollars to reach AGI, just behind the corner. The average pundit's critical thinking is just so disappointing.
- stephenr 1y ago
  > So I reject the notion of throwing the baby out with the bath water as much as the hype bubble around them. I never mentioned throwing them out; I specifically mentioned that they are niche - they have useful applications in very specific domains. That use isn't dependent on hype, because they don't need a bunch of investment dollars to somehow find a use-case and create artificial demand. As an example, someone proposed a while ago that banks could use a blockchain to facilitate near instant foreign exchanges; for the sake of argument let's say that's a feasible thing for them to use it for, and is an improvement over their existing system for them. The customer doesn't need to know and likely doesn't care that it uses a blockchain to facilitate the transfer. They care that the transfer was much quicker.
  - imiric 1y ago
    > I never mentioned throwing them out Eh, your entire comment was dismissive about the "technologies", and not unlike countless similar reactions about the topic. So any serious points you wanted to make were easy to miss within the sarcasm. I do agree with your point that valid use cases don't need to rely on hype, but at the same time, the technology that powers it doesn't need to be invisible to users. Some amount of marketing around it shouldn't be an issue. The thing is that we've been flooded with it for the past decade+, and the critical thinking public has become desensitized to the bullshit. But this doesn't mean that underneath that there is zero legitimate value, as some people vocally claim.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

imiric 1y ago

To push back at your obvious facetiousness, I do think that both cryptocurrencies and machine learning are very powerful and useful technologies. Underneath the scammers, grifters and investors that jump on the hype train for their get-rich-quick schemes, and the general public that falls for it and fuels the hype train, both technologies have solid reasons for existing, and can be generally very useful to humanity. So I reject the notion of throwing the baby out with the bath water as much as the hype bubble around them. What we do need, as with any novel technology, is oversight and regulation. Which is difficult this time around when the grifters are also the ones in power.

jamiejquinn 1y ago
ML I get, but what do you think the legitimate value of crypto is to humanity?
- c0redump 1y ago
  There isn’t any
- imiric 1y ago
  You seriously can't think of any legitimate value that an entirely digital currency can have? Try asking an LLM. I'm not going to regurgitate what can be easily found elsewhere, or just deduced with a bit of thinking. The constant groupthink negativity around this topic on HN is exhausting. It's just as bad as the hype.
  - stephenr 1y ago
    "Try asking an automated hallucination system without the ability to reason why something is a good idea, I can't be bothered to make my own argument"
    - imiric 1y ago
      "I'm too lazy to think and do my own research, so I'll post a lazy dismissal that agrees with the hivemind."
  - ath3nd 1y ago
    It's hard to see the positives considering current cryptocurrencies are 99% rug-n-pull ponzi schemes with the longevity of a mayfly, and the ones sticking around like bitcoin, eth, etc, are just a long-run-con with a value volatility rivaling only the volatility of the currently in-fashion javascript framework. I mean, most modern financial instruments are fairly similar, albeit slightly more regulated, so what do I know. In a short span, we have witnessed speculative buying of GPUs, crypto mining (aka using shit ton of electricity and hardware to produce NOTHING of value), dropshipping, and my favorite: the tremendous value that NFTs and all other web3 trash brought to society, I can't help but wonder why people are tired of the crypto fads, especially since crypto delivered NOTHING of its promises: - you can buy limited amount of stuff with it and you often need to convert it to "real" money - its unstable and unregulated, so it's just a breeding ground for scammers and snake oil salesmen - It fails hard on its privacy/anonymity promise, as it's LITERALLY the most traceable thing in the world, especially considering wallet scramblers are outlawed in many places So much negativity for no reason, all web3 so far has been super successful and extremely useful for society! /s
  - const_cast 1y ago
    The problem is the crypto isn't used as a currency. It's used as a security, and a very speculative one at that. We don't need more securities, sorry. Also, the benefits of crypto as a currency aren't all that. We already have instant money transfers that everyone uses day-to-day without any hitch. Crypto can do it too, sure. Keyword too. There can be other benefits like transparency or anonymity but: 1. We can already achieve transparency through regulation and largely have. 2. Anonymity for currencies is pretty much bad. We tried that in the past, turns out lots of organized crime.
hackpelican 1y ago
I’m glad you implicitly agree that blockchains have failed to find any use case other than cryptocurrencies.
- imiric 1y ago
  I don't, as that's a ridiculous thing to say.
  - ath3nd 1y ago
    Is it though? Where are blockchains widely used nowadays, pray tell?
    - fdupress 1y ago
      Transparency logs like [Certificate Transparency](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6962 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6962) use permissioned chains (and other things) to distribute trust in the internet public key infrastructure. That's all I can think of, though.
      - stephenr 1y ago
        My understanding is that CT uses Merkle trees, which can also be used in a Blockchain, but that seems to be where the association dies. Just because two things use the same underlying data type doesn't mean one is a use of the other.
        ath3nd 1y ago
        My point is: when was the last time when K-means clustering or the Bayesian theorem got a cult, spawned a 10000 fake currencies and were touted as a panacea for all societal problems? The hype behind blockchain, which is just a distributed mathematically sound log of stuff, is just a bunch of misinformation shouted loudly by charlatans and uninformed enthusiasts. It's the same thing with LLMs, they are basically an extremely sophisticated autocomplete, but I'll be damned if I don't see 1911 articles per day that claim they are sentient, and Sam the perv needs just a couple more billion dollars to reach AGI, just behind the corner. The average pundit's critical thinking is just so disappointing.
stephenr 1y ago
> So I reject the notion of throwing the baby out with the bath water as much as the hype bubble around them. I never mentioned throwing them out; I specifically mentioned that they are niche - they have useful applications in very specific domains. That use isn't dependent on hype, because they don't need a bunch of investment dollars to somehow find a use-case and create artificial demand. As an example, someone proposed a while ago that banks could use a blockchain to facilitate near instant foreign exchanges; for the sake of argument let's say that's a feasible thing for them to use it for, and is an improvement over their existing system for them. The customer doesn't need to know and likely doesn't care that it uses a blockchain to facilitate the transfer. They care that the transfer was much quicker.
- imiric 1y ago
  > I never mentioned throwing them out Eh, your entire comment was dismissive about the "technologies", and not unlike countless similar reactions about the topic. So any serious points you wanted to make were easy to miss within the sarcasm. I do agree with your point that valid use cases don't need to rely on hype, but at the same time, the technology that powers it doesn't need to be invisible to users. Some amount of marketing around it shouldn't be an issue. The thing is that we've been flooded with it for the past decade+, and the critical thinking public has become desensitized to the bullshit. But this doesn't mean that underneath that there is zero legitimate value, as some people vocally claim.

deleted 1y ago

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