Bitcoin is literally turning greed into money, by means of wasting exponentially increasing amounts of electricity. It doesn't just not create value - to be able to allow exchanging value, it fundamentally requires ever increasing waste, as the waste is what gives its mathematical guarantees.
LLMs deliver value. Right here today, to countless people across countless jobs. Sure, some of that is marketing, but that's not LLM's fault - marketing is what it always has been, it's just people waking up from their Stockholm syndrome. You've always been screwed over by marketers, and Internet has already been destroyed by adtech. Adding AI into the mix doesn't change anything, except maybe that some of the jobs in this space will go away, which for once I say - good riddance. There are more honest forms of gainful employment.
LLMs, for all their costs, don't burn energy superlinearly. More important, for LLMs, just like for fiat money, and about everything else other than crypto, burning electricity is a cost, upkeep, that is being aggressively minimized. More efficient LLMs benefit everyone involved. More efficient crypto just stops working, because inefficient waste is fundamental to cryptos' mathematical guarantees.
Anyway, comparing crypto and LLMs is dumb. The only connection is that they both eat GPUs and their novelty periods were close together in time. But they're fundamentally different, and the hypes surrounding them are fundamentally different too. I'd say that "AI hype" is more like the dot-com bubble: sure, lots of grifters lost their money, but who cares. Technology was good; the bubble cleared out nonsense and grift around it.
Well said, too many people conflate AI and crypto, and dismiss both without understanding either. Crypto has demonstrated very limited benefit compared to its cost, exchanging value has been a solved problem for millenia. We're only beginning to understand what can be done with LLMs but we can see some limits. Although it causes some harm to say it doesn't create any value is ridiculous. We can't yet see if the benefits outweigh the cost but it looks to me like they will.
Value is a subjective concept. One could argue that its value is that arbitrary quantities of it cannot be created by dictat.
> - to be able to allow exchanging value, it fundamentally requires ever increasing waste, as the waste is what gives its mathematical guarantees.
One could argue that it takes a lot worse to maintain any currency such as USD as a currency. Full force of government law enforcement will be unleashed on you if you decide to have your own currency. There is a lot of "wastage" that goes to safeguard currency creation and storage and to prevent counterfeiting.
I do not hold BTC. Nor do I trade it. But to discuss as if other currencies have no cost is not rational.
> There is a lot of "wastage" that goes to safeguard currency creation and storage and to prevent counterfeiting.
Yes. But the point I'm making is, none of that benefits from waste. The waste is something everyone want to reduce. With Bitcoin, the trend is uniquely opposite, because the crypto system is secured through aggregate waste being way larger than any actor or group can afford.
But we do know that the Proof of Stake system we currently have, is a lot cheaper and more advanced than what Bitcoin does.
Bitcoin doesn't solve any problem yet which is fundamental to our society and a fiat system like the trust issue:
If i exchange 1 bitcoin with you for any service or thing outside of the blockchain, i need the whole proof of stack system protection of our normal existing money infrastructure like lawyers, contracts etc.
And no smart contracts do not solve this issue.
What is left? Small amount of transactions per day with high fees 'but' decentralized infrastructure run by someone we all don't know aggregated probably in data centers owned by big companies.
Proof of Work is far superior to Proof of Stake in a network with absolute fairness (security) being fundamental. Satoshi himself said he could find no other way.
Compare energy spent on global hash rate to all energy spent by mining metals, physical banking, financial services middle persons, etc. if you want to talk about energy usage and make any kind of sense.
Yes, start comparing energy spend on bitcoin mining and the missing features. You will see that bitcoin already consumes a lot more energy than our proof of stake system.
What do you do when you want to exchange 1 bitcoin for 1 car and the person with the car doesn't give you the car after the 'absolut fairness/ security' of transfering bitcoin to their wallet? You go back to our Proof of Stake system. You talk to a lawyer. You expect the police to help you.
The smallest issue in our society is just transfering money from left to right. This is not a hard problem. And pls don't tell me how much easier it is to send a few bitcoins to africa. Most people don't do this and yes western union exists.
Or try to recover your bitcoins. A friend has 100k in bitcoins just doesn't know the password anymore.
What do you do when someone breaks into your home and forces you to give them your bitcoin key? Yes exactly anonyms moving of money from you to them. Untraceable, wow what a great thing to have!
And no Satoshi 'himself' is not an expert in global economy. He just invented bitcoin and you can cleary see how flawed it is.
> Compare energy spent on global hash rate to all energy spent by mining metals, physical banking, financial services middle persons, etc. if you want to talk about energy usage and make any kind of sense.
you're ending up with the entire rest of civilisation on the other side of that
* Bitcoin, 0.5% of all energy use: 7 transactions per second total worldwide
* THE ENTIRE REST OF CIVILISATION AND EVERYONE IN IT AND EVERYTHING THEY DO, 199x the energy use, really quite a lot more than 1,393 transactions per second worldwide, and all the other stuff civilisation does too
You are not comparing apples to apples.
BTC is comparable to gold or US treasuries. How often do you transact in physical gold? What is time taken from a piece of gold in your pocket to cash to coffee? However, you can transact in paper gold eg the ETF GLD in microseconds with comparatively much lower transaction costs (settlement is still not immediate).
How often do you transact in treasury bonds? Try paying for a coffee with your treasury bond. Let’s see how many days that takes.
Comparison with USD (ultimately representing US treasuries) on number of transactions basis is not useful.
Long term, LLMs are not going to create more actual value than the sum of their costs and negative externalities. Bookmark this comment and check me in 5 years.
Delivering value is not the same as creating it. Spam takes lots of value from many people, destroys most of it, and delivers a small fraction to the spammers.
I'd disagree to a large extent, because the specific similarities are important:
* the VCs are often literally the same guys pivoting
* the promoters are often literally the same guys pivoting
* AI's excuses for the ghastly electricity consumption are often literally bitcoin excuses
I think that's an excellent start on the comparison being valid.
Like, I've covered crypto skeptically for years and I was struck by just how similar the things to be said about the AI grifters were, and my readers have concurred.
LLMs deliver value. Right here today, to countless people across countless jobs. Sure, some of that is marketing, but that's not LLM's fault - marketing is what it always has been, it's just people waking up from their Stockholm syndrome. You've always been screwed over by marketers, and Internet has already been destroyed by adtech. Adding AI into the mix doesn't change anything, except maybe that some of the jobs in this space will go away, which for once I say - good riddance. There are more honest forms of gainful employment.
LLMs, for all their costs, don't burn energy superlinearly. More important, for LLMs, just like for fiat money, and about everything else other than crypto, burning electricity is a cost, upkeep, that is being aggressively minimized. More efficient LLMs benefit everyone involved. More efficient crypto just stops working, because inefficient waste is fundamental to cryptos' mathematical guarantees.
Anyway, comparing crypto and LLMs is dumb. The only connection is that they both eat GPUs and their novelty periods were close together in time. But they're fundamentally different, and the hypes surrounding them are fundamentally different too. I'd say that "AI hype" is more like the dot-com bubble: sure, lots of grifters lost their money, but who cares. Technology was good; the bubble cleared out nonsense and grift around it.