Fucking greedheads.
If only there were a way to combine the two, then we could keep an even larger bubble going.
Mining two cryptos together is already a thing, so…
Can we switch back to the need based economy instead of the greed based economy?
Which economy was that? We’ve had greed for hundreds of years, if not many thousands.
Sure, but it will have to change eventually, we can’t keep pumping out more and more throwaway shit year after year, there will be a critical mass, or maybe we just die buried in our own garbage.
It seems the nature of things are changing from physical things to digital things, and that has infinite potential. I expect at some point we’ll start mining the landfills because it’s easier than extracting stuff from the rock. Once that happens, there’s no physical limit on the greed.
Well, what’s already happening is circular self-contained greed “economies” were money (not actual wealth just value-tokens such as money but also assets which have valuations expressed in said value-tokens, from crypto coins to realestate and stocks) is made from merely money being passed around whilst no actual value is created (in fact, value is mainly destroyed as those things are consuming actual resources to produce no real value at all, only boost the count of value-tokens)
This is destroying the capability of currently accepted value-tokens to actual represent an underlying utility value.
In other words, thing like stocks but also things like currency are decoupling from the underlying value they used to represent:
- Stocks were a share of ownership in a structure - the company - that created things, either directly - manufacturing, extraction - or indirectly by increasing the efficiency of direct value creation - i.e. services that indirectly made manufacturing or extraction more efficient or helped in distributing the products of those - whilst nowadays the most “valuable” by market capitalization of stocks have almost purely speculative valuations or are for companies in rent-seeking activities which don’t create value but merely take a share of the value created by others.
- Currency used to be (and still is to a large extent) value tokens which were a claim on the value produced by the Economy. What we’re seeing is that as more of those value tokens are created in those circular “economies” each token can claim less and less quyantities of the traditional underlying value things - just notice food inflation. Also rent-seeking activities (such as realestate investment) have even faster devalued how much each value-token can claim. Whilst official Inflation numbers don’t tell us this story (there is a strong motivation for politicians to have Officially recognized Inflation be lower than reality, because Mathematically that makes GDP seem larger), most people are actually feeling the real Inflation, especially in the most ancient and required concrete assets: Food and Housing.
I expect that something is going to break, though I don’t know when and exactly how it’s going to materialized (though the way the ultra-wealthy are trying to transform the powers they captured from Democratic to Autocratic, leads me to believe that they’re preparing for a break in the functioning of the current value-tokens by having a more direct control over just about everything than indirectly by merelly holding lots of value-tokens).
The societal consequences of the value-representation structures we have (literally, of thing like money, stocks and even certificates of ownership) unwinding would be huge.
money… is made from merely money being passed around whilst no actual value is created
Crypto is a zero-sum game, so money is never “made,” it’s exchanged. So if one person does well, another person must do poorly. That’s the same for stocks, though stocks are a bit different in that the stock price includes the actual, physical assets a company owns.
Real estate isn’t. When real estate increases in value, that doesn’t mean another property decreased in value, it just means people value that property more today than in the past. This could be due to limited supply (there are only so many plots a geographic area) or renovations, meaning its intrinsic value changes (higher expected rents), therefore it’s not a zero sum game.
So you really need to define what “wealth” is if you’re going to lump real estate in with stocks and crypto currency.
Stocks were a share of ownership in a structure
They still are. The stock price includes the intrinsic value of the company, as well as expected future growth in its intrinsic value. It’s that expected future growth that is doing a lot of work here, and it’s why companies like Palantir can trade at ~1700 times earnings when a “normal” company would be around 10-20x (for reference, Nvidia trades around 50 times earnings, Johnson and Johnson is around 20), people expect Palantir to grow way faster than “normal” companies.
Expected future growth has always been a part of that equation, that’s not new. What is new is the amount of hype around certain stocks, and that probably has more to do with the news cycle (people have access to information way quicker than 50 years ago or even 20 years ago).
each token can claim less and less quyantities of the traditional underlying value things - just notice food inflation.
Inflation has also been a thing as long as fiat currencies have been a thing. The target has been 2%, and the average between 1913 and 2020 was about 3.6% (source; I took the total 2555% and divided it by the 87 years of that period).
Whilst official Inflation numbers don’t tell us this story
Do you have evidence of that? The CPI the US uses has been criticized for various reasons, but it’s still the official measure used, and there’s a good reason for that: it’s pretty good.
Things like housing are very location-dependent, so changes in one region won’t really reflect on overall inflation figures if other areas aren’t experiencing that as well. But if you look at expenditure figures using percentages of peoples’ incomes, housing stays relatively constant in overall percent, which is around 30%. Again, these are national numbers, things may certainly vary by region, since areas like LA will be quite a bit different than rural Texas.
The societal consequences of the value-representation structures we have (literally, of thing like money, stocks and even certificates of ownership) unwinding would be huge.
Sure, if what you say is actually true. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think instead, salaries increases tend to trail inflation, and some people still haven’t yet caught up from the high inflation just after COVID. The averages look good, but that breaks down in individual cases.
Rents, for example, are starting to come down in my area (about 6.5% from last year), which was one of the hardest hit. A lot of the problem was due to new construction projects getting delayed due to COVID supply-chain disruption, and we’re finally catching up to where we should’ve been.
Inifnite potential? Like NFTs? Subscriptions? I suppose… I’m beyond not interested in buying digital things I don’t even have the rights to, but I seem to be in the minority.
Whether you have the rights is kind of irrelevant to this discussion. Let’s say it’s GOG games that are all DRM-free, my point is digital consumption has nearly infinite upper limits for consumption.
Wasting electricity that was already being wasted isn’t as bad as wasting electricity that was being used for something productive, I guess.
Surplus electricity would lower bills for both households, which have been particularly affected by rising prices, and different industries which have also had to contend with AI for capital.
This isbprobably a philosophical question that i dont know the answer to, but its still a waste.
As one grift’s hype cycle fades, shift to another one.
“Scammers find new scam”
How would they make money from ai? be like chatgpt and release their own ai plans or something? or something else?
Make no mistake; the people selling server time will be making money. They are selling a real product to a real customer, it’s just the customer is a tech company that will never make money back in turn.
if the tech company is lucky, they can sell whatever their product is to customers. Only issue is, there’s not enough customers eager enough to part with their money. A pyramid scheme fails if it can’t hang losses on consumers.
Maybe host open source models and offer paid access for customers who need big generating capacities.
Paid : give money for
Payed: nautical term meaning to let out some slack on the rope or to cover the deck in tar/pitch for sealing it
As long as we’re being pedantic, when you pay out pitch, you’re not covering the deck with it. You’re making lines of it that go in between the deck planks. It’s basically caulking. You actually have to be careful to not get it everywhere (not least because pitch is really hot when you’re paying it out), so just like when you’re paying out a line, there’s a sense of careful control and easing out the pitch.
Also, If I understand it correctly it’s also called this because caulking requires jamming pitch soaked rope into the joints so it’s still about rope!
Pretty close! It’s tar-soaked hemp fibers (rope traditionally being hemp), called oakum. Sometimes cotton under that for filling if needed. To me it still feels more about carefully easing out, particularly since paying out also has other uses that aren’t rope related, like falling off to leeward after a tack.
Username checks out.
This is the level of pedantry I can get behind.
Aren’t most miners running ASICs that are pretty much only useful for mining specific coins? I was hoping we were past the last “people are buying off-the-shelves GPUs for crypto” bubble.
Depending on which crypto, but yes. And the ASICs have a usable shelf life of just a few years, so I assume they are migrating to machines for AI processing as their ASICs need routine replacement.
Yeah there’s lots of open providers like this.
OpenRouter is a marketplace for AI inference
In theory you could lease your server capacity to the big AI players, but then they would have to trust you -a noted crypto grifter - with their data.
Investors keep trusting noted crypto grifters with money.
Like AI companies care about business ethics
Same way a lot of the “ai” companies make money, investors that have no idea but want to get in on the ground floor of the next nVidia or openai.
No they play a different game and leverage hardware. Most probably they’ll buy H100s instead of ASIC and run AI inference on that. It turns out that inference can be pretty profitable if you have good utilization and don’t need to train your own models.
TFW when you realize AI is a bubble
Subscriptions for waifus?
Hey now, at least bitcoin has it’s uses. And if you have a farm for it I doubt you’re scamming on the side, that’s risky.
AI has more uses than Bitcoin, the fuck is this circlejerk, lmao
Sure it does
Bitcoin saved me from losing everything. You’d have to be a god damn fool to claim that it doesn’t have its uses. Investing when bitcoin was worth $19K was the smartest decision I ever made. You’ll never convince me that it’s a scam.
Abandon the bitcoin scam, full steam ahead for the AI scam!!!
Crypto mining is (mostly?) total waste… Proof of Work by doing hard but useless calculations and using it as kind of currency is like travelers on a desert world use water as a currency - but by intentionally spilling it 🤦🏻♂️
Great cryptocurrencies does not need power hungry hardware. Eg. Nano (XNO) have a secure network error or using around 17 000 000 times less energy per transaction.
Couldn’t agree more. Proof of Stake is the future of crypto.
I hate this timeline so much
most grifters like Trump and Elon are in both
Yeah, I’d expect there to be some real overlap between crypto and ai bros.
Some overlap? It’s like 90%
Lost all your money on Bored Apes, now generate your own!
Ahh, so this is where the concept of “rollover minutes” went, into bubbles
Hey, now that we have this obscene energy-wasting capability, let’s see what other ways there are to generate equally obscene profits!
At least they’re pivoting instead of just doing both.
especially if you have the infrastructure in place
I thought Bitcoin mining made no sense at all on GPUs any more? Unless you were running ASICs then the power costs just weren’t worth it, and application-specific is part of the acronym, there. Why would these things even be able to run an LLM?
In any case, Bitcoin just needs to iterate as fast as possible in order to find a match, doesn’t really need a lot of RAM. Whereas LLMs need really large amounts - NVIDIA’s latest data centre racks have about a terabyte for a reason. Even if you had cornered the market on GPUs five years ago for Bitcoin, what use are those cards for this?
If I read the article property, the real asset is the rackspace and power they are already leasing. They would tear out the existing Bitcoin mining infrastructure and replace it with AI servers.
Mining hardware is shortlived. These things get outdated real fast and need to be replaced frequently. So what they do is when a mining rig is up for replacement, they just swap it out for an AI rig.
The real asset for mining is the infrastructure: rack space, access to cheap electricity, data centers. All of that is very useful for AI as well.
Some of these bought decommissioned power plants like old coal plants, so they’re getting wholesale prices for energy.
One this is all speak to convince investors to throw money, so they’ll cheer pick their interpretation.
In this case I think they refer to already having the real estate, buildings, power and cooling. So “all” they have to do is rip out their rigs and dump a bunch of nVidia gear in. All they need is just a few hundred million from some lucky investors and they will be off…
I think you misunderstand that scene. Bitcoin miners are crazy rich and most of them are investors in their own right. They don’t need outside money.
