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  • Hacker News
  • Or the 1990s Beanie Babies.

    Or hell, 2 years ago with "those fucking apes", aka NFTs.

    Or, the Meta-Verse. Yeah, that really took.... Off.

    by nekusar
  • Tulips, NFTs, and the Metaverse all revolved around exclusivity and collectibles. Art with no real utilitarian value.

    I pay OpenAI $100/mo, twice what I pay for my mobile phone service.

    It’s a useful service that I use every day.

    I have never even heard of anyone in my social circle expressing even a mild interest in tulips, NFTs, or the metaverse.

    This bubble has much more in common with the rail road boom and the 2000 fibre build out bubble.

    by jiggawatts
  • Quite a few of the usual suspects are involved in Crypto, NFT’s, “Metaverse”, and now AI. You’d think people would figure it out, but there’s the old Upton Sinclair quote I guess.
    by EA-3167
  • this article reminds me of Greta for some reason .. wonder what she's upto these days ?
    by gyanchawdhary
  • In the meantime tulips prove math theorems that humans couldn't solve. Ridiculous article title (I wouldn't read it)
    by arisAlexis
  • Aren't human skills the tulips? That's why we're recording all kinds of movements; tokens become generic execution currency.
    by turtleyacht
  • No, AI tokens aren’t generic, they by definition cannot be used as a currency because they aren’t fungible. Generated tokens have completely different value depending on their meaning. You can spend 1M tokens doing nothing but wasting time and energy, then spend 100K tokens that bring a lot of value. It’s even weirder because we don’t have a way to know the ROI of tokens in advance
    by dgellow
  • I don't understand how you could compare crypto, which has no utility and no fair value, with AI which is used by hundreds of millions of people every day to achieve real outcomes.
    by dools
  • Crypto bros claim that crypto is super useful, revolutionary tech too. The proof is in the pudding, and AI has yet to show any real utility.
    by bigstrat2003
  • We created the content their systems are built on, yet they won’t even share how much energy each query uses, how much water goes to cooling

    "You read my blog so now show me your utility bill" is... an interesting argument.

    by blfr
  • Take advantage of open information, provide little yourself. Seems like a consistent enough line of questioning.
    by jayd16
  • “You ingested the vast majority of available human knowledge to build your product, and intend to change the entire world with it, and in fact are doing so incredibly rapidly at a rate that dodges scrutiny. Could we know more?” Would be the expanded version I guess
    by simonjgreen
  • "GPU compute powering crypto for the last decade..."

    I keep hearing this lately. Also, that GPU compute has been re-purposed from crypto to AI.

    I had the impression that crypto was powered by ASICs for the last... many years. And that was why GPU mining (let alone CPU mining) was not profitable

    by cyfex
  • Bitcoin mining is powered by ASICs. Random shitcoins are not.
    by decimalenough
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cryptocurrencies

    Major cryptocurrencies are based on Proof of Work or Proof of Stake. There are other consensus algorithms.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt#Introduction

    scrypt has been introduced to stave off ASIC and FPGA solutions.

    by ButlerianJihad
  • GPUs were used primarily for ethereum and to a lesser extent, other shitcoins. ETH switched to PoS in Sept 2022 and 18+ million GPUs were turned off almost over night. Nothing else has the liquidity to sustain a large operation any longer. ASIC's are used for bitcoin and a few smaller shitcoins, GPUs hadn't been used for bitcoin in many years.

    GPUs used for mining don't translate well to AI at any large scale. It is all newly created (modern) hardware. Some miners who ran GPUs (and ASICs) have transitioned to running AI compute (CoreWeave, IREN, NScale, myself...), but that's not the same thing as taking the hardware and using it for AI. It is new hardware.

    CPUs for mining crypto are a niche edgecase with very little liquidity and generally a bad idea, since it just incentivizes botnets.

    by latchkey
  • Riot Platforms strikes deal with Anthropic as bitcoin miners shift focus to AI infrastructure https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/11/riot-platforms-signs-anthrop... "But with the growth of AI, and against the backdrop of a prolonged slump in cryptocurrency prices, most publicly traded bitcoin miners are increasingly valued by investors as owners of digital infrastructure rather than producers of bitcoin, given their power capacity, data center assets and energy contracts."
    by Lambda11
  • This is a pretty confusing article. It seems to string together some loosely related facts to make the current AI boom look bad.
    by smokel
  • It's basically talking about the impact on the environment and which class of society will end up benefiting from AI. I thought the article was pretty clear, and a message we as a society should be discussing more, especially with the current state of things.

    With that said, the article reads like it's been through an AI pass, and not as concise and direct as it could be.

    by bezier-curve
  • Agreed. It has nothing to do with either tulips nor mania. Just some random musings.
    by bjourne
  • Unless you subscribe to the view that This Time It's Different(tm), they seem pretty pertinent.
    by pydry
  • It is confusing. But I enjoyed the read, it’s refreshing to read a string of rants from a human rather than something perfectly polished by Opus.
    by simonjgreen
  • Does this article being unreadable prove that it was at least written by a human? Frustrating tradeoff.
    by botencat
  • Not the solution you where hoping AI to solve?
    by nadermx