edit: Looks like this is the notebook used in the article: https://github.com/corbt/hn-analysis/blob/main/analysis.ipyn...
The classification seems pretty fraught; one cell shows a sample of articles classified as crypto, which appears to include a bunch of cryptography and other unrelated articles.
https://github.com/corbt/hn-analysis/blob/main/analysis.ipyn...
Molly White’s comment at the end is superb.
Not really. There are plenty of decentralized exchanges which are proven, reliable, auditable, generally used by many without issues.
see: https://uniswap.org https://curve.fi/ https://1inch.io
It's the centralized exchanges, which are more akin to traditional financial institutions whose records are not on a publicly visible blockchain but rather private databases or... apparently spreadsheets... which fall victim to the same issues we have seen in the past in the traditional financial world.
Then came ChatGPT. The tens of billions dollars poured into the next hype, often by the same hustlers who hyped crypto (but for sure they were not the ones who lost the billions or stood in front of the court). Same environmental damage due to wasted electricity poured into wasteful, pointless computation. Same hype without any actual usefulness. In both cases this sentiment is met with a huff but it's factual.
Came the AI-written mushroom hunting guides.
Came AI Modi singing trending garnering votes for him. Our worst fears of democracy ending in favor of the candidate with the most processing power aka with the most money winning.
This pandemic (for covid didn't end yet) already 300 000 people died because of hand written propaganda (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/13/1098071...) when the next pandemic will come the AI produced oh so plausible bullshit will flood everything and millions will die.
Aza Raskin compared it to a zero day vulnerability for the operating system of humanity and he is oh so right.
Who is laughing now?
The first papers that used GPUs to train neural networks were from the end of the 2000s and the beginning of the 2010s, before the Bitcoin price hike of 2013. But years before that, Nvidia had already introduced the CUDA architecture to GPUs in 2006 [1], which were used, among others things, to speed up algorithms to analyze seismic data for oil and gas exploration [2].
So with or without the "crypto fever", I believe the same advancements in GPU technology would have followed - but maybe not the scarcity brought by the investments in crypto mining. Because of this, we may also argue the opposite, that crypto got in the way of AI development and was one of the culprits of the "GPU rich vs GPU poor" division we hear/read about nowadays.
In a very similar fashion, though, I do tend to believe that PC gaming holds far more importance to the rise of both AI and crypto...
[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/nvidia-unveils-cuda-the-gpu-co...
It stands to reason therefore that the people who remain online to comment may have lower levels of mental hygiene by virtue of their ongoing exposure to the internet and social media, thus resulting in a gradual decrease in sentiment over time.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7364393/#:~:tex...
https://github.com/verdverm/pypge
https://github.com/verdverm/go-pge/blob/master/pge_gecco2013...
The reviews had awesome and encouraging comments
So the question becomes, what information are you interested on proving to someone on the internet? Say you want to ask an Israeli on Twitter about some bomb stuff and you want to prove you are a reporter. Say you want to prove in a comment on HN, that a repository on github is yours.
However one problem arises. The digital identity or identities, have to be stored somewhere. What happens if there is an outage? OpenAI had a multiple hour outage just today, and an ISP in Australia had a 12 hour outage yesterday. In that case, people cannot prove digitally their identity or identities (hundred of them if they like), even in real life.
The Greek government requires for the digital identity to be proven, access to internet[1]. I was just researching that right now.
Last, Estonia tries to secure the digital identities of their citizens on the blockchain[2]. Why digital identities need to be secured on a blockchain? Just a server or two, in a government building are not enough? How could a globally competitive network of miners, each one holding the digital information independent of any other, be more secure than the one or two servers solution?
[1] https://wallet.gov.gr/ [2] https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/services/legal/tech/assets/estonia...
Yeah, even with a bunch of safety features... Well, this Mitchell & Webb skit sums up the human-factor. [0]
"Lihe Pharmaceutical Technology Company, based in Wuhan, Hebei Province, China, was charged with fentanyl trafficking conspiracy and international money laundering, along with Chinese nationals Mingming Wang, 34, who is the alleged holder for three bitcoin accounts shared by sales agents for Lihe Pharmaceutical, and Xinqiang Lu, 40, the alleged recipient of funds via Western Union on the company’s behalf. " [1]
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...