Please don't take HN threads further into repetitive flamewar hell. Nothing interesting is going to come out of repeating this argument for the n-thousandth time. Worse, when discussions cease to be interesting, they turn nasty.
> The difference is crypto is useless and AI is useful.
Is that why Stripe, TicketMaster, Moneygram, Checkout.com, TransferGo, VISA, etc and many other companies continue to use it?
> That’s a pretty important difference.
Nope. The important difference is that crypto has energy efficient alternative methods of consensus available today such as proof-of-stake, byzantine fault tolerance (BFT), etc and even a former PoW blockchain (Ethereum) cut their emissions by 99.99% [0] by switching to a proof-of-stake consensus method. For crypto it is possible to switch to greener methods.
AI (Deep Learning) continues to destroy the planet since it has no efficient alternative methods available for training, fine-tuning and inference. This means their methods waste tons of resources, water and electricity. [1] [2]
It is a serious issue in the field after decades of its existence all to produce unexplainable black-box AI models which cannot reason and have to be retrained, fine-tuned again once it gets confused by a single pixel or regurgitates nonsense output.
The AI hype is another grift that the VCs are taking advantage of just like they did with thousands of crypto companies. The reality is, 90% of these AI / crypto companies will fail and the remaining 10% will still be around that are useful.
It is being used and businesses are using it in their products today.
Companies like Moneygram would not use Stellar if it was useless for them and their customers and would instead announce that they are shutting it down after trialling it. They seem to have seen utility in it for their use-case. The same can be said for the other companies I mentioned.
> Companies like Moneygram would not use Stellar if it was useless for them
Useless, not worthless. I happen to be familiar with that case. It’s great for sales. Useless for performance. (It might become useful one day.) Hence, marginal-enough adoption and a lot of marketing.
A couple years ago I counselled a friend in banking to do something with Ripple. It helped him win deals with crypto firms, and likely helped their wealth managers, too. Worthful. But useless.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html