ChatGPT has something like 40x the weekly users as Bitcoin. There are other AIs and other Bitcoin, but I'm not sure e.g. Bitcoin (or other crypto used by folks) has the penetration to really be average to use. Crypto has a mostly niche use case at this point, exchanging money when it would be illegal, across borders, or in an area with a failing local currency.
I'm not taking sides, but are we going to ignore the fact that crypto users are probably more valuable in the sense that they are paying users in a way?
A chatGPT user could just be someone who popped onto the website and submitted the chat form.
Not to be too cheeky here but paying with what? Cryptocurrencies are mostly hot potatoes everyone is throwing back and forth and occasionally dropping to catastrophic effect, and don't seem to be tied to actual value add.
Meanwhile millions of people pay for tools that are now integrating AI to enhance their value add.
Free ChatGPT is just a loss leader for API and paid acct and a way to better train the model.
What you describe is price, not value. Things may be priced high but have little value, such as in cases of asset speculation. Things can be priced low but have great value, such as the value of human relationships, knowledge, etc.
I think being able to spot where these diverge is really important to understanding the world and where we should spend our limited time on it.
True but in comparison to every other value crypto is the only one which doesn't have any alternative use.
Gold, shares etc.
I believe the criticism is correct as the current driver of crypto is either a 'i put that much money in I'm not selling until it increases again' or gambled los.
After all the miners want to get paid.
But hey binance and others struggle let's see if there is a collapse soon
> I what way does an average consumer/user get value from crypto?
Look at venezuela and turkey inflation rate these last two years (and the estimates for the coming years). Look at the SNAFU that happened in Iran and banks defaulting and now inflation kicking in.
It may be an ultra risky bet (and there are serious opsec risks too) but when your savings are going lose 90% of their value in two years anyway, why not take it?
Bitcoin was, after all, created as a gigantic middle finger in response to infinite money printing.
The world is big and there are average consumers in countries other than the US or the EU.
Let's say I want to send money from New York to Rome. How does crypto enable me sending USD and the receiver getting EUR without any intermediaries?
You need exchanges to do anything useful in crypto. And as we've seen most recently in the FTX case, all the exchanges are wretched hives of scum and villainy.
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.
So you need at least 2 middlemen. One exchange where you buy crypto and another exchange where your friend sells that crypto.
Or you could simply use a traditional wire transfer and currency would be converted automatically. USA and Italy exchange millions of dollars every day - it's nothing special.
To actually get the money to the other person via wire transfer is actually quite a process (having done many myself).
- You will need to get permission from your bank to send international wire transfers (sign forms/agreements).
- takes a long time (in the order of days)
- expensive (~$50-$75 for outgoing international wire, and $25-$50 to receive it).
If you've ever done an international wire, you know there's the form question "What intermediate bank to use". So at least the same if not less middlemen apply.
The intermediate is either a trust system in the real world, escrow service at dark net drug pages or the miner.or the traider who traides your fiat to crypto.
I'm a crypto sceptic but I wasn't always like that. There was a time many years ago when Ethereum was brand new and I was an eager early adopter. I tried creating wallets, tried running a node to see what it does, put in some money through an exchange, and then... Nothing. There was nothing to do after jumping through all those hoops. In fact, turns out the only thing to do with the crypto wallet was to wait for its value to maybe increase over time. (Hence the "number go up" meme.) And for that to be realized, I would need to sell the coins to a new sucker to get real money out again — suspiciously pyramid-like.
And it's still like that today. There's no reason for me to ever open those old wallets again (and surely I don't even have the passwords anymore because self-custody is such a terrible idea UX-wise). And there's no reason to try any of the new stuff because it still obviously does nothing I'd need.
The early Internet wasn't like that. There was plenty to see and try, and interesting people to interact with. Once you tried it, you probably wanted to go back.
Today's early AI is like the early Internet in all the ways that crypto isn't and never will be. There's plenty you can do with ChatGPT and other models, right off the bat. You can install interesting stuff locally or run it on somebody else's server. You don't need to run the crypto-style terrible UX gauntlet and buy coins from a shady operator. AI is already so much easier and more useful and more powerful than crypto-web3-anything, it's competing in a completely different race.
OpenSea has lost 99% of their transaction volume in the past year, and even more of their revenue. I'd be shocked if the same happens to OpenAI. One was a fad, the other isn't.
I ran full nodes, wrote smart contracts, even had 200 GPUs mining ethereum at one point. I still have a bunch of wallets, exchange accounts, ENS names, you name it. Interesting, kind of fun, but then a big "Ok, now what?". Turns out not much other than writing some crypto thing to do another crypto thing that does another crypto thing.
Since getting generally disgusted with the sleaze I saw from the inside I haven't touched any of it in years.
How much difference has this made in my life? Zero (other than not being grossed out on a regular basis). How many times have I had to dust off a wallet or write a smart contract to do something I couldn't do better, faster, and cheaper elsewhere? Zero. How many times have I wanted to buy something and needed crypto? Zero. My experience is an anecdote for the entire space - a lot of time, money, and energy spent with no tangible value and nothing to show for it.
Ethereum is over eight years old, bitcoin nearly 15. ChatGPT has been out for less than a year and I use it on a daily basis to save time and come up with fairly novel things I'm not sure I could on my own. Of course the roots of ChatGPT go back quite far but then again so do merkle trees.
I wish I would have saved the time, money, and grey hairs on crypto for "AI" - I have way more fun with Llama, Whisper, and dozens of other models with immediate and real use cases on a daily basis.
Cryptography can be used to hide something, or prove something. The word cryptography encapsulates two different disciplines, cryptography and provegraphy. People who use the term crypto-* to refer to blockchain, do not know that blockchain has nothing to do with hiding information, but it has everything to do with proving information.
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?
The average person has no need to transact with people that card processors do not like. The most common scenario where that is the case is people "needing" to pay "Microsoft support".
Yeah. I have to say, I've never needed to give money to someone my bank doesn't want me to give money to. As someone spending money, I don't want guarantees like "this transaction cannot be revoked". I want to revoke transactions sometimes! Thus, crypto is anti-value-add for me. (Some would argue, merchants would charge lower prices if all sales were final. That's probably true! But it would depend on them never making a mistake, and everyone makes mistakes.)
Expand card processors to payment processors. There is constantly sites that get unjustly restricted or banned from payment processor like PayPal and Stripe. Even Minecraft, one of the most popular games of all time, had issues with PayPal.
That is like saying insurance is not in not something average, every day people need. If the rare event doesn't happen to you then yes it is a waste of money, but if it does you will be thankful to have it.
The same thing can be said about having bulletproof cars, wearing a helmet anytime when you are outside, carrying a lifejacket with you all the time. Those are things that cater to specific threat models. And those are not the threat models of average, every day people.