[kenjackson]

Crypto's main value to a LOT of people is purely speculation that you could be rich by buying it cheap and then watching the value explode. No one expected DogeCoin to provide any utility at all, but tons of people bought it.

[nickpp]

Countless people play the at the casinos, online poker games, bets - even the stock market is viewed by a lots of people as something of a gamble.

Personally I don't partake - but they get a value in it, I guess. Who am I to judge?

[ToucanLoucan]

I don't judge anyone in the crypto space for wanting to gamble. I judge them for lying to other people about their crypto being anything but gambling, which is what it is.

I don't think we'll ever even know how many NFT projects there were out there, all taking up space on the various chains, all shilling garbage artwork, all promising all manner of shit from video games to magazines to comics to television series, many of which raised huge sums of money, virtually all of which is now gone. And it's easy to point and laugh at the people who thought these things were anything but scams, but also, in a better world, we wouldn't let tons of people be scammed like this. Being vulnerable to certain kinds of hype shouldn't give other people permission to rob you blind.

[fsckboy]

> even the stock market is viewed by a lots of people as something of a gamble

the majority of people don't have formal training in probability and statistics, not to mention limit theorems and finance, so who cares how they view the stock market? I mean, I care, in the sense of educating people but most people don't really want to put the time in.

stocks and gambling both have risk, but only stocks reward many/most types of risk; gambling does not. The expected value of stocks is positive; gambling is not.

What people are trying to say about stocks is that they are stochastic, and so is gambling.

on the larger topic, Crypto also does not reward risk or offer a positive expected value. It's stochastic nature is driven by the changing opinions people have about it, or secondary effects from how much other stochastic markets might rely on it. Mining bitcoins is stochastic from the point of view of a miner, but not really from the point of view of the market or at any scale, but without a productive use case providing a reward, no postive expected value and the reward for risk ("you got a coin") is not above the cost of mining, at least not for long.

[jakupovic]

This makes zero logical sense. People can do whatever they want with their money period full stop. Nothing else.

[JeremyNT]

> Personally I don't partake - but they get a value in it, I guess. Who am I to judge?

The thing about gambling is it's a zero sum game. It doesn't enable any "real" productivity, it's just passing money around (with skimming off the top).

ML/AI isn't necessarily like that, it can be actually useful. Nevermind chatbots, we've already see how "AI" is useful in products for the last decade (e.g. google search results and extracting structured data out of emails, just to name a couple).

The only similarity is the hype/confusion cycle. Lots of crypto people got rich because they were in the right place at the right time, and they want to be there with the chatbot wave next.

The fact that AI/ML can be judged on real utility will limit some of this, and I think these crypto people will be in for a rude awakening if they think they can replicate their success here. With crypto the "game" of gambling / speculating meant that there was a lot of demand for ongoing endeavors, but once people realize that low effort ChatGPT reskins don't deliver anything tangible it'll be pretty obvious the emperor has no clothes.

You can't buy/trade ChatGPT prompts, after all - unless, perhaps, you were to create prompt NFTs?

[lesuorac]

Movie tickets are zero-sum and people get value out of them.

AI is way too overhyped and also completely not understood. I think most people here immediately think of some kind of genetic algorithm when they hear AI but even a simple thermostat could be marketed as AI even if all it does is turn on the furnace when some thermometer provides a low signal. The only thing reading AI on a product tells you is that there is software.

I'm unconvinced GPT will remain as a mass market tool. Google Docs got super popular because people don't want to fork out like $50 for microsoft word; they're not going to fork over $15/month to do web searches.

[schleck8]

> Who am I to judge?

Someone who isn't addicted

[nickpp]

Are addicts lesser humans? Do they lack free will? Am I entitled to decide for them and impose my will on their lives?

And who said I am not addicted? I don't do hard drugs but I am certainly addicted to coffee, sugar and maybe other habits I (moderately) indulge in but I would be very pissed off if someone else would try to take away from me.

[jakupovic]

Crypto haters will do anything to convince you that crypto bad, but other bad things are only bad, dometimes. There is no logic other than haves and have nots.

[Yoric]

Out of curiosity, does your argument also work for drugs?

[nickpp]

Isn't that pretty much settled already? It seems to me our society is becoming more and more permissive while giving up the previous "war on drugs" failed approach which did an incredible amount of damage.

[walr000s]

It also created and continues to create a lot of cheap labor, which the United States is in short supply of and likely will be for the foreseeable future.

[yreg]

Isn't it obvious drugs have utility?

[schleck8]

Depends on the drugs. If you think anyone who is reasonable in their head takes fentanyl (which is 50 times stronger than heroin and can be incredibly easily overdosed on because they are packaged in 24 hour slow release plasters and additionally is either stolen from the healthcare system, sometimes actually ripped off from elderly patients, or bought from mexican drug cartels) then you'd be wrong.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

People get high from drugs, thus drugs have utility.

Your opinion on the validity or ethics of that utility has no impact on the fact that for some people they have utility.

[singleshot_]

Fentanyl is an FDA-approved analgesic. I would guess that the reasonable person who is prescribed fentanyl takes it.

[schleck8]

Fentanyl is a last resort painkiller that is extremely heavily regulated in other countries and prescribed for things like tumor pain and heavy burns. It's not a regular painkiller, it's a narcotic. If you dose it high enough it can be used during anesthesia.

[immibis]

That's wrong - crypto's main value is buying and selling illegal goods and services on the internet.

Its secondary value is buying and selling legal goods and services on the internet without having to deal with credit card companies, but only for techbros.

[mrb]

"main value is buying and selling illegal goods and services"

Nah. Far more people use crypto for speculation than for actually illicit purposes.

[gmadsen]

By far the largest portion of the market is bitcoin. Bitcoin is inherently traceable from the ledger and IRS is always looking for large tax fraud.

[immibis]

They can only speculate because of the value brought to it by illicit purposes.

[dartos]

I don’t think you could possibly know that.

[1ark]

I think you could probe into some truth about it by looking at the volumes being traded on exchanges and how much are in the exchange's wallets.

[immibis]

But that's true about fiat money, too. Far more fiat money gets traded on exchanges in a single day, than circulates the rest of the whole world's economy in a year. But I think you'd agree fiat money derives its value from the way you can go down to the corner store and buy stuff, not from the fact it's traded on exchanges, right?

[1ark]

My argument at this point was only that speculation probably triumphs illicit usage. Do you mean that speculation is built on top of illicit use for crypto? It maybe doesn't even matter what the fundamental beliefs are because it has a price, today, now.

Fiat money derives its value from what you say, indeed. It is traded on exchanges because of that. But fungibility is only one of several factors. Money should also serve as store of value, but how long is highly debatable and the point.

[strangattractor]

You are forgetting ransom payments for hijacking corporate computer systems. Or money laundering. I am sure there are more. Not being a criminal I don't know what they are.

[strangattractor]

I forgot buying fentanyl from China.

"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-...

[red-iron-pine]

It's wicked cool for the ~15 or so tech bros in SV doing that.

But outside of a couple of meme articles about how "someone bought a house with BTC!" the only use case I can find for crypto is money laundering or ransomeware.