> profit of $273.4 million, or $1.04 per share, in the three months ended Dec. 31, compared with a loss of $557 million, or $2.46 per share, a year ago.
That’s an $830M increase(!) in revenue in one year
In the past 30 years, basic financial transactions (buying groceries, a meal, a movie ticket, etc) have shifted from (my estimate) probably 90% physical (cash and checks) to 90% electronic (cards, apps, EFT, Paypal), and most consumers prefer the new methods.
Some rough edges need to be worked out, but I would not be surprised at all if over the next 15 years, a decent number of companies start paying employees via stablecoin. And once that transition happens, it's not much of a leap to allow employees to decide whether they wish to be paid in a dollar-pegged currency or something else entirely.
You are comparing apples to oranges. AI hasn't been hamstrung since its inception like crypto. If there was a reasonable dynamic maximimum block size, no friction at crypto on/off-ramps, and no surveillance or taxation on it, you would absolutely be transacting in crypto rather than your national currency by now.
If there were free mansions on the Moon and you could breathe its atmosphere of Chanel Five perfume while eating delicious aphrodisiac figs grown in the fertile lunar soil, surely by now you would be doing that rather than still sitting in your miserable Earth home. Just a few practical details to sort out.
Humor, a great replacement for domain expertise, apparently.
Cryptocurrency was a threat to incumbents and governments since its inception. It was never meant to be a "store of value" or to represent cheesy art images on the internet as its primary use case. It was meant to be electronic cash. That's the primary use case.
That use case was knocked down, starting way back in 2012-2014. The death blows to crypto were as follows:
1) the massively unpopular hard cap on the blocksize of Bitcoin at 1MB, which limited it to around 5 transactions per second, and the limitations on OP_RETURN and other fields which allowed programmability.
This destroyed Bitcoin's network effect, and it also forced the emergence of "alt coins", as there was no hope of innovating on Bitcoin, both because of imposed throughput and programmability limitations. This developer coup ossified Bitcoin in an immature state, and was a huge blow to the technology. The coup had 9-figure funding, including AXA, other transnational corporations, and the MIT digital currency group, which was, interestingly, funded by Jeffrey Epstein directly.
A Bitcoin that stayed true to its values and was allowed to evolve would look more like a proof-of-work based Solana. Now we have thousands and thousands of projects competing for the same pie of network effect. This environment is exponentially detrimental to crypto's use case as electronic cash.
2) Unfavorable tax and regulatory regimes.
The IRS treating cryptocurrency as a "property" made it inconvenient to use as money, because every transaction carried a potential "schedule D". That's a huge drag on a technology meant to be used as money.
The KYC standards applied to crypto exchanges were and are vastly more stringent than most other financial services. This ties back to Operation Chokepoint 2.0. Bank regulators are forcing banks to not serve crypto companies, so only the largest ones survive.
Combine with this an ongoing turf war between the SEC, CFTC, and other agencies about who should regulate crypto, combined with no clear rules, and regulation by enforcement, and you've got a climate for zero innovation and investment. Investment in Bitcoin startups fell off a cliff in 2016 based on data coindesk.com used to publish in a downloadable spreadsheet. That trend continues today.
I could go on, but yes, saying "crypto had 15 years" is BS. Crypto had 15 years of attacks on it by incumbents that twisted its original purpose, shattered it, and scattered that purpose to the wind.
AI is going to fare much better than crypto because its risk/reward profile is more favorable from the perspective of existing power structures.
Nobody likes tech anymore, we just all put up with it. It's gotten boring and locked down. Crypto was the first nail in the coffin, and AI was the final one. Crypto is so far down on the list of tech that regular people like and want that it might actually be dead fucking last.
I actually started reading again and going outside!
I disagree, outside of tech, I don't think many people are excited about AI. The public perception is primarily negative: now, threatens my reality (deepfakes), soon, threatens my job, long-term, threatens humanity (i.e. SkyNet)
Bitcoin miners are far more savvy about the economics of running GPU/ASIC computation than every single AI startup. The miners figured out and perfected this kind of compute over a decade ago and are chomping at the bit to purchase high-end GPUs at firesale prices when these AI startups fail.
Also, most people outside of the tech bubble don't give a shit about AI and think it's a novelty, especially when they're struggling to pay their bills. There's also a minority scared to death AI will eliminate an unprecedented number of jobs across virtually every sector of the economy.
The Bitcoin folks are at least trying to fix money so people can afford things that cannot anymore because of inflation.
I am firmly in the tech bubble and think AI is a novelty in its present state. ChatGPT is a fucking idiot. That said, so is everyone who thinks cryptobros are "trying to fix money". They're trying to fix the problem of themselves not having your money yet.
So we should stay at status quo, with governments stealing from regular people because they control money supply? Same would have happened if we listened to our Nobel laureate Krugman poo-pooing internet at early stages and comparing internet to better faxing? You don't propose an alternative but say crypto no good because I say so.
Simple advice bolster your argument with something concrete rather than pointless statements you invented on the spot.