Comment by kjkjadksj
1 year ago
It took about 10 years for the crypto headline hysteria to taper but it might have been only because ai is now the big annoying thing to shoehorn into everything. Monkeys pawl will curl and you will emerge out of your hibernation to more disgust at whatever the next annoying thing will be.
Also, it's very clear from the messaging and breathless hype that the NFT grifters packed uo their stuff and moved over en masse to the GenAI space
Was at a networking event recently and "I was in the crypto/NFT space but I'm now pivoting to GenAI" was by far the most common way people introduced themselves.
At least it made it easy to figure out who I didn't need to talk to.
I think the difference is that AI is definitely useful and here to stay.
Crypto was mostly scams or pie in the sky ideas that will never work. It will stick around for money laundering & buying drugs but that's about it.
Eh? I'm not pretending digital coins or dubious "tokens" were all particularly useful, but crypto (in the sense of cryptography) has been around for decades and is definitely here to stay...
The people who made coins and tokens bad for society are doing the same thing with GenAI...
Both are useful and both come with huge problems. Neither one is some panacea or a sustainable get-rich-quick scheme (obviously, both people in "crypto" and in "GenAI" are getting rich, but neither are going to lead to some sort of great societal good).
> but crypto (in the sense of cryptography) has been around for decades and is definitely here to stay...
But that's not the sense under discussion. "Crypto"=cryptography lost the language war and was completely supplanted by "crypto"=cryptocurrency. I really wish the word could regain its original and useful meaning, but it's too late now.
Ironically, "I work in crypto" went from meaning something useful to society to meaning being a parasite on society, and you'd best not accidentally use the phrase expecting people to understand it to mean the original thing (cryptography).
(Yes, not all uses of cryptocurrency are a parasitic detriment. But if you happen to be working on actually useful stuff and we meet socially, then please be very quick about saying that you work at doing something with cryptocurrency or blockchain that is intended to provide actual benefit. If you just say "I work in crypto", I will excuse myself at the first opportunity.)
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