Comment by 1dom
3 hours ago
> The difference is, for the claims of blockchain, it was trivially easy to look at and say, "This could have been a database".
Yes, and it's trivial now to look at so many LLM startups and say "that could be a complex if/else statement" or "that could be an Alexa skill" or "I can do that already with my mobile phone".
Everything you've just described about the impact of the friction of you doing your work, and how AI has solved that, is essentially what crypto promised and delivered for a certain subsect of finance, which is why crypto still has market caps in the trillions.
AI will do the same, make a notable change on a certain sub sector of work.
My point isn't that AI is useless, it isn't that it won't add value. It's hugely valuable and will change the world in way people don't even realise, just like dotcom and crypto did and do. Right now though, the disruption and investment is disproportionate and speculative, which is why it has parallels to crypto and dotcom.
Crypto only looked like it solved friction in places with messed up banking.
To people in the EU/UK who had free faster payments before Bitcoin was a thing, it never looked like an improvement at all.
The solution expensive and slow banking was always political, not technical.
Crypto was purely speculative, because it was never solving real problems.
I'm not speculating about problems being solved, I'm out there solving real problems. No-one in "blockchain" ever got to say the same. It was always a promise of things being better. And for many people, things already were better than what was being promised.
> Crypto only looked like it solved friction in places with messed up banking.
AI only solved friction in places work messed up, like giving developers enough time to program stuff.
> To people in the EU/UK who had free faster payments before Bitcoin was a thing, it never looked like an improvement at all.
To tech companies who were already content with their development team's velocity, AI never looked like an improvement at all.
> The solution expensive and slow banking was always political, not technical.
The solution to developers not coding fast enough was always political, not technical.
> Crypto was purely speculative, because it was never solving real problems.
AI was purely speculative, because it was never solving any problems. (Sorry, I have to point out here you said higher up a bunch of problems that Crypto was solving, and now you're saying how it was also speculative, which is the parallel between crypto that you were trying to argue against).
> I'm not speculating about problems being solved, I'm out there solving real problems. No-one in "blockchain" ever got to say the same. It was always a promise of things being better. And for many people, things already were better than what was being promised.
Again, either you're right above when you said crypto solved problems where banking was bad, or you're right here where you're saying blockchain never solved anything.
You're going round in circles trying to find a way that AI isn't like crypto whilst giving more examples of how AI is like crypto.
Remittance, micropayments, unbanked people, unstable economies: all of these did, can and do have problems solved by blockchain.