• hark@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    17 hours ago

    If only there were a way to combine the two, then we could keep an even larger bubble going.

  • etherphon@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    32
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    22 hours ago

    Can we switch back to the need based economy instead of the greed based economy?

      • etherphon@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        22 hours ago

        Sure, but it will have to change eventually, we can’t keep pumping out more and more throwaway shit year after year, there will be a critical mass, or maybe we just die buried in our own garbage.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          22 hours ago

          It seems the nature of things are changing from physical things to digital things, and that has infinite potential. I expect at some point we’ll start mining the landfills because it’s easier than extracting stuff from the rock. Once that happens, there’s no physical limit on the greed.

          • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            10 hours ago

            Well, what’s already happening is circular self-contained greed “economies” were money (not actual wealth just value-tokens such as money but also assets which have valuations expressed in said value-tokens, from crypto coins to realestate and stocks) is made from merely money being passed around whilst no actual value is created (in fact, value is mainly destroyed as those things are consuming actual resources to produce no real value at all, only boost the count of value-tokens)

            This is destroying the capability of currently accepted value-tokens to actual represent an underlying utility value.

            In other words, thing like stocks but also things like currency are decoupling from the underlying value they used to represent:

            • Stocks were a share of ownership in a structure - the company - that created things, either directly - manufacturing, extraction - or indirectly by increasing the efficiency of direct value creation - i.e. services that indirectly made manufacturing or extraction more efficient or helped in distributing the products of those - whilst nowadays the most “valuable” by market capitalization of stocks have almost purely speculative valuations or are for companies in rent-seeking activities which don’t create value but merely take a share of the value created by others.
            • Currency used to be (and still is to a large extent) value tokens which were a claim on the value produced by the Economy. What we’re seeing is that as more of those value tokens are created in those circular “economies” each token can claim less and less quyantities of the traditional underlying value things - just notice food inflation. Also rent-seeking activities (such as realestate investment) have even faster devalued how much each value-token can claim. Whilst official Inflation numbers don’t tell us this story (there is a strong motivation for politicians to have Officially recognized Inflation be lower than reality, because Mathematically that makes GDP seem larger), most people are actually feeling the real Inflation, especially in the most ancient and required concrete assets: Food and Housing.

            I expect that something is going to break, though I don’t know when and exactly how it’s going to materialized (though the way the ultra-wealthy are trying to transform the powers they captured from Democratic to Autocratic, leads me to believe that they’re preparing for a break in the functioning of the current value-tokens by having a more direct control over just about everything than indirectly by merelly holding lots of value-tokens).

            The societal consequences of the value-representation structures we have (literally, of thing like money, stocks and even certificates of ownership) unwinding would be huge.

          • etherphon@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            21 hours ago

            Inifnite potential? Like NFTs? Subscriptions? I suppose… I’m beyond not interested in buying digital things I don’t even have the rights to, but I seem to be in the minority.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              4
              ·
              18 hours ago

              Whether you have the rights is kind of irrelevant to this discussion. Let’s say it’s GOG games that are all DRM-free, my point is digital consumption has nearly infinite upper limits for consumption.

  • leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    21 hours ago

    Wasting electricity that was already being wasted isn’t as bad as wasting electricity that was being used for something productive, I guess.

    • djsp@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      13 hours ago

      Surplus electricity would lower bills for both households, which have been particularly affected by rising prices, and different industries which have also had to contend with AI for capital.

  • Zier@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    93
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 day ago

    Abandon the bitcoin scam, full steam ahead for the AI scam!!!

  • kubofhromoslav@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    21 hours ago

    Crypto mining is (mostly?) total waste… Proof of Work by doing hard but useless calculations and using it as kind of currency is like travelers on a desert world use water as a currency - but by intentionally spilling it 🤦🏻‍♂️

    Great cryptocurrencies does not need power hungry hardware. Eg. Nano (XNO) have a secure network error or using around 17 000 000 times less energy per transaction.

  • leastaction@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 day ago

    Hey, now that we have this obscene energy-wasting capability, let’s see what other ways there are to generate equally obscene profits!

  • termaxima@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    13 hours ago

    Bitcoin has at best 5 years left until quantum computers just destroy the cryptography they use, so they are right to look for an escape.

    I just wish they realized how futile this all is.

    • Tja@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      9 hours ago

      Quantum computers don’t destroy the cryptography, as long as you follow best practices and don’t reuse addresses.

  • addie@feddit.uk
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    especially if you have the infrastructure in place

    I thought Bitcoin mining made no sense at all on GPUs any more? Unless you were running ASICs then the power costs just weren’t worth it, and application-specific is part of the acronym, there. Why would these things even be able to run an LLM?

    In any case, Bitcoin just needs to iterate as fast as possible in order to find a match, doesn’t really need a lot of RAM. Whereas LLMs need really large amounts - NVIDIA’s latest data centre racks have about a terabyte for a reason. Even if you had cornered the market on GPUs five years ago for Bitcoin, what use are those cards for this?

    • dhork@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      19
      ·
      1 day ago

      If I read the article property, the real asset is the rackspace and power they are already leasing. They would tear out the existing Bitcoin mining infrastructure and replace it with AI servers.

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 day ago

      Mining hardware is shortlived. These things get outdated real fast and need to be replaced frequently. So what they do is when a mining rig is up for replacement, they just swap it out for an AI rig.

      The real asset for mining is the infrastructure: rack space, access to cheap electricity, data centers. All of that is very useful for AI as well.

    • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 day ago

      Some of these bought decommissioned power plants like old coal plants, so they’re getting wholesale prices for energy.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 day ago

      One this is all speak to convince investors to throw money, so they’ll cheer pick their interpretation.

      In this case I think they refer to already having the real estate, buildings, power and cooling. So “all” they have to do is rip out their rigs and dump a bunch of nVidia gear in. All they need is just a few hundred million from some lucky investors and they will be off…

  • ook@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 day ago

    I don’t get it. What are they even seling then? Bitcoins I understand, but AI? Just enabling scams?

  • jaykrown@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    12
    ·
    1 day ago

    The difference between AI and Bitcoin is that people actually use AI to do productive things.