> 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.
Sure I will bolster my argument, here's the tl;dr: I'm not required to propose an alternative to bitcoin, that isn't what this is about. As a regular joe consumer, I find that bitcoin is a disgracefully inadequate alternative to fiat that solves none of the problems it alleges to try to solve and makes many of them worse.
I didn't say anything about the status quo, I said specifically that bitcoin is a scam and the concrete part of that statement is how after 15 years of allegedly "trying" to make it work, the only thing anyone has successfully managed to use it for is speculating on its own future value, rugpulls and other flavors of scam artistry, and enabling terrorist groups and drug cartels. Most bitcoin darlings either end up in prison or cash out and disappear forever. The high profile personalities within the space have shown time and time again that they are nothing but charlatans. I'm sure I don't need to provide you with specific proof of this, articles about these people are literally everywhere. Ignoring what people have actually been using it for, the onus of proof is on YOU to tell ME why in the fuck we should use THIS system:
-difficult for the layperson to understand
-inaccessible to people without internet access
-transactions take so long that the value of the coin can change dramatically by the time it actually happens
-requires the user to accept total liability for the data points which represent their entire identity in the economic system. i do not want to tattoo one half of my key onto my balls and bury the other half on a hard drive in the backyard so my money doesn't get stolen.
-no concept of ownership and therefore no concept of theft
-no consumer protections. if your wallet (ie your identity) is stolen, there is absolutely nothing you can do, because you have no identity in this system.
-"no central authority" is a BAD thing because there is no price control mechanism. with fiat, there are controls in place for a loaf of bread to not cost $10000 and there are people who can be held accountable if this ever happens.
-"no central authority" is a MYTH, the price and supply of bitcoin are de facto controlled by a small number of anonymous whales and miners with the resources to buy thousands of GPUs and quickly stand up mining operations in countries with cheap energy.
-the compute work is 99.9999999% wasted so all the energy they suck up in these mining operations amounts to fuck all.
-if you croak, your money is lost to the ether. Millions of people die every day, so every day the money supply shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. i can imagine that in a few hundred years there will be like 12 bitcoin left and the price of a loaf of bread will be .000000000000013542 bitcoin even though it was .000000000000012732 just yesterday. You might be tempted to say well we'll just move the decimal around, but who will? Who has the authority?
These issues cannot be blamed on external factors, they are baked straight into the design of the system. It is not enough to say that "fiat money is the problem so let's make a different currency". The problem is that it's possible for some people to exploit economic systems to accumulate wealth beyond what is reasonable for a person to live, which in turn makes it impossible for many others to accumulate enough wealth to escape poverty. There is no software nor economic system that can answer for this, it's just human behavior. Once a system is put into place, people begin to work to exploit it, and bitcoin is laughably easy for people with enough resources to exploit. In this regard it is a spectacular failure.
Thank you for "bolstering" your argument with information that is mostly verifiable. You're mostly right in all your points and I will not deny that. The biggest issue is that there is nothing better we have out there. We have had monied interests control the money supply forever and Bitcoin is trying to take that power away from these interests.
> Ignoring what people have actually been using it for, the onus of proof is on YOU to tell ME why in the fuck we should use THIS system
Right now there is nothing better that we have which is accessible to the people and not controlled(as much as we know) by the governments in power. I also agree that if we had a better system we should use it.
The point I don't agree on is the 'no central authority" is a BAD thing'. I lived through multiple inflation bouts and have no want to repeat the same. Having the money creation out of the hands of the people who benefit the most is a good thing.
