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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9265952" data-attributes="member: 18">This is true.Unfortunately both are tools largely being use for either grift or outright theft.The blockchains are a solution looking for a problem. I say that having worked extensively on a blockchain product for my company, note, not someone who is fundamentally opposed to the concept. The trouble is, they're too slow, too expensive to run (both inherent problems which cannot easily be avoided), and the fact that they effectively make ownership more public actually is adverse to the very rich people who could be primary drivers of usage. So their usage largely has been either entirely pointless, or in places where they're actively unhelpful, adding a time overhead and cost to something that would run more efficiently with centralized servers. The one place they could be useful, which is property ownership, and particularly the transfer thereof, where they genuinely could save people insane amounts of money and problems, their usage is directly opposed by the most wealthy property owners who absolutely do not want people in general to know what they own or what they paid for it, and especially not anything even suggestive about where they got that money from (a statistically significant part of higher-end property ownership is money-laundering). Nor do owners of large amounts of property want normal people to have easier time buying and selling houses - on the contrary, most want to make it as painful as possible so they can benefit from the price rises that friction brings.So the only places where the blockchain could help, where it is not just pointless frippery or "X with extra steps", we can't use it because it doesn't benefit the mega-wealthy.AI has been useful for a long time - again the company I work at has used it since long before LLMs became the topic du jour - but it's now basically being by the rich to steal from the middle and working classes. I don't say that in a political sense, but rather a very literal one - all the current successful AI tools are essentially stealing everything that's not nailed down (and some stuff that is!), providing absolutely no recompense whatsoever to the creators or owners of that stuff (most of whom are individuals or companies which are not very powerful or wealthy), and funnelling the money to a few tech execs or tech bros, most of whom were already extremely wealthy.A big part of the problem is that if you simply label your company as a "tech company", and needlessly involve the blockchain, NFTs, AI or the like in what you're doing, you can achieve three things:1) You can evade regulation in heavily-regulated industries. This is the typical "use case" for blockchain/crypto-based companies. Perhaps the actual majority of them, at this point, are attempting to essentially create unregulated banks. Please recall that banks are regulated because of the insane damage and horrific schemes they cause when unregulated. These "tech companies" are essentially seeking to do horrific or incredibly financially dangerous schemes which would be illegal for banks.2) You can get funding from the huge cadres of absolute airheads who operate VC and PE firms, and even banks and the like, because of the completely irrational yet bizarrely widespread view among these people that almost with "tech company" written on it is inherently better and more deserving of funding than the exact same company without "tech company" written on it. This is helping to cause what is inevitably going to be a dotcom bubble again.3) Politicians, particularly of the most brainless modernist kind (and on both sides of the centre), rush to slap public contracts into the hands of "tech companies" because they're "modern" and "forward looking" and offer "unique value" and so on.A good example of the above would be Ambulnz* (seriously), an NY company which, in reality, is just pretty much a very basic shoddily-run, extremely low standards medical transport company, of which there are a basically infinite number. But by branding themselves a "tech company" and claiming to "use AI" (in unspecified ways), they've attracted tons of funding and public contracts which, were they called something like "Ambulance Inc" and just presented themselves as what they actually are - a dodgy medical transport company, they wouldn't have got much of either.* = C.f. this week's episode of Trashfuture if you'd like more details.</blockquote>

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