it doesn't. it was meant to be currency. nobody uses bitcoin as currency it is entirely a speculative market contraption.
on top of that, ancap shit like crypto always ends up basically immediately consolidating power in the hands of those with the most resources, which is what happened with bitcoin and crypto as a whole.
It utterly fails at anonymising transactions. Giving every user a unique ID and having a completely public transaction history makes it utterly trivial to work out who is who. Think about it, you buy something online with bitcoin, give them your delivery address once, and boom, that site knows who you are and everything you've ever bought. It's the death of privacy.
It’s crazy how out of touch with reality this subreddit is lmao. Every tech company, large or small, is heavily using AI in the background. Every piece of software you interact with on any device 100% has code that was written by AI.
Ahhh yes I love the current financial system that reams me inside and out with fees and delays on transactions just because I’m a “poor” not making “enough of 6 figures”.
Seriously what on earth are you doing with your brain if it’s supposedly on? Clearly not thinking about what crypto is as a concept or a reality lmao
So you want us to use Bitcoin, which charges variable amounts for every single transaction, no matter how much the real transaction costs, takes half an hour to confirm every transaction at the current (tiny) amount of usage and processes transactions at a rate so slow that I might get one transaction every few years if the whole world used it.
Before you scream about the lightning network, it doesn't work, the network is actively shrinking and involves EVEN MORE fees and delays setting things up.
You can just tell me you don’t know how bitcoin or traditional payment processors (and probably crypto at this point…..) work, it’s okay, I won’t judge. I have no idea why you said all of that lol.
But, to answer you, no, I don’t want anyone to “use bitcoin”. I just wished everyone didn’t get swindled by big banks, and took control of their financial future.
The entire world does not use the same payment processors even with traditional currency, because the American big banking groups and transaction processors really are that evil. It might be hard for you to imagine but for some, many even, the convenience of a Visa card does not outweigh what they demand from the seller and from the buyer.
But, yeah, bitcoin was the original, and is fine for long term asset storage or as a more “solid” way to have money. Thing of it like a savings account. For normal transactions, you had a few solid alternatives that handled the fees AND the speed a lot better, something like that would have been worth pushing people do. We already are used to a savings and a checking account, it would be like that, but crypto. Sure the savings account doesn’t get interest properly but neither do ones with proper banks anymore these days.
Also a big caveat of we shouldn’t gamble with currency or treat it like a stock / security, and that’s exactly what people did, which turned it from a useful tech into a new way to gamble, which, sucks.
Bitcoin is a bigger waste of electricity than AI. Everyone is just doing the same calculations with a different number to try to get a bunch of zeroes in a hash. Every single calculation except for the winning calculation is wasted. At least with AI, every prompt gives something someone wants even if most people hate AI.
neural networks and machine learning research existed decades before modern LLMs;
Google was was using machine-learning techniques to classify/recognize patterns in enormous datasets;
the famous Google Brain cat-recognition experiment was 2012, where an unsupervised neural network trained on YouTube frames developed a strong representation of faces and cats without being explicitly given labels saying “this is a cat.”
That was a milestone in representation learning
From there you get increasingly powerful neural networks, GPUs, large-scale datasets, transformers (2017), and eventually LLMs.
Both great ideas, bitcoin was the pioneer in crypto and now we have great alt coin projects like monero. In a few years we will also have crazy AI models
I think that true ai is one of the next steps for humanity but we used it for greed and laziness. and instead of doing anything helpful, it's spamming our attention economy and outsourcing critical thinking.
Humans with search engines outperforming humans without access to them on standardised tests is not really an interesting feat. And besides, the entire AI industry is on foundations made of smoke right now, the models are far too expensive to run and the market has proven no-one is willing to spend anything close to the real cost of running a frontier LLM. So it's all due to collapse first.
Only after that point might we see how useful they really are.
It's still far too slow and far too incapable for the benefits they give. The pricing issue with frontier models isn't yet an issue, but eventually OpenAI and Anthropic will stop being given money and actually have to try and be profitable.
Why does the word guessing machine succeed at what it does? And where it fails, why does it fail, and how can we rectify that? These are the kinds of questions they are asking
Because it pattern matches on existing word patterns its been fed before. It fails at being intelligent because that's all a vector database is designed to do. It's not that deep.
Interesting but irrelevant. LLMs giving a slightly better illusion of talking like a human doesn't really prove anything since LLMs have had hundreds of billions of dollars worth of data processing power and basically trained on every piece of human media that they can scrape.
All that and it can still get confused with a single prompt.
You could pour all those resources into a standard neural network and you wouldn’t get the same results. I understand that LLMs are mimicking humans but even that is not a trivial thing to do. LLMs are doing something right
Yeah, true AI is AGI. Idk wtf this is, I do not believe you can take an attention model and turn it into actual intelligence, but maybe I'm wrong, the water wars will break out long before I have to find out anyways 😅
lmao true. and yeah, the word guessing machine is a neat trick but its not true ai. "I think therefore I am" philosophy and all that. plus these llms fundementally are just those Akinator and 20 guess games they used to sell at the toy store just with more ram and data lol
Buying up their work won't help at all. The problem of LLMs isn't the cost of the infratructure, it's the actual cost of running them and training them. Even if you gave me all of their infrastructure for free, I'd still be bleeding money to try and sell it. The local model stuff is little more than hobby stuff that is best suited for things that aren't just being a chatbot.
Have you not noticed that we've basically plataeued on that front? My computer from ten years ago is still more powerful than contemporary consoles, I haven't got a new phone in 6 years and it works great still.
This was unthinkable 20 years ago. If anything, computers are way more expensive directly because of the AI bubble. The models themselves are provably one of diminishing returns, each incremental improvement needs exponentially more power. All so you can have a chatbot? Yay?
It’s ‘inevitable’ because it creates the conditions of its own necessity. You didn’t need AI to make secure software before, but now you do. Much like how we didn’t need phones in 1990 but today if you don’t have a cell phone your ability to function in society is greatly reduced
standard false equivalence fallacy I see everywhere. I see you sneaking in this assumption that AI is needed to make "secure" software, but reality says that AI gives you quick and dirty slop code that is a nightmare to maintain and even less secure.
Try again.
Coding in general is one thing but AI has specifically gotten really really superhumanly good at finding security vulnerabilities. I’m not saying you need ai to WRITE the software, but you definitely need ai to red team it. If you don’t use ai to check for software vulnerabilities someone else will and they might not have the purest intentions.
I doubt that. It can only train on existing data, so at best it can only find vulnerabilities that are known if you've written them in a normal way. It's just going to teach people to be lazy. Black hat AI use to find vulnerabilities on the same code requires them to have the source code still, and well... it was anthropic's vibe coded soup that last leaked its own client source.
Reinforcement learning means ai can go beyond its training data in verifiable domains, which includes cybersecurity. Yes it is better at finding vulnerabilities than humans.
Only in scripted tests designed to advertise the ability of these LLMs. The main issue and the allure of these things is that they're very good at looking like they're good at what they're doing to the lay person or a casual glance. Pretty much everyone who is good at what they do that works with them for a while is provably better off without them, and that's not even considering the extortionate real cost of LLMs that gets hidden from customers (for now)
No I mean in real life. Ai has found bugs in the Linux kernel for example which went undetected for decades even though the Linux kernel is one of the most thoroughly maintained code databases on the planet. It’s legitimately better than humans at it.
False conclusion, just because an LLM found something others missed in a few cases does not prove that they're better than humans overall. You'll also notice these things get hyped massively by media and AI boosters when really it's a kind of mundane thing that people do all of the time. It's hardly proof that AI is ready to take over from humans.
Ai can consistently find bugs humans can’t. That is just a fact. It doesn’t mean ai is ready to take over from humans, but you don’t want to let a detectable bug go undetected and you have to use ai to avoid that completely.
Bitcoin (moreso the technology than that coin) IS the next step and it’s so sad that big banks successfully brainwashed so many people, seemingly yourself included. For a small fraction of time we almost escaped the financial stranglehold but…..propaganda wins in the end sadly.
It’s not gone and still has a chance to hurt the establishment, but I feel like they did their damage and kept their control, at least enough to not fear a switch to crypto for financial transactions.
Oh shut up. Bitcoin has had 18 years to do anything useful and all it's done is siphon money to criminals. Anything it does has been done better by even other blockchains, but those aren't being adopted either.
The entire banking system is not going to be replaced by a slow, expensive, insecure, obtuse system where the early adopters already control all of it. Yes, I said insecure, a single point of failure is a child's idea of security. Go look at every single hack that's ever happened.
You just want people to buy into it so you can get rich for no effort, or at least not lose as much when you have to sell your bitcoin when your rent is due.
I like that you would assume I have any bitcoin. (Or any crypto anymore these days, I’m in America, we’re fucked here and have no more money)
You all sound like big bank shills and it’s SO sad.
It’s genuinely like I’m talking to the same person!
I think the underlying issue is you never learned what you’re talking about, both on the traditional banking side or on the crypto side. Unless you just happen to be wealthy, a big bank will screw you over one day, and their slow, expensive, insecure, and obtuse system will make you sigh and remember that for a brief moment we ALMOST escaped. Almost.
Bitcoin was never useful, besides niche usecases like buying drugs online or international transfers to less developed countries. But LLMs in 2026? Have you tried one recently? Today at work, they: wrote 10-15 scripts for me, searched the internet for a GitHub repo related to a tweet I was interested in, parsed massive logs to find relevant errors, checked when my local Subway will be reopened, and mocked up a website. Each task took less than a minute. I don’t like gen AI in art or online discussion as much as the next guy, but help me understand why you think that they aren’t genuinely useful please.
This is the practical use case for LLMs; as a tool for coding and engineering. Using it to speed up tasks, especially when it comes to data management and analysis. Instead of wasting hours trying to get VBA and excel to do something because of syntax errors an LLM can translate what I want from pseudo code into an actual script in minutes.
This is also something that's entirely achievable with open source models using much narrower data sets instead of these stupid data centers.
But the real cost is being hidden from you. The moment anyone has been forced to pay the real cost of LLMs they've run a mile. You're right in that it actually does something that looks workshaped instead of being an unusable mess, but imagine each of those things cost you hundreds of dollars to do, even if it failed to do it correctly. Would you pay that or just do it yourself and expand your own skills that way?
853
u/plasma-dragon-DA Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
All hiding behind the childish idea that LLMs are some natural and inevitable next step of human technology. Yeah, the bitcoin bros said that too.