Wasting electricity that was already being wasted isn’t as bad as wasting electricity that was being used for something productive, I guess.
Can we switch back to the need based economy instead of the greed based economy?
Which economy was that? We’ve had greed for hundreds of years, if not many thousands.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As one grift’s hype cycle fades, shift to another one.
most grifters like Trump and Elon are in both
Hey, now that we have this obscene energy-wasting capability, let’s see what other ways there are to generate equally obscene profits!
At least they’re pivoting instead of just doing both.
Abandon the bitcoin scam, full steam ahead for the AI scam!!!
Ahh, so this is where the concept of “rollover minutes” went, into bubbles
“Scammers find new scam”
How would they make money from ai? be like chatgpt and release their own ai plans or something? or something else?
Make no mistake; the people selling server time will be making money. They are selling a real product to a real customer, it’s just the customer is a tech company that will never make money back in turn.
Maybe host open source models and offer paid access for customers who need big generating capacities.
Aren’t most miners running ASICs that are pretty much only useful for mining specific coins? I was hoping we were past the last “people are buying off-the-shelves GPUs for crypto” bubble.
Depending on which crypto, but yes. And the ASICs have a usable shelf life of just a few years, so I assume they are migrating to machines for AI processing as their ASICs need routine replacement.
Paid : give money for
Payed: nautical term meaning to let out some slack on the rope or to cover the deck in tar/pitch for sealing it
As long as we’re being pedantic, when you pay out pitch, you’re not covering the deck with it. You’re making lines of it that go in between the deck planks. It’s basically caulking. You actually have to be careful to not get it everywhere (not least because pitch is really hot when you’re paying it out), so just like when you’re paying out a line, there’s a sense of careful control and easing out the pitch.
Also, If I understand it correctly it’s also called this because caulking requires jamming pitch soaked rope into the joints so it’s still about rope!
Pretty close! It’s tar-soaked hemp fibers (rope traditionally being hemp), called oakum. Sometimes cotton under that for filling if needed. To me it still feels more about carefully easing out, particularly since paying out also has other uses that aren’t rope related, like falling off to leeward after a tack.
Username checks out.
This is the level of pedantry I can get behind.
Yeah there’s lots of open providers like this.
TFW when you realize AI is a bubble
OpenRouter is a marketplace for AI inference
In theory you could lease your server capacity to the big AI players, but then they would have to trust you -a noted crypto grifter - with their data.
Investors keep trusting noted crypto grifters with money.
Like AI companies care about business ethics
Same way a lot of the “ai” companies make money, investors that have no idea but want to get in on the ground floor of the next nVidia or openai.
No they play a different game and leverage hardware. Most probably they’ll buy H100s instead of ASIC and run AI inference on that. It turns out that inference can be pretty profitable if you have good utilization and don’t need to train your own models.
Subscriptions for waifus?
Hey now, at least bitcoin has it’s uses. And if you have a farm for it I doubt you’re scamming on the side, that’s risky.
Sure it does
AI has more uses than Bitcoin, the fuck is this circlejerk, lmao
I hate this timeline so much
Lost all your money on Bored Apes, now generate your own!
Yeah, I’d expect there to be some real overlap between crypto and ai bros.
Some overlap? It’s like 90%
Major Bitcoin mining firm pivoting to AI
one shady grift for another
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?
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.
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.
Some of these bought decommissioned power plants like old coal plants, so they’re getting wholesale prices for energy.
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…
I think you misunderstand that scene. Bitcoin miners are crazy rich and most of them are investors in their own right. They don’t need outside money.
I don’t get it. What are they even seling then? Bitcoins I understand, but AI? Just enabling scams?
Data centre capacity, they seem to be making an emphasis on access to independent power sources.
