In the ever-evolving landscape of technology and innovation, both blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) have captured significant attention.
Let’s think about blockchain for a bit. Blockchain technology has been met with considerable hype, promising revolution across various industries. However, this enthusiasm has not translated into success for most ventures in this space. Research indicates that approximately 95% of blockchain startups fail within a year of operation. Contributing factors include market volatility, regulatory hurdles, and the lack of clear use cases.
A notable example is the collapse of Terra’s LUNA cryptocurrency in 2022. In just one week, $45 billion was lost, illustrating the inherent risks associated with blockchain projects.
AI startups are now experiencing their own wave of excitement and investment. However, they too encounter significant challenges. Over 80% of AI projects fail due to issues like insufficient market demand, operational difficulties, and ethical complexities.
Consider this: approximately 42% of AI startups fail because there is insufficient demand for their products or services. Not to mention, many AI ventures struggle with resource mismanagement, inadequate expertise, and scaling difficulties. You also have the additional challenge of navigating the evolving landscape of AI ethics and regulations adds layers of complexity that can impede progress. There’s not exactly decades of history to refer to regarding legal precedent with AI.
A lot of the hype and marketing I see today looks just like what I saw a few years ago, except instead of “blockchain” it says “AI” now. There are consulting firms, integration firms, everything. Is this just a sign the industry is just endless fads with no actual commercial usage?
Bitcoin was hyped as reinventing the world’s economy. Sure, it found a few usages, like replacing Western Union, or also by essentially becoming “digital gold” that people can just acquire and sit on, but last time I looked, VISA/Mastercard and the like were still doing 98% of the world’s commerce. In other words, Bitcoin fell far short of where many of its proponents said it would land years ago. Looking around at all these AI firms, I wonder how many of them will even exist in 3 years.
Yes, but not to the same extent. Both AI and Blockchain are amazing technologies, but those people that are pushing either as the next big thing since slice bread don’t understand them.
Blockchain is an elegant solution to a decades old problem that’s actually impossible to solve called Byzantine fault tolerance by making it costly to bad actors to the point where it’s better for them to become good actors. It is revolutionary, but very unlikely that someone will make a profitable product out of it, especially because the two more obvious uses for it already exist and are open source.
LLMs, which is what people are calling AI, is also a very cool new step for text prediction. But it’s not in fact intelligent, so it can’t do anything without supervision, and more often than not it’s easier and safer to create something yourself than to fix a possibly broken, possibly malicious creation by someone else. LLMs are great for stuff like brainstorming or suggesting short pieces of code that I was about to type anyways, but to think they can produce a book or a program on their own is absurd.
However, as much as I think Blockchains are elegant, they solve an abstract and very specific problem, whereas LLMs are good at solving generalized stuff. There are plenty of applications that would benefit enormously from having LLMs, e.g. a bot that finds, summarizes and points you to documentation at work would help anyone having to deal with documentation to make them more efficient, and companies that invest in these sorts of solutions might come up with great products. But most of the time they’re using it as a buzzword or worse trying to remove a person’s job which will backfire.
bitcoin is a workaround, not a solution to the byzantine problem. Its security hinges on humans placing value on it and wanting to hoard it. It’s a clever psychological thing that makes it so that the participating cleanly is more advantageous than trying to cheat. But the byzantine fault problem is just as mathematically impossible to solve as ever (because proven math does not change).
Blockchains solve nothing, lol
Now blockchain fans need to come up with problems it solves, fucking Byzantine fault tolerance, lmao
Is it that you don’t understand the problem or the solution? Or maybe you got scammed and lost money by buying a picture of a monkey that someone assured you would be worth way more, akin to an old person being against emails and thinking they solve nothing because once they sent money to a Nigerian prince.
Okay genius, name one real life application that’s solved by the blockchain, and I don’t mean a problem that can also be solved by blockchain, I mean one where it can only be solved by blockchain and nothing else
First of all no technology is the only way to solve a problem, for example Lemmy and Reddit essentially solve the same problem except one is open source decentralized and the other is centralized and closed source. With that in mind, Blockchains solve the decentralized 0-trust validation of tokens, which can be used for anything you might need a token for, e.g. money or proof of ownership. Sure, you can do that in a centralized manner, but the fact that we’re having this discussion over Lemmy instead of Reddit should be enough of a proof to you of why you can’t always rely on centralized solutions. If you have any other technology that solves tokens in a decentralized 0-trust way I would love to hear about it.
An inflation free currency
That’s not a good thing, also not a currency.
It’s one real life application that blockchain solves, just like you asked.