Calling blockchain a pure grift ignores the serious enterprise-level work being done to solve real logistical problems. The technology behind NFTs isn’t just for JPEGs it’s used to create a unique and immutable digital identity for stuff like physical shipping containers and pallets as digital twins. In a global supply chain where a single shipment passes through dozens of untrusted parties like factories, freight forwarders, ports, customs, and warehouses a distributed blockchain leger provides a single source of truth that replaces manual emails, scanned paper documents, and spreadsheets. Smart contracts can automate releases upon verified scans, directly reducing the demurrage and detention fees that cost millions of dollars. The big hurdle isn’t that the tech doesn’t work or is a grift, it’s getting competing companies to agree on common standards and invest in the infrastructure. The speculation was a sideshow, but the underlying utility for tracking physical assets across trust boundaries is a real thing
Capitalism is what makes them grifts. Llms could be neat. Theft at scale, environmental impact, and using it to kill little kids (anyone but jfc the kids killed wtf) is the problem. Its always the horrid companies and governments who look at any tech like “can i hurt people with this? I totally can…”
If you agree with the basic view that any software that does not respect your rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute it, is a form of unjust power over you - then that principle becomes a convenient acid test for virtually all computer technology. Any tech that enables and enhances those rights is not a grift. Any tech that restricts those rights is a grift.
Of course there are edge-cases. Blockchain stuff is usually open-source, and yet it’s a tool that has been designed by and for the most extreme right-wing libertarian types, so while the underlying technologies could hypothetically be used for good, the forms that they’re implemented in are pretty clearly a grift. So intention and design matter too.
I’d also like to see how the Hyppocratic License shapes software over time.
Would also love to see more developments in Farm Hack, Appropriate Technology, and Open Source Ecology.
they will all be enshittified so whats the point
uhm well how about anti-enshittification/corruption technology, wheres that
These technologies are not grifts.
The way they are often employed is absolutely a grift.
Blockchain is a very cool concept. Getting people to pay $1,000 for a picture of a cat and imply that it has value because it’s on a blockchain is grift.
Ai is a cool technology. It has become a grift because the companies behind it are sucking up massive investor dollars, destroying the worldwide computing parts market, and persuading managers to axe jobs promising the AI can take their place.
If quantum computing actually starts to work some of it will be used for grift because many current encryption schemes could potentially be cracked using quantum computers.
The picture wasn’t even on the blockchain. It was a url which links to a picture of a cat sitting on someone else’s server
Was it even that or just a hash of the url (or whatever text/data was being “confirmed”)?
It was some sort of hash system. The blockchain didn’t want to store large amounts of data on the chain itself so it would store some sort of hash of the image file and as I recall a pointer to a server where that file was located.
The whole thing was totally fucking stupid but people poured tons of money into it
This is the grift economy baby! Everything is a gotcha.
The first two are grifts and I have yet to see anyone say quantum computing is going to be a grift anywhere, so because of your other comment I’m going to assume you’re just someone who likes crypto and AI and are mad that people are pointing out how they are grifts with huge environmental and social problems
Hi, read the next sentence:
quantum computing is also a grift
None of them are a grift. They get used by financial traders for performing grifts, but the grift was and always has been stock market manipulation. AI is incredibly useful and many competent engineers now use it effectively. I expect the bubble of anthropic/openai will pop once local or on-prem models get better.
All technology from this point on will be a grift, because the grifters have all the power.
Seriously
Fediverse
None of these technologies are a grift per say, the economic system we use to develop them and the marketing needed to ensure funding under the aforementioned hellscape are a grift.
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The FOSS, for one.
FOSS isn’t a “new and emergent technology”. The OSI was founded in 1998. Richard Stallman started the FSF in the 80’s.
By that metric, llms aren’t new either and the blockchain was invented in 2008.
Open source software is a grift?
How, exactly?
Try reading the post again
Nah they’re not inherently grifts; they’re pushed by grifters making money off the back of them.
I think Lemmy users are more likely to call these grifters out for what they are, because the user base has proportionally more technically minded people who understand what the technology is. Lemmy users have to an extent self-selected themselves into the fediverse. On other social media the absolute number of technically minded people will be higher but the proportion of technically minded people is much lower, so the voices are drowned out by those who don’t understand he technology and it’s limitations. And of course the grifters target those platforms with a lot of propaganda, because ultimately it’s about selling shares and inflating share prices.
Anyway to answer you question, CRISPR gene editing is revolutionary and will have major impact. Nuclear Fusion despite it’s slow emergence will also be revolutionary. Immunotherapy is an ongoing revolution; it’s not a quiet revolution but it’s also not getting the general focus it probably should be as AI appears to dominate the current zeitgeist.
We are actually living through extraordinary times; AI is a part of it but AI seems to be the bit getting most of the attention because we’re in the middle of a stock bubble driven by AI speculation.
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The renewable energy industry. The tech is good and getting better rapidly. Costs continue to drop, consumer grade solar is becoming widely accessible.
This to me is the most exciting thing. And not just solar, but also modular nuclear power, fusion power, battery tech. The PRC is at the forefront of this green revolution.
I don’t see why put quantum computer in that group.
It’s a scientific research topic. It is know what it does and what it doesn’t do. And they are not selling you it’s going to be the future.
It’s just a developing technology which have potential to make some algorithms more efficient than binary computation.
They don’t sell you quantum computation, they don’t tell you to invest in it. It’s just something being researched by computer scientists.
Let’s not be that much anti-any-kind-of-progress, shall we?
Artificial Intelligence is also a research topic. But when snake oil merchants figured out that they could use the term to take lots of money from the hands of unsuspecting people, it became a grift. As such I believe the inclusion of quantum computing in the group is on point
I agree from the standpoint of research for research sake is still worth doing but anyone telling you that they have a working quantum computer that is just around the corner from working is most likely grifting.
Quantum computers are a thing, and they’re very useful for certain things…
But business idiots in the tech world do be slapping the word “quantum” on stuff. It’s not a huge thing at the moment, but it’s probably gonna be the next insufferable hype cycle after they get tired of branding random shit as “AI enabled” because they stapled a chat bot on to it.
Like, give it a few years, someone will be trying to tell you that a quantum computer will somehow make a vacuum robot able to do your laundry because “something something better path finding”
Quantum computers are more secure but could also be used to break that security. That’s why the major customers of quantum computers are banks and governments. It is not really for wide mass consumption. Although I heard quantum chips are better and more environmentally friendly but i am not a tech guy so i could be wrong on that or the quantum chip itself.
but could also be used to break that security
Not really, unless really stupid encryption was used. The best quantum can do is the log of a problem space. It can do log(N) if the problem space is N.
TIL RSA is a pretty stupid encryption algorithm.
I mean it’s definitely something that companies are trying to sell. Even if it’s just marketing BS right now, they’re using this to sell their LLM products.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/innovation/majorana-2-microsoft-discovery-agentic-ai/
They are not selling that to end users or business.
That’s a line of product for research purposes.
They sell that to people researching quantum computer.
How about Mullvad advertising quantum protection or whatever?
What?
Post quantum encryption algorithms are the ones that any serious company should use right now.
Because one of the algorithms that it’s stated to be far more efficient on a quantum computer than a binary one are number factorization, which is the bases of many public private enceyption algorithms like RSA.
Right now it’s not possible, but listen now decrypt later means that anything encrypted now might be decrypted in not so many years by a quantum computer.
They are not selling you a quantum computer, they are “selling” the algorithm you should be using if you don’t want your communications to be easily decrypted when a quantum computer with a higher number of stable qbits hits production.
Those algorithms are, anyway, public and well know, like parabolic curve algorithm or lattices. You could implement them yourself, any company can do so.
I am not against any of the tech i listed, i think they all are neat and quite interesting to study and use.
you have probably not been around the forums to realise why i put it there, QC discussion these days are leaning towards the it’s a grift/ it will never be viable territory. This is mostly in large part due to M$ and their claims. there is also some subtle fear mongering going on with the recent push towards quantam resistant encryption standards.
So i am not calling QC a grift, I am calling out that whenever it becomes viable for the companies that are researching it to rent their computers to consumers, people will start calling it the next grift.
Maybe you’ve mistaken criticisms of the MS claims for criticisms of quantum technology in general?
