Crypto vs. AI
It often feels to me like these two were inverted. AI should've come first and crypto much later. A glitch in our tech tree. Everything that crypto is useful for comes *after* AI.
- AI gives you an authenticity problem: everything can be faked. Crypto gives you tools to combat this: authenticity, stamping, chains of provenance, and with people ultimately staking their reputation(/money) on the claim that something is real.
- AI gives you a scarcity problem: everything becomes abundant. Where do people hold wealth, to the extent that it exists? Crypto gives you provable scarcity.
It's no wonder that positional goods in the form of NFTs, provable chains of custody/provenance, financially tied reputation-staking mechanisms, etc. all fell flat. They were before their time. They are solutions that first need problems caused by AI.
I am still a big believer in what I'd call @rodarmor's core identity of crypto: the elegance of bitcoin is that your money is your speech is your identity is your reputation is your memory (if you remember your seed phrase). It was just early. But the time will eventually come.