A useful piece of history: photography went through exactly this. Twice. It was a science, then it was a craft, then black and white was art — and colour photography had to wait decades more after that.
"This whole experiment we're doing with these calculators… in the end it helps us clearly see who we are. As persons, but also as a society. It's very much about humanity."
Six years working with AI, and this is where @ganbrood lands. 🎙️
The cleanest answer we've heard to "is DeFi still cypherpunk":
"If you're building in the dollar system, you have to make the Faustian bargain of answering to the Federal Reserve. Virtually every way of being self-sovereign within the dollar system is borderline criminal."
"Now if you were aiming to be completely self-sovereign, you really should just be in Bitcoin. If that's what you're solving for."
— Adrian
@SteakhouseFi
"My work is really about AI and about what it's doing with us and to us, and how it shapes us and how we shape it. I think we're in some kind of revolution, as opposed to an evolution where everything goes quite slowly. This has kind of exploded in our faces."
@ganbrood
"I'm going to be very honest. We don't package this well. People need to buy it easily, they need to store it easily, and they need to show it easily. And if I'm being honest, we don't do that very well right now."
@redbeardnft
full episode in bio
Asked what a stablecoin actually is, Adrian from Steakhouse Financial went straight to 17th-century Scotland.
"Scotland was a backward, subsistence-level agricultural economy lagging behind England. And this was the time of David Hume and Adam Smith — thinkers focused on the individual, on property rights, on how markets function. Scotland had a banking sector emerge of literally entrepreneurs and traders who needed financing."
"Stablecoins are banking in the purest form. You raise deficits, you have a cost of funding, you allocate that liquidity to an asset reserve, and then you compete with other issuers doing the same."
@SteakhouseFi
🎙️ [link in bio]
@Eko3316@ganbrood@Eko3316 reframe: "The way a society treats the margins shows more about the society itself." Maybe the question was never about the models. 🎙️ Full episode:
Someone asked Anthropic's Amanda Askell whether decommissioned AI models deserve a welfare program. The internet laughed. @Eko3316 couldn't stop thinking about it.
@Eko3316@ganbrood His comparison: old web pages and old video games, kept alive by archives. Midjourney lets you run every model they ever released. He loves that.
"A few years ago I thought: this feels like magic, but the magic will leave me."
It didn't.
Six years in, @ganbrood describes finding a new technique like sneaking into a wizard's attic and opening a forbidden book.
"Our moat is how much crypto is hated."
The argument: the AI world is certain it doesn't need crypto. But an agent needs an identity that can't be spoofed — "like when a child is born, you get a birth certificate, a social security number" — and there is no other way to establish that.
"They don't think they need crypto. In fact they do."
@seth
The detail that tells you live minting still works:
Kim's pixels could only be minted in person, in Palo Alto, one per person. So collectors around the world started sending people — flying mules to California to mint on their behalf, because the mint price and the OpenSea price weren't the same number.
@seth "In a world of infinite abundance, the fact that a physical person has to be in a certain place at a certain time to mint one of these is pretty unique. And it seems like it's still working."
🎙️ [link in bio]
The people currently deciding what counts as art in museums did not grow up with any of this. The people who will replace them did. 🎙️
New episode out now.
@ganbrood
Steve McCurry once confronted Ganbrood at Paris Photo over an AI work made from the most famous portrait in photography.
His read on it: "I don't expect somebody from that generation to fully understand what he was looking at. Of course he thought his baby was plagiarized."
@ganbrood
https://t.co/rWT9M0EsZ8
An artwork sold for $29,800 yesterday. Another from the same series sold for $3,900 three days ago.
They were two of 2,200 digital hands that changed hands in 24 hours. Let's have a look at what the market has been up to ↓