“Scammers find new scam”
this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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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.
if the tech company is lucky, they can sell whatever their product is to customers. Only issue is, there's not enough customers eager enough to part with their money. A pyramid scheme fails if it can't hang losses on consumers.
Maybe host open source models and offer paid access for customers who need big generating capacities.
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.
This is the level of pedantry I can get behind.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Whether you have the rights is kind of irrelevant to this discussion. Let's say it's GOG games that are all DRM-free, my point is digital consumption has nearly infinite upper limits for consumption.
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Abandon the bitcoin scam, full steam ahead for the AI scam!!!
If only there were a way to combine the two, then we could keep an even larger bubble going.
Mining two cryptos together is already a thing, so...
Wasting electricity that was already being wasted isn't as bad as wasting electricity that was being used for something productive, I guess.
Surplus electricity would lower bills for both households, which have been particularly affected by rising prices, and different industries which have also had to contend with AI for capital.
This isbprobably a philosophical question that i dont know the answer to, but its still a waste.
Yeah, I'd expect there to be some real overlap between crypto and ai bros.
Some overlap? It's like 90%
Fucking greedheads.
I hate this timeline so much
As one grift's hype cycle fades, shift to another one.
Lost all your money on Bored Apes, now generate your own!
Ahh, so this is where the concept of "rollover minutes" went, into bubbles
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.
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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.
Hey, now that we have this obscene energy-wasting capability, let's see what other ways there are to generate equally obscene profits!
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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?
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.
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.
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..
Major Bitcoin mining firm pivoting to AI
one shady grift for another
most grifters like Trump and Elon are in both
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