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0 pointsznnajdla25d ago0 comments

No it's not the same premise at all. Crypto doesn't do anything useful for legitimate businesses. AI inference is very useful for legitimate businesses, and so are residential IP proxies for scraping. And by definition, residential IPs cannot be centralized. And as building GPUs becomes more expensive, the existing pool of second hand unused hardware becomes more valuable, not less. The problem with crypto mining is that it quickly becomes unprofitable for small scale deployments. I'm not sure if AI inference would be, especially for the decentralized benefits of lower latency.

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rzwitserloot25d ago

It is the same premise, because the person you are responding to is not talking about the moral implications at all, only about the financial / hardware implications.

Running AI inference increases the power draw, and requires certain hardware.

Mining bitcoin increases the power draw, and requires certain hardware.

OP's point thus stands: Bad players will find places to get far cheaper power than the intended audience, and will buy dedicated hardware, at which point the money you can earn to do this will soon drop below the costs for power (for folks like you and me).

Maybe that won't happen, but why won't that happen?

znnajdlaOP25d ago

The main problem with crypto is there is no universal need for it. The demand for crypto doesn’t keep increasing as compute gets cheaper. But the demand for AI inference is only growing, and making it cheaper would likely only increase demand. So it’s not a race to the bottom. Sure hyper focused players can earn more at higher margins. But average players can probably still earn decently. Take for example electricity. It can still be profitable for a home in Germany to install balcony solar and make a little money selling back to the grid even though it’s obviously not as efficient as an industrial power plant. Mom and pop AI inference don’t have to be super efficient as long as they serve a universal need - it will be like balcony solar in Europe.

kennywinker24d ago

The residential IP proxy point is i think invalidated by their privacy model. I think they aren’t offering up your IP, just your GPU.

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