Distributed ledgers were not a Bitcoin invention. Proof of Work was - largely a waste of electricity. There's no reason why SWIFT or any other institution can't have far more efficient real-time payments. It's already the case in most countries (UK & EU).
Distributed technologies have largely been useful to actors that wish to remain anonymous (Napster, Tor). Money transmission probably shouldn't be (if we want to avoid scams as a society).
Anonymous cash is good, but BTC is not really digital cash either - it doesn't work in a warzone without internet for example. Any real alternative to cash would have to work offline. And any real alternative to bank transfers would have to be regulated.
I've been toying with a concept for a cryptocurrency that works without internet access (like physical money) - peer to peer credit. I believe it is the only real use case for this technology.
You don't really need to. In IOU systems you extend credit to someone you know, based on ones reputation or credit score. How back in the day your local milk man would just keep a tab of what you owe.
In a way everyone has something to barter: you owe the milk man, your employer owes you. Identities form a web of trust in the physical world.
But how would you eventually reconcile and settle balances?
Would all payments be just non-fungible bilateral agreements? So if I paid the milkman for some milk, but there was no good or service I could later provide to him, he would be unable to take my payment to the butcher to buy some meat (unless the butcher was also willing to enter into a new bilateral agreement with me)?
Double spending & verifying identities isn't really an issue in a mutual credit system because credit lines are set between trusted parties. You’re replacing an algorithmic double‑spend check with a social credit check.
The butcher would have to trust the milkman in the real world to extend credit to him. At some point the butcher would go to a lender and borrow USD against the IOUs from the milkman. The lender knows the butcher, but can also evaluate the IOUs from the milkman by evaluating who owes the milkman, etc etc. Based on the level of trust the lender has in the butcher (and his IOUs) the lender can lend some hard USD to the butcher, and sell IOUs in exchange for USD to people wanting to join the network.
USD is also not backed by anything, and relies on trust. The important thing is that someone would be prepared to exchange IOU promises for USD/BTC/GLD - market makers. Demand for IOUs comes from people wanting to access the network.
That's only "fair" in a certain, academic sense, which claims that willingness to pay more money makes someone more "deserving" - completely ignoring socioeconomic status.
That also offends a lot of people who oppose the above reasoning.
How are concert tickets different to airplane tickets?
Allocation of scarce resources is based on demand for them, expressed in monetary terms. "Deserving" has nothing to do with it. I may deserve a ticket, but not even want to go.
The answer is mentioned in the article. Not all concerts want only people with means to attend. The venue might want to be accessible to low-income members of the community, or it might be a benefit concert, with free tickets and a donation drive.
You can't hand out money (which you're doing if you're giving away something of market value for nothing) without taking on the responsibility of deciding who gets it. Even charities have to put in the work.
I really wish this trend of prompting gen AI models with text would stop. It's really meaningless. Musicians need gen AI they can prompt with a melody on their keyboard. Or a bit of whistling into the microphone. Or a beat they can tap on the table. That is what allows humans to unleash their creativity. Not AI generating random bits that fit a distribution of training data. English language is not the right input for anything except for information retrieval tasks.
Agreed! Those will be much more fun and we plan to support that. However, right now we're focused on making the base model slightly better, then we can easily add all of those controls (a-la ControlNets with Stable Diffusion).
But this is not easy, it's the real challenge here as there are lots of text-to-audio models out there. It is far from solved for Stable Diffusion as well. ControlNet is pretty bad. Just try taking the photo of an empty room and asking an image model to add furniture. Or to change a wall colour. Or to style an existing photo as per the style of another and so on. We are very far from being able to truly control the output generated by the AI models, which is something that a DAW excels at. I'd start with an AI-powered DAW rather than text-to-audio and try to add controls to it. It's like Cursor vs Lovable if you get my drift.
> Not AI generating random bits that fit a distribution of training data
How is that specific to text prompting? If you tap your fingers to a model and it generates a song from your tapping, it's still just fitting the training data as you say.
I may be an outlier but I don't get it - I much prefer a visual interface of Google Flights that gives me all the options. I'd hate to have to explain to a real PA all my preferences for each and every journey (every flight has a very different set of trade-offs). It's like asking a realtor to show me the 3 houses she thinks would be best for me. Thank God for technology that allows us to see all the options.
The real value is in the actual booking aspect: fill in all the forms on the airline's website and checkout for me!
Distributed technologies have largely been useful to actors that wish to remain anonymous (Napster, Tor). Money transmission probably shouldn't be (if we want to avoid scams as a society).
Anonymous cash is good, but BTC is not really digital cash either - it doesn't work in a warzone without internet for example. Any real alternative to cash would have to work offline. And any real alternative to bank transfers would have to be regulated.