The AI Hype Bubble is the New Crypto Hype Bubble
upstart writes:
Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea - known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water - changed its name to "Long Blockchain Corp." Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.
[...] The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn't the peak of the blockchain bubble - rather, it was the start of blockchain's final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022's blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.
[...] They were amateurs. Their attempt to "make fetch happen" only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.
[...] Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were "investing" in a vast enterprise - but the only real money ("fiat" in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble's energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.
We've stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money - and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest - are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.
Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:
Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.
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