The crypto bubble is the ai bubble. AI was the answer to “what are we going to do with all these chips and servers now that crypto crashed?”
Bitcoin needs ASICs to run it. GPUs haven’t been viable there for a long time, and ASICs aren’t useful for anything other than the thing they’re designed to do.
Ethereum used GPUs until it went proof-of-stake, but it was always smaller than Bitcoin.
Nothing else is big enough to have caused a bubble.
Most of the AI training is being done in brand new datacenters on brand new GPUs. Those Ethereum GPUs mostly got dumped on eBay.
ASICs are used to mine crypto, but the ledger itself is on a regular server, more or less. It’s also true that LLMs are trained on High throughput ASICs. I don’t know what that volume looks like rn wrt AI, but I imagine its still in high demand.
The number of actual active coins has barely changed since the peak. Its a little higher, and there are more coins now, but they are significantly less active. Active trading on exchanges during the peak was about 25T, now its around 18T, a decrease of over 1/4. Are you arguing that 7 trillion dollars in annual exchange volume is inconsequential? At the peak there were about 400 exchanges, now there’s a little more than 200 active exchanges. Do exchanges not use any computing power? Are people trading bitcoin by hand somewhere? I’d love to see that.
There’s still a good amount of marketing and advertising but it has cooled a great deal. Lots of that business has consolidated and sees significantly less traffic = less computing power.
Added to the post covid lockdown decline in demand for computing services, which affected all of the same subjects of concern, there was a fuckload of unused computing power, just sitting around. This computing power represents a ton of investment in infrastructure, and long term plans that could not be stopped. AI is the justification to buy up a bunch of cheap server space available at the time, and continue growth of data centers and chip manufacturing plants (now stalled for 5 years or more). Why are all these companies who are heavily invested in vast server farms and chip manufacturing going so hard for a service that barely works?
The answer isn’t technical, its economic and political. I have no doubt you know more about chips and computing than I do, but if you want to understand what is happening, you have to look at economics and politics. The technical world of these tiny little areas of concerns and continuously manicured definitions is not how you tell what is going on in the world of chips and computing.
Trump is buying 10% stake in Intel, whose stalled manufacturing plant in Ohio was once visited by Biden and heralded at his state of the union. And the justification for it is National Security concerns. The great tech giants all sat right behind Trump at his inauguration. Did you not get the message? Chips and servers are a national security issue, it is incredibly political and as such greatly influences, and is greatly influenced by, an economic system that has to constantly grow greater returns of profit.
Anyway coin maintenance, ancillary services and subsequent economic activity surrounding crypto uses the same kind of computing power as AI. Its not like once a chip is mined with a ASIC GPU it stops using computing power, quite the opposite, but it does stop using ASIC computing power.
Actually…
Crypto mining requires high compute throughput.
LLM’s require high VRAM.
Very different objectives and hardware in mind.
The bubble isn’t just the thing itself, its all the services and infrastructure that built up around it. Crypto doesn’t have to be awful, its just a tool, a ledger. But it exists in its current form because of what it creates, what kind of economic activity it stimulates. My point is that all the grifty ass economic hype activity around crypto just moved to AI
But I do appreciate the clarification, it gives me a chance to refine my perspective
Running the model? Sure. Training the model still requires high compute throughput.
There seems to be a few people in this thread who don’t understand that the crypto bubble describes when tech bros kept promising to use the technologies that power cryptocurrency in other applications and then running away with investors’ money. That it has nothing to do with the value of any specific crypto currency.
My particular issue is that the Venn Diagram of crypto bros and ai bros is a circle
“If you don’t use
NFTsAI models, you will be left behind”.I swear it’s the exact same people.
There were people profiting from the dot com bubble, from the crypto bubble, I’m pretty sure there will be people profiting from the AI bubble crashing. But surely not the average people, it’ll be big corporations which profit no matter what.
Nvidia comes to mind.
They sure did profit from all the bubbles, but how would they profit from the AI bubble bursting?
That’s a good point, my bad. I didn’t think about the bursting.
They can maybe swoop in and catch an even bigger share of the market, as they are filled with cash after the AI bubble?
Or make sure the next big thing is also using GPUs
They already have almost all of the discrete gpu market, they’d have to expand to new markets (although they are kind of exploring that already)
I’m not sure that this meme is using “offline” correctly. I use AI offline, which means I absolutely do know that it’s not going to “go away.” It’s running on my computer, it’s stored on my hard drive. Ten years from now I will still be able to run it regardless of what’s happened in the outside world. I welcome offline AI integration into software, that’s the best way to do it when possible.
You can do that, and I can do that. Companies don’t want to provide that, because there’s value to having you feed their data. That means there’s no incentive for them to make it easy for people to run local models.
So sure, it can technically exist, but not as a mass market tool.
Fortunately FOSS software is often not beholden to companies or profit motives like that, and that’s specifically what this meme is about.
And it’ll be just as impactful to mass culture as self-hosted FOSS software. That is, not very at all. My mom isn’t hosting her own Jellyfin server, and she isn’t hosting an LLM, either.
Okay? That’s not what the meme was about, that’s a separate thing.
Tech bros are shoving AI into things that really do not need AI. If it’s garbage I don’t need IDGAF if that garbage is offline, I still don’t want it on my computer.
AI is not a bubble, it’s cartel. The only way to destroy it is to abolish monopolies or establish competition and as you can see it is not going to happen. GabeN where is my steam phone ?
Gaming bubble?
The video game market crashed hard from 1983 to 1985 and never really recovered.
And in early 2000 too
What happened? Explain for someone from '03 please?
To add to what the other commenter said;
You have to understand that “obsolete” is much more of a recent understanding culturally. In the 80s it was still far more common to see appliances as things you bought for life and to see electronics like a television, computer, hi-fi, etc. as appliances.
The oversaturation came not just from a plethora of games but also from a severe lack of quality control and from Atari and other companies rapidly releasing new consoles, that weren’t exactly upgrades to the previous consoles, to a market that wasn’t interested in replacing the system and games they just bought while dumping support for the previous console. Atari is most guilty of this and an attempt to reduce inventory and increase price led to the now famous ET carts buried in the desert story you may have heard about.
By the time Nintendo was ready to release the NES in North America they did so through toy stores and marketed it as a toy and not a computer for games (one example of this is the board inside the cart only takes up about 1/3rd the space, they made them bigger for kids to handle in NA compared to the Japanese version called the Famicom). As well, they had extremely strict quality control guidelines with things like the Licensed by Nintendo seal appearing on approved games and accessories, and bans on retailers that sold unlicensed games. It took a couple years but this approach paid off. They also didn’t drop the NES when the SNES was released with the last official NES game (Wario’s Woods, also the only NES game to get an ESRB rating IIRC) coming almost 5 years after the SNES came out.
The main thrust of it was oversaturation. A whole bunch of companies put a whole bunch of money into video games at once, but the demand wasn’t there, so only a few titles and/or consoles could become hits and the rest were just huge wastes of money. It ended up snowballing and iirc the market receded by circa 95%, resulting in a lot of bankruptcies. Stores either returned surplus, or marked it down considerably, which meant little or no revenue for companies that made the products, and so of course they died. That includes US games, Atari, lots of other famous brands.
Sooo basicly the same that is happening right now?
Crypto bubble? BTC is near its all time high that was last month… People tend to really over exaggerate how hard the prominent crypto currencies crash.
Edit: People seem to not understand that crypto is short hand for crypto currency, not all of everything ever made with blockchain. Swap crypto with NFTs and the meme makes sense.
Dot com bubble? I was on a website last month!
I’m not sure you are making the argument you think you are making.
Where was the bubble for btc?
Crypto bubble, not bitcoin bubble, don’t move the goalposts.
Did you miss out on the fad of putting block chain and nfts in everything and calling it Web 3.0? (A move that also completely missed why it was called Web 2.0 in the first place.)
When we bought our house in ‘19 we were told that in the future there would just be a block chain for the house and we wouldn’t have to sign any actual papers…
Replace crypto with nft and I would agree there was a bubble. But crypto is not nfts. Crypto is short for crypto currency, such as btc and eth. I’m not moving the goalposts, you did by lumping in all of blockchain. You seem to agree that I was right.
Bubbles are about capitol investment not a single product. The crypto bubble, like the dot com bubble, are so named because hype inflated the value and when they popped investors (in capitol not crypto currency) lost a lot of money and people lost jobs not because the product went away.
In technologies around crypto, not in crypto. Crypto exchanges like Coinbase that maintained some ethical standards did just fine.
Crypto bubble, not bitcoin bubble, don’t move the goalposts.
Okay, where was the crypto bubble, then? The total market capitalization for cryptocurrencies in aggregate had a significant bump in the 2021-2022 timeframe, but it’s since recovered from and far exceeded that so if that was the bubble it didn’t cause any permanent harm. BTC largely follows the overall cryptocurrency market.
As OP said, the crash of cryptocurrency has been exaggerated.
They seem to be conflating crypto currencies with the blockchain technology that enables crypto currencies. If the original meme uses NFTs, it would be accurate.
I think the NFT bubble is more apt.
Ah, in that case I’m on board. That was obviously a bubble.
BTC is still only being used by people who want to get rich from it. It is an investment, not a currency.
And therefore it will never be anything more.
I have no argument with that. That’s definitely how btc is used.
Crypto was sold as a world changing technology. It hasn’t delivered.
I don’t think this is true, but a lot of this impression is probably because much of the growth in actual use of cryptocurrency for everyday finance is happening outside of places like the US or Europe:
In the 12 months ending June 2025, APAC [Asia-Pacific] emerged as the fastest-growing region for on-chain crypto activity, with a 69% year-over-year increase in value received. Total crypto transaction volume in APAC grew from $1.4 trillion to $2.36 trillion, driven by robust engagement across major markets like India, Vietnam, and Pakistan.
Close behind, Latin America’s crypto adoption grew by 63%, reflecting rising adoption across both retail and institutional segments. In comparison, Sub-Saharan Africa’s adoption grew by 52%, indicating the region’s continued reliance on crypto for remittances and everyday payments. These figures underscore a broad shift in crypto momentum toward the Global South, where on-the-ground utility is increasingly fueling adoption.
There is also the way stablecoins are now a growing top 20 holder of US debt, and major financial institutions moving to have infrastructure on crypto networks. Change is happening even if it isn’t immediate or directly visible to everyone.
I again think you mean blockchain.
“Crypto” is a standard (to the general public) shorthand for “cryptocurrency”. And not every cryptocurrency uses blocks so “blockchain” is not technically accurate.
Thanks for proving my point.
I traded crypto to pay for my AI machine.
I feel like I’m stacking bubbles.
As long as you jump out before the burst, you’re doing great.
Shh, people don’t like to hear that cryptocurrencies are still around and doing just fine.
Every “crash” is usually still higher than the previous high. That is if you ignore all the shit coins out there.
