Yeah, I’ve leaned my lesson trying to predict when a bubble was going to pop with the blockchain madness.

Is what Bitcoin is doing now still a “bubble”? It’s worth a “lot” (whatever that means… I mean I guess it means $64,241.70/BTC), so it’s hard to say the bubble has “popped” per se, but I think the number of people engaged in the market is way down from where it once was. And it’s back to being something people rarely mention, which makes it feel more “popped”-ish. (Remember when SNL was doing skits about NFT’s and stuff? And I know personally I remember times when people at my work were asking the upper management when the company was going to offer Bitcoin as a payment option. I haven’t heard anyone talk like that in a fairly long time.)

But yeah. While I 110% believe there’s virtually no inherent value in “Generative AI” as it exists today and no promise of any kind of game-changing revolution in the “technology” (if it can be called that) that will make it useful, and while I also 110% believe that the hype around it is ludicrously overdone, and in that sense it absolutely is a “bubble”, I think we may have largely moved into a new era of humanity where economic bubbles don’t “pop” the way they used to. The extent to which people just live their entire lives in a fantasy is so great that the market likely won’t so much realize one day it’s all a massive scam causing billions in GDP to evaporate in an hour as just slowly fizzle out anticlimactically. We’ll all kindof realize one day that nobody in our own personal circle has brought up ChatGPT or Claude or whatever in a long time. And maybe there will be massive companies trading billions of dollars of “investment money” round-robin-sylte somewhere in the background, far removed from what most people think about on a daily basis. And likely there will still be occasional postmortem muscle twitches and rallies that let the promoters all collectively pretend “it’s really happening this time” from time to time. But it’ll be so irrelevant that the bubble will feel kinda… if not “popped”, at least “deflated.” And, I doubt even that day will come anywhere near as soon as it ought to.