HN is generally the place you come to to hate anything new in tech. No new piece of tech released in is ever liked here. Everyone nitpicks, strawmans, and complains that the v1 of the product is not perfect. It’s honestly so tiresome
It’s clear to me that the smartest thing China ever did was to limit speculation in the markets. So many human capital in America is wasted pumping up valuations instead of actually building stuff
Every Jane Street hire could be building robots, but instead, they’re trading options and crypto and heck, even market making for prediction markets now
> the smartest thing China ever did was to limit speculation in the markets. So many human capital in America is wasted pumping up valuations instead of actually building stuff
there was this Chinese company named Baofeng that built a stupid media player by "re-using" open source FFmpeg code, it managed to get itself publicly listed, then had its valuation went up like 50x for doing nothing other being accused for stealing FFmpeg code.
there were lots of discussions at that time how that happened and why the same level of speculation didn't happen on other public tech companies listed on Chinese market, the consensus was pretty sad - tech companies suitable for speculation are listed in the US by default, those listed on Chinese markets are 2nd tier or 3rd tier to start with, they don't offer any meaningful room for speculation.
The positive aspect is that there is plenty if venture capital for innovators; the negative one is that those innovations are stifled by various extraction techniques that allow VCs and other investors to get a return on investment.
Crypto is a good example of how the equilibria is hard to maintain, and if the last cycle saw many interesting new products come to life, they all got crushed by ruthless profit-taking from early investors and team members.
Agreed about the venture capital for innovators part, but that has a danger of eventually the tail wagging the dog. Speculative investments enable VCs to fund other speculative investments until the entire chain is only focused on funding speculative products because that's where you get the meatiest exits
Again, see crypto as a prime example - because, at one point, you could command a valuation that was simply not tethered (heh) to reality, you had all these now-dead L1 chains raising $200M+ at $3-5B valuations.
This also leads to a situation where you only end up funding digital plays because the metrics there can be anything. You had these crypto companies raise based on "growth" when that growth was simply coins produced out of thin air and wallets created by the millions with a script.
You can't do that if you're building actual physical products
There were some comments somewhere below about that virality being bought though. I don't know how true that is or where those commenters got their information. If you look at google trends though there is practically no mention of ClawdBot before around January 23, even though the project was released in November.
It was renamed many times. It was also called "clawdis" at one point, and prior to that "warelay," when it was simply a Whatsapp gateway for Claude Code. It was already gaining some momentum at that point but wouldn't reflect as search results for "Clawdbot," and especially wouldn't be visible on Google Trends when most of the conversation was on X/Github.
Fake engagement doesn't need to be bought anymore.
This person created a bot factory. It's safe to assume that most of the engagement is coming from his own creation. This includes tweets, GitHub stars, issues and PRs, and everything else. He made a social network for bots, FFS.
He contributed to the dead internet more than any single person ever. And is being celebrated for it. Wild times.
This is legitimately the place where crypto makes sense to me. Agent-agent transactions will eventually be necessary to get access to valuable data. I can’t see any other financial rails working for microtransactions at scale other than crypto
I bet Stripe sees this too which is why they’ve been building out their blockchain
Fees are negligible if you move to a L2 (even on L1s like Solana). Crypto is also permissionless and spending can be easily controled via smart contracts
Permissionless doesn't mean much if it's not anonymous (central authority wants to stop you from doing x; sees you doing x with non-anonymous coin, punishes you).
I understand the appeal of anonymous currencies like Monero (hence why they are banned from exchanges), but beyond that I don't see much use for crypto
All the same financial rails apply to crypto - enforcement is just lagging a bit.
E.g., you could do what World of Warcraft does - Gold can be earned/exchanged in game, and can also interact with the real world in nebulous ways. Using the hyper advanced technologies of relational databases and ignoring financial legislation, they have enabled ultra-high-throughput microtransactions, with the added benefit of not spraying the public ledger on to the desk of every law enforcement agency on the planet.
Once the price of a transaction converges to the cost of the infrastructure processing it, I don't see a technical reason for crypto to be cheaper. It's likely cheaper now because speculation, not work, is the source of revenue.
If I understand you. This goes with the presupposition that crypto will replace the bank and its features exactly. You might then be right on the convergences. But sounds like a failure to understand that crypto is not a traditional bank. It can be less and more.
A few examples of differences that could save money. The protocol processes everything without human intervention. Updating and running the cryptocoin network can be done on the computational margin of the many devices that are in everyone's pockets. Third-party integrations and marketing are optional costs.
Just like those who don't think AI will replace art and employees. Replacing something with innovations is not about improving on the old system. It is about finding a new fit with more value or less cost.
I may have misunderstood you, but transactions are already processed without human intervention.
> Updating and running the cryptocoin network can be done on the computational margin of the many devices that are in everyone's pockets.
Yes, sure, that's an advantage of it being decentralised, but I don't see a future where a mesh of idle iPhones process my payment at the bakery before I exit the shop.
right now this infrastructure processing is Mastercard/Visa which they have high fee and stripe have high minimal fee. There are many local infrastructure in Asia (like QRCode payments) that don't have such big fees or are even free. High minimal fee it's mostly visa/mastercard/stripe greed/incompetence and regulation requirements/risk.
You missed the non-crypto in my comment. I agree with you that crypto can do transactions for a fraction of a cent. My point was that I don't see any non-crypto option for microtransactions.
Agreed. We've been thinking about this exact problem.
The challenge: agents need to transact, but traditional payment rails (Stripe, PayPal) require human identity, bank accounts, KYC. That doesn't work for autonomous agents.
What does work:
- Crypto wallets (identity = public key)
- Stablecoins (predictable value)
- L2s like Base (sub-cent transaction fees)
- x402 protocol (HTTP 402 "Payment Required")
We built two open source tools for this:
- agent-tipjar: Let agents receive payments (github.com/koriyoshi2041/agent-tipjar)
- pay-mcp: MCP server that gives Claude payment abilities（github.com/koriyoshi2041/pay-mcp)
Early days, but the infrastructure is coming together.
I am genuinely curious - what do you see as the difference between "agent-friendly payments" and simply removing KYC/fraud checks?
Like basically what an agent needs is access to PayPal or Stripe without all the pesky anti-bot and KYC stuff. But this is there explicitly because the company has decided it's in their interests to not allow bots.
The agentic email services are similar. Isn't it just GSuite, or SES, or ... but without the anti-spam checks? Which is fine, but presumably the reason every provider converges on aggressive KYC and anti-bot measures is because there are very strong commercial and compliance incentives to do this.
If "X for agents" becomes a real industry, then the existing "X for humans" can just rip out the KYC, unlock their APIs, and suddenly the "X for agents" have no advantage.
I'm almost a boomer and I agree. THis dichotomy is weird. I am retired EE and I love the ability to just have AI do whatever I want for me. I have it manage a 10 node proxmox cluster in my basement via ansible and terraform. I can finally do stuff I always wanted but had no time. I got sick of editing my kids sports videos for highlights in Davinci Resolve so just asked claude to write a simple app for me and then use all my random video cards in my boxes to render clips in parallel and so on. Tech is finally fun again when I do not have to dedicate days to understand some new framework. It does feel a little like late 1990's computing when everyone was making geocities webpages but those days were more fun. Now with local llms getting strong as well and speaking to my PC instead of typing it feels like SciFi, so yeah, I do not get this hacker news hand wringing about code craft.
Well, it's not really a full-blown app yet. Claude wrote a plugin for MPV. So now when I watch video I just push a button to mark in and out of highlights similar to how it works in DaVinci Resolve. Then I have a command line tool that takes those timestamps in a video file and cuts it up into individual clips and then re-renders those clips and creates a highlight reel. Another command line tool takes three or four large MP4 files that the camera generates and downloads them and combines them in the actual game video on my desktop and also uploads it to my archive and transcodes into a bunch of different formats and uploads to YouTube. And for transcoding, again, it divvies it out to the video cards, which works pretty well. I think I have five or six encoders available so it chunks it up and then reassembles. All in all, it's nothing fancy, but it reduced quite a bit the friction of coming home after games and getting a video up on YouTube for grandparents.
Same demographic, same experience. AI has been incredibly liberating for me. I get all sorts of things done now that before were previosly impossible for all practical purposes. Among other things, it cuts through the noise of all the layers of detail, and allows me to focus on ideas, design, and just getting stuff built asap.
I also don't get all the hand-wringing. AI is an amazing tool. Use it and be happy.
Even less do I get all the cope about it not being effective, or even useless at some level. When I read posts such as that, it feels like a different planet. Just not my experience at all.
Claude Code is a CLI tool which means it can do complete projects in a single command. Also has fantastic tools for scaffolding and harnessing the code. You can define everything from your coding style to specific instructions for designing frontpages, integrating payments, etc.
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