Autor Cointelegraph By Andrew Fenton

Just as we don’t allow just anyone to build a plane and fly passengers around, or design and release medicines, why should we allow AI models to be released into the wild without proper testing and licensing? 

That’s been the argument from an increasing number of experts and politicians in recent weeks. With the United Kingdom holding a global summit on AI safety in autumn, and surveys suggesting around 60% of the public is in favor of regulations, it seems new guardrails are becoming more likely than not. One particular meme taking hold is the comparison of AI tech to an existential threat like nuclear weaponry, as in a recent 23-word warning sent by the Center of AI Safety, which was signed by hundreds of scientists:

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Extending the metaphor, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing for the creation of a global body like the International Atomic Energy Agency to oversee the tech.

“We talk about the IAEA as a model where the world has said, ‘OK, very dangerous technology, let’s all put (in) some guard rails,’” he said in India this week. 

Libertarians argue that overstating the threat and calling for regulations is just a ploy by the leading AI companies to a) impose authoritarian control and b) strangle competition via regulation. 

The launch of BRC-20 tokens and Ordinals NFTs on Bitcoin has transformed the No. 1 blockchain overnight into a clunkier version of Ethereum.

The core developers and miners who signed off on the network’s Taproot upgrade in November 2021 never envisaged this would be the result. Bitcoin now suffers from many of the same problems that have bedeviled Ethereum for years, including scammy memecoins and shitcoins, NFTs of monkey pictures hogging block space and skyrocketing transaction fees.The network is even having to deal with incidences of miner extractable value (MEV), whereby miners profit by reordering pending transactions.

Mati Greenspan

“I’m kind of upset at myself for not realizing,” says Quantum Economics founder Mati Greenspan, a Bitcoiner since 2013.

“It took these guys starting to hype up JPEGs on Bitcoin until I was like: ‘Oh shit, what did we just do?’” He laughs ruefully.

Some Bitcoiners on Bitcointalk and Twitter refer to the impact of Ordinal NFTs and BRC-20 tokens as an attack on Bitcoin, an exploit of Taproot, or simply as spam clogging up the network.It’s sparked a fierce debate over whether unexpected outcomes are precisely the sort of outcomes you should expect from a permissionless protocol, or whether something needs to be done to get rid of them.

Why are Bitcoin fees so high?

BRC-20 tokens were only launched by anonymous developer Domo back on March 8. They use Ordinal inscriptions of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data to deploy token contracts, mint tokens and transfer tokens. Some argue this is horribly inefficient and costs four times as much in transaction fees as if they just used binary.Alongside the inefficiencies, there’s also a gold rush for minting memecoins. Someone will deploy a contract with a ticker for a new token and a max supply, and then traders rush in to mint as many as possible in the series, on a “first come, first served” basis, at whatever fee rate gets them priority. These tokens have already surpassed $1 billion in market cap — even though Domo argues they will be worthless.But they are here to stay — at least in the short term — with major wallets already adding support for BRC-20 tokens. And newer developments, such as the launch of a Uniswap fork that amassed $500,000 in trading of “smart BRC-20” tokens (SBRC-20) in just a few days, suggest that the building of a permissionless new ecosystem on Bitcoin is set to continue.

There’s a narrative that’s grown up around Ethereum’s two most important co-founders, Joe Lubin and Vitalik Buterin, to explain how they went in different directions almost a decade ago.It suggests the pair fell out over the blockchain’s future direction, with the idealistic 20-year-old Buterin determined to turn Ethereum into a nonprofit foundation, while Lubin and others wanted to commercialize the technology via a for-profit company.

“That wasn’t really what happened,” the billionaire founder of Ethereum infrastructure and software firm ConsenSys tells Magazine during an in-depth interview in Tel Aviv.

“What happened was people were looking for a way to explain why these two people were bumped out of the project. And that was a convenient way to label it. But that wasn’t the reason they were moved.”

Lubin’s referring to Ethereum’s infamous “Red Wedding” in 2014 when the eight co-founders and the team gathered to incorporate Ethereum as a company.

Former Ethereum CEO Charles Hoskinson (right) with creator Vitalik Buterin (left) from back in the day. (Flickr)

The meeting descended into bickering and infighting over internal politics that saw a devastated CEO Charles Hoskinson pushed out of the team, along with underperforming co-founder Amir Chetrit.

“I think it’s true that I and several people on the team — like maybe everybody else — believed that you need to draw businesses in, you needed economic, commercial validation in order to build better things, even open-source software,” the 58-year-old says in his slow, measured tones.“But that wasn’t the root of why I started ConsenSys or why two people were bumped off the project.”

Red Wedding and Crypto Google

As documented in Camilla Russo’s history of Ethereum, The Infinite Machine, the co-founders had gathered in Zug, Switzerland on June 7, 2014, to sign a document transforming Ethereum into a for-profit company. But instead of signing the contract, tensions boiled over Hoskinson’s management style and personality, Chetrit’s contribution to the project, Ethereum’s future direction and other internal political issues.