ArtTimeInvestor

    Emarketer’s data finds that standalone chatbots like ChatGPT,
    Microsoft Copilot app, Google AI Mode, and Amazon Alexa for
    Shopping (formerly Rufus) in U.S, will generate less than $1
    billion in ad revenue this year, and just $5.41 billion by 2030.

Just because there are no ads now does not mean there never will be. Google search was run without ads for the first years too.

Thats why I said proof of work that is used to mine a cryptocurrency to pay the bills of websites that serve information.

As long as the website gets paid more than the cost of serving the pages, it does not matter if a human or a bot did the POW.

Securing signup forms is another issue. Maybe related. But not what I was referring to.

In theory, proof of work that is used to mine a cryptocurrency could be a solution.

Bitcoin and others are already secured via massive pow computations. If we could shift that into browsers, no additional energy would be used and we could solve an issue that has been unsolved for too long: How to pay websites that provide useful information other than with ads.

The question is which resources typical consumer hardware has that large centralized compute power does not. In-browser POW to pay websites would only be possible if such a resource exists.

I am not familiar with the topic, but maybe CPU power and memory? Both seem significant in a typical consumer device.

Napkin math: If a consumer device can generate $100 per month, that would be 100/30/24/60/60=$0.00004 per second. If the user waits for 5 seconds before the first pageview, that would then make the website provider $0.0002 per visitor. Serving a million visitors per month is nowadays easily possible on a $10/month machine. So the $0.0002x1000000 = $200 would make the website a nice profit.

It is a step into the right direction.

Over time, more and more work is going to be done by AI though. At some point, it will be unthinkably slow and expensive to let humans work on anything.

To do *that* locally, you need GPUs and LLMs.

How will Europe solve these two?

I don't see anything that looks like a "slowing" in mid 2018.

Growth in Q1, Q2 and Q3 2018 was higher than anything that came before.

I don't see anything that looks like a "slowing" in mid 2018.

Q1, Q2 and Q3 2018 are all higher than anything that came before.

     "...the slowing GDP growth rate in America..."

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP

In the limit, that would mean that Bitcoin's volatility reflects only the savings rate of people.

That would mean that Bitcoin is pure monetary value. In that case, it would suck out all the monetary premium from other assets like real estate, equities and gold. The monetary premium in those is probably a few hundred trillion. So by that time, Bitcoin's price should be 2 orders of magnitude higher than today.

So a minus of about 45% from the all time high three months ago?

If this is it for this cycle, that would indicate the volatility of Bitcoin went down significantly.

Taking a look at the Bitcoin to USD price chart, I see roughly these numbers:

2013: $1,100 -> $238 = -78%

2017: $19,000 -> $3,500 = -82%

2021: $68,000 -> $16,000 = -76%

It will be interesting to watch if the volatility really stays this low suddenly. If so, one could point to the institutional adoption over the last years as the reason for this. When I ask Gemini for the number of public companies with Bitcoin on their balance sheets over the last years, I get:

2023: 67

2024: 79

2025: 190

And a similar trend for Bitcoin ETFs and ETPs. Twice as many in 2025 than in 2023.

AI will be involved in all processing of data. Everything that is human work today will be done by AI tomorrow.

So if Europe will rely on US AI infrastructure, nothing is won by moving the old CPU bound processes off of US cloud infrastructure.

Can Europe build AI datacenters though?

Europe has no wafer production and no companies that produce GPUs.

That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design.

Then there is the question wether there is a will to invest. Gemini gives me this list of publicly traded companies in the US and what they invested in AI infrastructure in 2025:

    Amazon: $100B
    Alphabet: $90B
    Microsoft: $80B
    Meta: $70B
    Tesla: $20B

    Deutsche Telekom: $1B

Google is still the best search engine. YouTube is still the best video site. Android is still the best operating system. Chrome is still the best browser.

And on the side they built the best AI and the best autonomous ride service.

Not bad for a "hollow shell" of a company.

    I've never seen a company that ...

Example: Alphabet has started share buybacks in 2015 and increased those every year. $70B in 2025 alone. And they are firing on all cylinders product-wise.

If the USA cannot be trusted that they will honor the ownership of gold in their vaults, can it be trusted to honor the ownership of US equities and bonds held by foreigners?

Additionally, I have read up a bit more on the Lightning Network now, and it seems not possible to send invalid payments in the first place.

The sender does not have a direct communication channel with the receiver. They send the payment to a hop they are connected to (they have a channel with) and it gets routed to the receiver. The first hop would already drop an invalid payment. If they spam them with more invalid payments, all that would happen is that their connection to the Lightning Network would get lost as their channel partners would disconnect from them. The receiver would not receive a single network packet in the whole process.

The incentive to send http requests is that data comes back. That's why the storm of scrapers hurts website owners. They gather the data and give nothing back.

What would be the incentive to send failing payment requests?

All of these problems would go away if we had micropayments. So that the user could pay for the resources they use.

The user would know that each pageview is $0.001.

The website owner would know each pageview pays for itself.

We probably could get there with some type of crypto approach. Probably one that is already invented, but not popular yet. I don't know too much about crypto payments, but maybe the Bitcoin Lightning network or a similar technology.

Hetzner is awesome.

I wish they would go public.

Would be very interesting to see how their business is doing compared to IONOS and OVH.

We need more public cloud companies in Europe.

This is cool.

It tells you something about how much a gambling place the market is when a site like this has a one day default for the price change. When it comes to a high level view of the market, why would I care for a comparison of todays prices to ... YESTERDAY??

My first reaction was to look for a 10 year option. There is none, so I took the 5 year option. All of the big names roughly doubled or tripled over the last 5 years. Amazon lagging a bit behind. I could start to reason about the numbers but .. 5 years is just too short. I would play with it more if there was a 10 year option.

And I would love Love LOVE a European version of this.

Because I am interested to hear about the experience as a customer.

How content are you with them? Have you tried alternatives?

You don't think the web interface is chaotic?

Are you using them?

US companies seem to sell into Europe just fine?

Amazon, Google, Microsoft - they all make tens of billions of revenue in Europe.

Why wouldn't a company based in Europe be able to do the same?

Hetzner is not a publicly traded company.

Are there any publicly traded European cloud companies that will benefit from Europe hosting more of their stuff on their own?

I looked at IONOS, but it seems they just let their cloud product rot away? The cloud backend looks outdated and lacks basic features like uploading private keys that can be used when provisioning new VMs.

I also looked at OVH, but their website and interface look like total chaos to me. I felt lost all the time while I was trying to set up a VM, and while trying to use their AI APIs.

Considering that Europe has an economy as large as the USA, it is puzzling how small these companies are. The combined market cap of IONOS and OVH is less than $10B.

The way I understand it:

Introducing quantum resistant addresses is possible via a soft-fork, so rather easy.

Work on it already started: https://github.com/jlopp/bips/blob/quantum_migration/bip-pos...

If capable quantum computers become more probable and the soft fork is not already happening, it will be accelerated. And then everybody will move their coins to quantum resistant addresses.

So it does not look like a major problem. It will lower the price a bit though. Because old, lost coins will be revived and come to the market.

There will also be some type of war around "code is law" because some people will suggest to invalidate old coins on non-quantum-resistant addresses. That will be interesting to watch.

    You're cherry picking

    nobody knew in 1999 which companies would be the survivors

The all time high of the Shiller PE was in December 1999.

If your hypothesis at that time was that the internet would benefit tech companies, it was not a bad time to invest:

Microsoft shares were $58. Now they are $510.

=> 9% annualized ROI.

Amazon was at $4. Now it is at $220.

=> 17% annualized ROI.

QQQ was at $89 and is now at $592

=> 8% annualized ROI.

If one country manages to outpace all others in the race to better AI, all other countries are at the mercy of that one country.

Depending on how the one country treats the others, it might be ok - like it is kind of ok for some animals to live in a zoo, I guess. Or it could turn out very bad - all other countries becoming slave colonies of the one that rules the world.

Currently it seems like only two countries are really taking part in the AI race. The USA and China.

On a political level, I am not sure if there is still time for the rest of the world to try and avoid becoming 100% dependent on them. It looks like there is not even awareness of the issue.

On a personal level, it is an interesting question, how one should brace themselves for the times ahead.

    1:1 cash/cash-equivalent reserves, which means the
    best they can do is things like US treasuries /
    money-market funds

Are you saying the holder of a stable coin is not taking a higher long-tail risk than the holder of a dollar in a checking account of a bank?

What you describe sounds like the opposite of my perspective.

You make it sound like stablecoins offer a benefit to all sides because of better technology.

My expectation is that they offer a benefit to the borrower because the borrower is less regulated and can lend out the money with higher risk and by doing so generate a higher yield.

You mention "1:1 backed thing, with super regulated entities" as if that means the money is safe. But as we have seen with Silicon Valley Bank, even lending out the money to the government via bonds is not safe enough in all circumstances. And my expectation is that issuers of stablecoins can do even more risky types of lending than Silicon Valley Bank did.