Ether price hits fresh 11-month high
Good morning. Here’s what happens:
Prices: Ether continued its ascent following last week’s Shanghai upgrade on the Ethereum blockchain, hitting an 11-month high.
Insight: Sufficiently decentralized ownership and control would prevent a single party from dictating AI development, writes CoinDesk’s Chief Content Officer Michael Casey.
For months, traders speculated whether the Ether (ETH) price would crash after the Ethereum blockchain’s Shanghai upgrade milestone, or whether it would rise.
And it has continued to rise, gaining in four of the past five days, hitting a new 11-month high on Sunday around $2,141.
The ETH price is now up 77% year-to-date, still trailing bitcoin’s (BTC) price increase of 83% in 2023, but is quickly catching up.
“The market’s pessimism regarding Ethereum stake withdrawals proved to be overblown,” as Sean Farrell, head of digital asset strategy at FundStrat, put it last week.
Web2’s lesson for AI: Decentralize to protect humanity
This is going to sound presumptuous coming from a guy who doesn’t write code, let alone have any direct experience with machine learning or AI research.
But I have to say this: The recent alarmist call for a six-month pause or even a military-enforced shutdown of AI research—from people with experience, money, and influence in the AI industry—is based on a fundamentally flawed thinking that will encourage the same destructive outcome for humanity that we are trying to avoid. That the US government is simultaneously orchestrating a crackdown on the crypto industry, a field of open-source innovation that is developing the kind of cryptography and network coordination technologies needed to deal with AI threats, makes this a particularly dangerous moment for all of us.
These doomsday men are computer scientists, not students of economic history. The problem is not in itself that an out-of-control AI could evolve to kill us all. (We all know that. For decades, Hollywood has taught us that it is.) No, the task is to ensure that the economics of AI do not inherently encourage that terrible outcome. We must prevent concentrated control of input and output from AI machines from impeding our capacity to act together in the common interest. We need collective, collaborative software development that creates a computational antidote to these dystopian nightmares.
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The answer does not lie in shutting down AI innovation and locking ChatGPT creator OpenAI, the industry leader that has taken the field to its current level of development, in pole position. On the contrary, it is the best way to ensure that the nightmare comes true.
Read the full story here:
Ether was above $2,100 as many investors choose the prospect of additional liquidity while earning stake rewards over the desire to take immediate profits and run. Dexterity Capital Managing Partner Michael Safai shared his crypto market analysis. Additionally, Blockchain Association director of government relations Ron Hammond weighed in on the state of crypto regulation ahead of SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s testimony to lawmakers next week. And TurboTax tax expert Lisa Greene-Lewis shared tips on what crypto investors need to know ahead of Tax Day.
