Technology

The wallet is not, I think, surprising. Proton Mail is billed as a trusted holder of email that you want private. In the US, there are specifically some people who want an out-of-country provider of email service. A lot of use of cryptocurrency is from people who want private financial transactions. I will bet that there is overlap in userbase.

I also don't know how they're billing their LLM, but a thing that some people don't like about LLM services -- and I am among those -- is that what you write can be data-mined. If they're selling this as a service where they charge a fee not to do that, that might make a lot of sense in terms of their privacy company reputation.

I use Kagi as my search engine. They do the "we don't log or mine your data, but rather charge a subscription fee", so they're gonna be selling to a market of people who are willing to pay something for privacy. And they also just started providing LLM service. I bet that they have the same rationale.

You can get your own hardware and run latent diffusion software locally. I have. But that's expensive.

It saves a lot of money, if you only need the hardware computing N% of the time, to buy the hardware and share it with other people, both in compute capacity and cost. Then you only need to pay N% plus a bit for the service provider to make a return.

I suspect that a lot of companies have done the math, figured out that the economics work, and are aiming for that market -- people who want to use latent diffusion software, want privacy for use, but don't need them hot 100% of the time, and don't want to pay to get their own hardware at home.

It used to be common, when all computers were more expensive, for all computing access to be sold like this, on time-sharing systems.