Yo, technology.

What is it all about?

You're going to have five AI systems that give you answers that produce video, that produce art, that produce writing.

And I think we have a real fork in the road between this kind of world of these five internet services and kind of nothing else.

Or a diverse, rich, interesting, decentralized internet.

And my argument is a lot of it comes down to how we build these internet services.

Hello, Ed. Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech.

I'm your host, Danny Fawson.

The West Coast correspondent for the Sunday Times, and this week appropriately, we're talking about

crypto. You will have seen, of course, that Bitcoin is back, baby. It hit a new record this

week of $69,200. And of course, you will recall that just two years ago, the price collapsed.

The whole industry went into a deep freeze.

More than $2 trillion of quote-unquote value was destroyed.

Scammers came out of the woodwork from FTX to Celsius.

It was a disaster of truly epic proportions.

And all the skeptics, understandably, took a victory lap.

Here was the comeuppance for this thing, which I'll be honest.

I still don't totally understand.

And I have written tens of thousands of words about crypto,

talked to the smartest people in the world about it.

And yet it remains this kind of a little bit of a mystery to me. What is it for?

What problem does it actually solve? And why 16 years since the original Bitcoin white paper

...