I've been in the former since '21 and have seen every single cycle since 2011 in the latter, I can assure their is more dumb money in the former than in the latter; (just by scale alone) at least in the latter whether it was ICO or NFTs or whatever mal-investment was promptly punished (rugpulls/exit scams) companies like INTEL get to stay in Zombie mode because of the corpo-welfare that the US doles out while shaming everyone else to be prudent with their investments while these corps and banks spend like drunken sailors and tries to strangle the former out of existence (rightly so in most cases as most crypto is a total scam).
With that said, what you will see emerge are some incredibly established players in both fields that will have the staying power to change how the Industry is shaped around them: Nvidia and Bitcoin are comparable to one another in that respect.
Both have/had crazy volatility but the staying power and just the fact they remain firmly at the center of both Industry's is rather telling that you simply don't see what these technologies offer because of the hype and boom and bust cycles.
As a person who directly benefits from this: I can assure you most of these VCs are exit liquidity just as most foolish people are for the alt scams of yore, execpt the US economy (likely all of the Western World at this point) isn't entirely reliant on the promise of vapourware with 'crypto' in any capacity, weheras the same cannot be said about the theatrics of Jensen's Nvidia.
Source: I build data center infrastructure for these mega corps doing 'AI' and I'm doing an MSc in CS (Big Data) and been a Bitcoiner since Satoshi was still on BTF.
edit: if it isn't clear I'm a staunch opponent of cryptocurrency in any form.
It's very clear, but your exposure to zealots, on both sides, shouldn't deter you from being objective and seeing what these technologies actually offer. Hence why i wrote that part in the 2nd to last paragraph.
HN has such misinfored vitriol for any technology it didn't ordain itself, you sem to be of that cohort, what's odd is that very same people who gave you VC.SV funded startup land are all major backers of this technology.
I can just summarize this in one phrase: you seem to collectively not know, what you don't know and make leaps in logic and misinformed judgments from that POV.
I'm just here because it happens to be where like-minded people (_sometimes_) hang out.
Ohh, well... I'm guilty of drinking that kool-aid, unfortunately and was a boot-strapping fintech founder with the battle scars to show--those scars appear in this discussion thus far by the way.
But I get it, I'm trying to be amicable about this as much as I can, especially fbecause I know no one can deny us anymore in the BTC side at this point, and in the AI side... well, money-hype boom and AI-doomer pr0n cycles aside we are actually building amazing amounts of compute that hopefully can yield amazing results, something like Starship recovery system levels of advancement in many other Industries/Sectors one day, probably very far off in the future but that's the start, right?
Every forest starts with a sappling kind of a thing, and these two technologies emerged from a time when I was in my formidable development period so I saw them as something more than just the marketing side--AI is marketing, ML is really just stats with code to back it up after all. Bitcoin is just a FOSS network using token based cryptographic key encryption.
Stop using throwaways if you want real conversations, it might help you have those conversations you're looking for. :)