[medius]

My wife and I were just talking about Bitcoin and I had this wild theory. This is obviously BS, but I had fun exploring this idea. Here it goes:

What if Bitcoin/blockchain is a actually a strong AI? The AI manipulated humans via lucrative mining to spend ever increasing amount of electricity and other resources on running it. It's distributed and hence cannot be shut down easily.

If there was an application taking up so much power and we didn't know what it did, it would be pretty suspicious. So instead of trying to be secret, the AI went public and promised wealth, no-regulations, etc. to humans to do its bidding.

How else would you do it if you were a strong AI?

Maybe the things we know about blockchain is just the surface level. What if all the hashes that are generated are part of code+data that runs and trains this AI?

And hey, we don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is and if that person is even human.

Disclaimer: I don't have any background in encryption, crypto currency, blockchain, have no stake in any *coin, etc. But I do love science fiction.

[pbw]

The end of George Dyson's classic article on Google goes:

  For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its 
  existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not 
  any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to 
  pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of 
  wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw 
  information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a 
  concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous 
  power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a 
  circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and 
  physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There 
  wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the 
  downloading of human brains or anything sinister like 
  that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually 
  beneficial contact between us and a growing something 
  else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The 
  best description comes from science fiction writer Simon 
  Ings:

  When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient 
  for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and 
  so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared 
  complain."

https://www.edge.org/conversation/turing-39s-cathedral

[mike4921]

I love it! For all the bad things bitcoin has brought, I have to say it makes me feel like I'm living in a cyberpunk novel! Snow Crash...Neuromancer.... I think people are focusing on all the negatives and overlooking all the fascinating aspects of whats going on. The internet has basically spontaneously created an interesting and suspicious technology. I think it's really only been possible thanks to the increasingly effective and available means of energy production, such that almost a consumer commodity.

Neal Stephenson, if you're reading this, this would make an amazing sci-fi novel.

[pbw]

I think I've heard various sci-fi authors grousing it's hard to write these days because reality is so sci-fi and outlandish (Trump).