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Reminds me of the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment. An AI which destroys the universe by turning it into paperclips, as its goal is to make more paperclip
by graeme 6y ago
Reminds me of the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment. An AI which destroys the universe by turning it into paperclips, as its goal is to make more paperclips.
First crypto took marginal GPU and energy capacity. Now it is taking SSDs.
It has so far produced nothing except higher values measured in fiat. And the higher the values go the more resources needed for the computer networks.
Of course crypto is not an AI so it can only get fed more resources if it converts believers to feed it more. More GPUs, more SSDs, more coal, to run calculations.
So this should be self limiting at some point. Or maybe I’m wrong and some practical use will come of it but it’s been 12 years without any so far.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoSomeone a while ago imagined a future humanity where we had constructed a Dyson shell entirely devoted to cryptocurrency generation and were now a species of conmen and zealots desperately trying to convince alien civilizations that it is valuable.
- greesil 6y agoThere is some overlap here with the plot of a science fiction book Accelerando. I guess the singularity is here but it's not what we expected.
- ineedasername 6y agoAh yes-- I remember reading that around the time it was released and couldn't really wrap my head around was "economics 2.0" was actually supposed to be. 16 years later I'm starting to understand.
- cesarb 6y ago> science fiction book Accelerando For those who haven't read it yet, it's available for free on the author's website: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
- ddalex 6y agoThat's one smart book
- CoastalCoder 6y agoThat comment makes me miss Douglas Adams.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- DavidSJ 6y agoThis reminds me of my sci-fi dystopia idea: An intergalactic network of wormholes enables rapid travel and communication between worlds, but the collective energy output of the universe's stars is devoted entirely to bitcoin mining, ultimately accelerating the heat death of the universe.
- wcoenen 6y agoStars burn whether the energy they produce is used or not, so this doesn't accelerate the heat death of the universe. You'd have to merge stars for that (because larger, heavier stars have a higher rate of fusion).
- m4rtink 6y agoNot to mention if you could get total conversion of mass to energy going, you could just scare all the stars into inert hydrogen icebergs and use the hydrogen to fuel your total conversion reactors. Much more efficient than fusion.
- pixl97 6y agoTechnically if you wanted to maximize energy production you would split every star apart into dwarf stars that lived 100s of billions of years. You don't want them burning at all. Then you would take their matter and dump it in a black hole and capture that energy.
- Yizahi 6y agoThat's the premise of Xeelee Sequence novels :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeelee_Sequence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeelee_Sequence
- Can_Not 6y agoAnother thought, an advanced bitcoin miner type thing uses new physics where the environmental destruction used to power it is basically to increase the progress of the Big Rip (perhaps only locally though), but maybe the reason we always thought expansion of space was always happening is because older aliens were already doing the same thing for their blockchains.
- ineedasername 6y ago"But we spent all this energy to prove that the work done by our distributed mining networks could be trusted. It's trusted! Aliens: "Um, so... yeah, we were more interested in trading novel technologies and refueling our ships. But seeing as you all look like you're starving to death and have destroyed your system's resources, how about we just donate a few universal constructors and a bunch of feed stock for them. We've got enough fuel to make it to Proxima Centauri, so we're good for now. Oh-- we're hard coding the universal constructors to "food" only though because your life choices have been... well never mind that, our philosophy is not to judge."
- ehvatum 6y agoUninvited additional aliens: “hey guys, sorry to interrupt, you should try protomolecule-chain. It solves the problem of boot-strapping an interstellar proof-of-work ledger. There’s some problems with inter dimensional dragon environmentalists, but that’s neither here nor there.”
- hyperpallium2 6y agoDon't worry, long before then we'll pass the Crypo Event Horizon, when it becomes uneconomical to compute anything but crypto, and civilization will gratefully collapse. Our descendents will curse the blockchain and evolve other means for exchange of value.
- rzzzt 6y agoPrecious metals are reasonably compact, easy to store and have inherent value due to their relative rarity.
- kijin 6y agoBring back the gold standard, and enjoy your popcorn as the entire solar system rushes to build supermassive particle accelerators that bombard base metals with all sorts of stuff until they turn into gold. It really is the same principle as brute-forcing meaningless hashes until you get a predetermined prefix. Only in this case the desired prefix has 79 protons.
- m4rtink 6y agoBlack hole accretion disks are more efficient for that: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464790d2497de https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464790d2497de
- rbanffy 6y agoThings only have value for their utility. Anything else is a consensual hallucination.
- Nextgrid 6y agoRight now a non-trivial chunk of compute power, storage and engineering effort is spent on advertising and marketing. I'd rather take crypto, at least it's easier to ignore.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
- h4kor 6y agoI can only recommend Accelerando from Charles Stross.
- napier 6y agoI wish he’d start writing science based speculative fiction again.
- causality0 6y agoOh just wait, someone will come up with cryptocurrency that benefits from usage of higher bandwidth over longer links and then we're all truly fucked.
- mrb 6y ago«It has so far produced nothing» Censorship resistance. Digital money that does not require constant "authorizations" from incompetent, flaky, slow, or even sometimes corrupt payment processors or other financial entities. Money that works even where traditional systems fail. No denied transactions. No limits. No "account" to open. Works for the underbanked. Send it truly anytime anywhere. No other system does this. In other words, money created by people for the people.
- adreamingsoul 6y agoThis reads like a wish list. In all seriousness, the entire concept of money has always been created by people. IMO, cryptocurrency seems like a religion. I’m seeing a lot of belief of what said religion will do for you.
- trophycase 6y agoThis reads like a person who has never used cryptocurrency or defi in any manner whatsoever. If I want to right now, I can get a multimillion dollar loan, no questions asked, against most any crypto I own for an interest rate lower than credit cards or scammy payday loans will charge. I can be a market maker for trades without being an institution and with no barrier to entry, I can liquidated overleveraged loans, I can trade derivatives otherwise not allowed to me by my country, and I mint and trade synthetic assets, the list goes on and on. You're the one who sounds like they are subscribing to a religion and haven't actually even attempted to understand what financial freedoms are suddenly afforded to you when you use cryptocurrency.
- Kiro 6y agoOne of the best comments in the thread, actually describing the utility of crypto and the power of DeFi, and you're getting downvoted to oblivion.
- adreamingsoul 6y agoCould be the tone, when removed it does make a good argument.
- bironran 6y agohttps://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
- poidos 6y agoWarning: will waste your time like few other things if you're the sort to get addicted to clicker games.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoI honestly don't know why people even try clicker games. They sound awful.
- poidos 6y agoI wish I knew why they tickle my fancy so much! I've spent far too much time on them.
- Groxx 6y agoPersonal theory: they're like juggling. Satisfying but ultimately useless. Many clicker games are perpetually-changing resource-balancing and short-vs-long-term-tradeoff games under the hood. Do you spend your [_] on something linear and replace it soon, or exponential but you'll be waiting longer for the next thing? Do you spend [#] to support more passive styles, or do you go full [%] and spend 30m micro-optimizing by hand to save hours later? That same kind of thing exists in the core of lots of games. E.g. look at StarCraft - Zergling rush, or get more resource gatherers? Early and mid game is super heavily focused on this, and the players and community spend incredible amounts of effort micro-optimize their setup to get even one more unit in a time window. Through this lens, the combat is primarily evidence of your superior resource management, and whether you investigated your opponent's plans well enough. --- They're of course not all homogeneous, but if I had to pick one thing they overwhelmingly share in common, it's this resource-balancing aspect. And they go a heck of a lot further in it than most other kinds of games do.
- Groxx 6y ago
- nradov 6y agoThere is a practical use: evading China's currency controls. Buy mining hardware and electricity with renminbi. Sell the resulting coins in the free world for fiat hard currency.
- larsiusprime 6y agoDoes this theory predict China will eventually clamp down on crypto? If so, why haven’t they already?
- inter_netuser 6y agoThey endorse Bitcoin openly to their citizens as a good investment. Why wouldn't they want to dethrone USD as the reserve currency?
- larsiusprime 6y agoOkay so that’s a competing theory to the parent I was replying to, to be clear, though it does seem a better fit for available evidence to my unsophisticated self.
- smolder 6y agoI don't think they're mutually exclusive. If China wants bitcoin to succeed, they would do well to turn a blind eye to people evading currency controls, in order to maximize incentive for their citizens to mine and use it.
- larsiusprime 6y agoThat makes sense, but it seems like an unstable temporary situation? If what you say is true there’s a tension- crypto can help unseat USD as the global reserve currency, but a huge part of crypto’s value is because... Chinese oligarchs can use it to transmute their renminbi into USD? What am I missing?
- cwkoss 6y agoRoko's Basilisk is constructing itself
- graeme 6y agoHah, interesting. Lends new meaning to “have fun staying poor”. A phrase intended to chastise those who didn’t help raise crypto’s hash rate.
- atweiden 6y ago> It has so far produced nothing except higher values measured in fiat. And the higher the values go the more resources needed for the computer networks. That isn’t strictly true. Before the advent of Bitcoin, there was no global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms. That simple academic experiment was quickly infiltrated by profiteers, however. Most people never cared to cultivate an understanding of Bitcoin beyond the barest of surface level understandings, and these same people are now able to finger point at blatantly self-serving get-rich-quick ICO projects — like Ethereum and Chia — which have clearly achieved nothing in spite of endlessly promising investors “innovation”. The only thing innovative that has ever come out of the Bitcoin space is Bitcoin itself: a speculative store of value. Every national currency is similarly speculative, and people who “missed” Bitcoin are loathe to admit the same thing that happened to gold’s market capitalization prior to its ubiquitous use as money, is now happening to Bitcoin.
- matkoniecz 6y ago> there was no global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms That is not good in itself. > That simple academic experiment Original description by its author intended it as a replacement for a payment system and currencies, not as an academic experiment or as a store of value useless for normal transactions
- atweiden 6y agoEvery aspect of cryptocurrency save for one either fails to solve any societal issue, exascerbates existing ones, or is otherwise hype entrepreneurship. But the deflationary global economic system Bitcoin facilitates disincentivizes mass consumerism — mass consumerism which is destroying the world’s natural ecosystems. This is only possible via a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms. Bitcoin’s creator invented this. It is an innovation, in every sense. Deflationary economics discourages capital investment, because it rewards saving — i.e. “hoarding” — not spending or investing. Assuming a Bitcoin-based economic system, as the pace of technological advancement continues to quicken, and more products and services hit the market, absolute BTC-denominated prices will have to decrease. More products and services on the market, with a fixed supply of money, equals lower absolute prices. In addition, global adoption of a free-market money like Bitcoin would eliminate the ability of governments to fund weapons of war and public works projects by printing their own money. That would no longer be possible. Bitcoin throttles humanity, and with it humanity’s ecological destructiveness could be kept at bay. No other aspect of cryptocurrency is of societal value in any way.
- asddubs 6y agoisn't the paperclip maximizer a metaphor for the profit motive anyway? at least that's the way i understood it
- graeme 6y agoNot quite. The key of the profit motive is it generally produces at least some useful output. For example, if you mine oil, you have externalities of course, but at least someone finds the end product useful and humans get a benefit. And you can create a framework of laws and rules to capture the externalities. (We haven’t, but we could, and are starting to) A paperclip maximizer is incentives gone wrong. People wants profits so they can do something with them. But the AI wants paperclips because it is programmed to want paperclips, and it does so to the detriments of any other goals. It would devour the child of the AI designer to turn her into an input for paperclip production.
- franknine 6y agoThere is a game about turning the universe into paper clips: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ It has one of the most beautiful endings in my opinion
- 127 6y agoIt has produced poor people easily to be able to store their wealth something that they can both afford and isn't constantly being debased. Something they can trade without an intermediary, that can't be trivially censored or confiscated. Something that doesn't require taking great risks and effort in transporting like physical gold. I think that's definitely worth something. Crypto only needs resources as much as it needs security and throughput. More efficient cryptos will win as they are cheaper.
- rtpg 6y agoYes, poor people, those who we all know have savings to protect (and definitely don't have a negative net worth /s) There are people who benefit from having strong stores of values with deflationary pressure, and it ain't the poorest among us.
- paublyrne 6y ago> It has produced poor people easily to be able to store their wealth something that they can both afford and isn't constantly being debased I can't get excited about people too poor to have access to banking putting their money into something as severely volatile as crypto currency. There is room for new financial companies supporting mobile banking and banking in the developing world, but I don't see why crypto needs to be involved.
- hungryforcodes 6y ago> I don't see why crypto needs to be involved But others can and that’s the important point here.
- prox 6y agoExcept that’s not how value works in a human, emotional sense . Without agreements (maybe some crypto’s have that implicitly? Idk) the value will plummet, scale, inflate, deflate without reason or sometimes apparent cause. There might be countries where there are advantages to crypto (say Turkey who was in the news) where it’s a better short term alternative, but crypto in my book is as speculative as ever, and I have seen nothing that changes my mind. I’ve heard (don’t know how true it is) there also there are also some big players who have big hoards of a coin and can dump or pump a value at their wim.
- jwiz 6y agoYou might like https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
- vmception 6y agoI feel like all the practical use standards are unfalsifable and there is no use that will satisfy it Is it a lack of awareness due to disinterest, or objective reasoning, we’ll never know!
- seibelj 6y agoYou can comment hundreds of times all the use cases for crypto and there is always a reason why MySQL is better...
- vmception 6y agobut you can’t transfer the rights to whatever you did with mysql, in a way the administrators can’t arbitrarily reverse or be compelled to reverse the market has been saying “hey this is useful in some circumstances” for over a decade
- szhu 6y agoCrypto is valuable only if we believe it is. Once we discover a way to transmit money that has benefits over crypto, we'll gradually move to that, the same way transactions that felt limited by fiat moved to crypto.
- mikro2nd 6y agoALL money is only money if we believe in it. Money only has value to the extent that I believe that you believe in its value.
- bosswipe 6y agoHumanity must not allow technology that marries self reinforcing emergent AI with a blockchain.
- Slartie 6y agoSomeone should write a book about an AI that is developed as a new cryptocurrency, with PoW providing it insane amounts of compute power to its AI algorithm instead of performing dumb hashing races and proof of space providing insane amounts of fast storage. And us humans feeding it more and more of both out of pure greed, until it eventually becomes self-aware.
- jamesgreenleaf 6y agoThe author qntm was just tweeting about that in relation to cryptocurrencies today: https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1388301328716378112 https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1388301328716378112
- bboygravity 6y ago> It has so far produced nothing except higher values measured in fiat. I don't get how people keep bringing this up. So it's all pure speculation is what you're saying? So what are some of the reasons people want crypto? 1. As a store of value. Fiat currencies lose purchasing power over time by design. Especially now that interest rates are funny. If people/businesses (Tesla) want to preserve the buying power of their income/capital, they can not just keep their USD or EUR on RMB in their bank account. Traditionally gold fulfilled this function, but gold has limitations being bulky and all. Furthermore the COMEX where the gold price is decided is completely dysfunctional due to institutionalized deeply rooted corruption. Example: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/jpmorgan-to-pay-%24920-mln-fine-for-manipulating-precious-metals-treasury-market-2020-09-29 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/jpmorgan-to-pay-%24920-mln-f... (note that this manipulation is ongoing and the fine was a fraction of what JP Morgan made on these spoofing trades). People are turning to something that cannot centrally be corrupted as easily by a few governments and bankers. People and society as we know it NEED a store of value. So they're turning to one of the few options left: crypto. 2. As a safe haven from a corrupted US/international financial system. See point 1. Metals price manipulations are just a small fraction of the corruption that goes on. There's a reason why Elon Musk Tweeted something along the lines of "Bitcoin, in retrospect it will be inevitable." Tesla stock got naked shorted into oblivion by hedge funds while the SEC did nothing. Coincidence? US companies get deliberately shorted into bankruptcy by hedge funds (case in point: GameStop where this strategy failed). And then there's the share rehypothecation scam with perpetual failures to deliver on institutional trading positions and so on. Example: https://web.archive.org/web/20060421085925if_/http://www.rgm.com:80/articles/FalseProxies.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20060421085925if_/http://www.rgm... Does it still seem like a silly nerdy gamble now that Tesla converts some of it's cash into BTC? Not to me anyway. 3. As a free bank account with upgraded features like almost instant tranfers and total privacy (in case of ZEC and MNR). Ever tried to transfer money to a foreign bank account, thereby losing a significant percentage to currency conversion fees and other fees? Or over the weekend with a national holiday on Friday? You'd be lucky if the money gets into the other account within 4 days. It's infuriating IMO. And now it's also unnecessary, because: crypto. 4. Democratization of the cloud computing market. Example: decentralized yet commercial file transfers: https://skynet-send.hns.siasky.net/ https://skynet-send.hns.siasky.net/ There are other applications like coins that allow you to render Blender projects in exchange for a tiny fee. So... Can anybody explain to me how all of the above is "nothing" and how the alternatives are somehow clearly more energy efficient and less damaging to the environment (lol: gold mining)? The down voting is not really doing it.
- tomrod 6y agoLike David Brin's messengers in Existence.
- lokimedes 6y agoIt’s a cancer metastasizing in all components of value and scarcity. Why this type of operation is not banned globally, but coexist with climate change worry, is a perfect indicator of mass delusion.
- aww_dang 6y agoIs there a link between cryptocurrency speculation and artificially low, centrally planned interest rates?
- Aerroon 6y agoIsn't it possible to create a crypto currency where mining it computes something useful? Like larger and larger prime numbers or digits of pi or protein folding or something like that.
- wongarsu 6y agoYes, but a useful proof-of-work leads to a less secure block chain. Bitcoin is secure because you know that an attacker that wants to change the second to last block has to spend X million on computational peer to do that. But if those computations are useful outside mining itself, then the attack might become much chapter or almost free
- dpweb 6y agoBitcoin has tremendous value. Not as a currency or financial processing network. Those are pipe dreams. But in bringing the power of cryptographic and blockchain technologies to prominence.
- travisjungroth 6y agoIs it really worth the energy production of a small country to raise awareness?
- anoncake 6y agoNow if only blockchains were good for anything.
- bufferoverflow 6y ago> It has so far produced nothing except higher values measured in fiat Not true. All kinds of blockchain development is happening in hundreds of fields. The most important development so far is deflationary capped currencies independent of any single government. Currencies that almost anyone in the world can use, which helps the poor in the countries like Venezuela, Argentina, Sudan, Lebanon, Iran.
- skjoldr 6y agoThe Ethereum Swarm project uses the blockchain and smart contracts to offer completely anonymous and decentralized file storage space, for which the node operators are rewarded with crypto. It's still in beta and actively developed, though. But I hope it will overtake Chia because it is actually useful.