How Bitcoin Is Hostile AI
Who needs Skynet to destroy the human world? Just throw techbros some coin
Bitcoin now consumes as much energy as Argentina (45 million people), and more than most countries in the world. Bitcoin consumes more energy than Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook combined. Within 12 years Bitcoin has become one of the fastest-growing sources of climate change in the world.
As an inadequate summary, Bitcoin is ‘mined’ by solving purposefully hard ‘Sudoku’ puzzles (making them rare) which you could exchange for heroin. No one does anymore because it’s become an asset, not a currency. The hardware to solve these problems has also become so intense that it inhales electricity, and runs all the time. Bitcoin consumes energy by design.
If machines wanted to destroy humanity they could not come up with a better avatar than Bitcoin. Who needs to take over the military? Techbros will happily sell us out for some coin. The machines have somehow got us to run them 24/7, warming the fuck out of our Earth, and all they have to do is give us some made-up tokens.
The greatest myth of SciFi was that we would resist AI. People will happily change their profile pics to laser eyes while it farts up the Earth. SciFi makes us think AI would be ‘sentient’, meaning like us, when in fact life just emerges out of other life in different and mutually incomprehensible forms. Behold Bitcoin.
Is Bitcoin AI?
Is Bitcoin artificially intelligent? You could say obviously not, but are we obviously intelligent? This is still debated within philosophy but also, just look around *gestures at everything*.
I’d say that humans are actually uniquely unqualified to judge something as AI because we’re so fucking dumb. We’ve been living with full legal, artificial persons since at least 1600. They’re called corporations. You may have noticed them enslaving people or exploiting us today. We don’t call these things AI, but our courts certainly do. It’s literally called corporate personhood. They actually have more rights than you do. America’s Supreme Court ruled that corporations have free speech rights. All over the world they have more freedom of movement than human beings (WTF is a multinational while…
