What if “Satoshi Nakamoto” is an evil AI, and the whole concept of the blockchain was invented to see if it could devise a way to harvest the processing power of billions of computers. Currently they are just doing meaningless (or seemingly meaningless) math problems. But what if the math problems they were doing weren’t meaningless? What if they were trying to solve some sort of physics problem necessary to create wormholes or something?
The bitcoin mining computations are pretty provably meaningless—all it is is looking for hash collisions. If you want examples of convincing millions of people to donate their computing power for meaningful computation, with no financial incentive, look at folding@home or rosetta@home.
Oh, dear… From Marginal Revolution’s comment section:
The bitcoin mining computations are pretty provably meaningless—all it is is looking for hash collisions. If you want examples of convincing millions of people to donate their computing power for meaningful computation, with no financial incentive, look at folding@home or rosetta@home.
Oh, I know—this is a case of weird meme propagation, not of lizard overlords tricking humankind.