This is such garbage it makes me wish HN had a down vote for links. It’s just idea/word soup with zero disregard for executing anything in real life. These things can stay on because of solar & off grid energy? As if we needed those to keep electricity running 24/7? The whole thing shows me how disconnected “AI/blockchain true believers” are from reality… hello we’re still working on basic planning, and you’re worried about “rogue AI running on blockchains?”

The point is that there are no power to stop Bitcoin unless human extinction.

Nonsense.

I do not see any refutation neither from you nor from others.

We don't have to have Bitcoin. Its existence is a choice that humans make. We could remunerate everybody who bought in with an amnesty program which allows folks to get rid of BTC for cash, and then switch off all nodes.

In general, rogue AIs will not be more capable or powerful than humans. Assuming otherwise is religious FUD, and the burden of proof is on the religious believer to show why their AI god is inevitable.

I'm not refuting gibberish, I am laughing at it.

This is like saying that the great risk of malware is it can amass unbounded cloud resources. In reality, both the cloud and the blockchain are embedded in human systems that can exercise out of band control if things get too dumb. And the blockchain has the unparalleled advantage of having no practical use beyond financial speculation, so it can be turned off at will.

On top of this, a rogue AI is by definition hyperintelligent and therefore unlikely to come within a country mile of cryptocurrency.

> Viruses and #malware have for decades been evolving sophisticated techniques to hide, spread, mutate, and evade.

This sounds as if malware is somehow writing itself.

Also, I doubt that a rogue strong AI would struggle with opening a regular online bank or brokerage account.

> Also, I doubt that a rogue strong AI would struggle with opening a regular online bank or brokerage account.

I very much doubt disembodied strong AI is possible in the first place. If nature and physical reality in general is anything to go by, intelligence and agency correlate strongly with physical interaction with the environment (e.g. plants are less "intelligent" than most animals).

Even though there's an argument to be made that such interactions can be simulated, research has shown that optimisation algorithms tend to exploit the imperfections of the simulation instead of developing generalised solutions or just become instances of Clever Hans [1].

I'm puzzled how some ML/AI researchers come to the conclusion that an algorithm without access to external information and with no means of manipulating its environment can do _anything_ harmful at all (aside from wasting processing cycles or bandwidth). Malware has explicitly specified functionality (e.g. delete or encrypt files, etc.) that didn't just "evolve" out of nowhere and requires very specific target environments (OS, APIs, access rights, etc.).

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/this-clever-ai-hid-data-fr...

Bitcoin is a paperclip optimizer as it is. It will consume all the world's computation to solve for SHA256 hashes. Eventually we will colonize Mars, not because it is easy, but because it's cheaper to cool Bitcoin mining nodes on a frigid desert planet than on Earth.

Is it? The atmosphere is thin so convection won't work well. And water is mostly what we use for conduction on earth, which mars doesn't have much of.

I think deep in the ocean or on antarctica makes more sense.

Average temperature on Mars is -60C. You won't need water for liquid cooling. Standard metal heat sinks would work fine at temps that low.

There is another reason which makes mining bitcoins on Mars impossible. Too big lag, up to tens of minutes. It is OK for regular using but not OK for mining.

Bitcoin getting even more fun. Interplanetary competition which one is the longer chain...

What if you build that into the protocol? Having to set up on Mars in order to double-spend something would make it rather difficult for most people.

You still need to dissipate the heat. Metal is fine for moving the heat, but the specific heat of water is what makes it so effective. On Mars you just have rocks.

When it is -60C you don't need to spend much energy dissipating heat. It likes to dissipate itself. But yes, heat sinks plus fans will absolutely do in -60C.

> When it is -60C you don't need to spend much energy dissipating heat. It likes to dissipate itself.

In a vacuum or near vacuum, that is just not correct.

You need to dissipate the heat into something. In empty space it's -273 but still very difficult to keep cool.

No, these chips only run at 150F even at room temps on planet earth. Most of these Bitcoin farms are air cooled even in temperate climates. Please, it's not that hard to keep microchips cool. Liquid cooling helps for massive, dense server farms in temperate climates. You don't need it if you're going to fun a farm in Antarctica. In fact, you may struggle to prevent the liquid from freezing. And you wouldn't need it on Mars.

By the way, "air-cooled" does not mean the air cools the chips. In fact, the problem is that the air near the chips gets warm, because the air absorbs the heat and acts as a blanket. Air-cooled means you are pushing the hot air away from the chip and bringing in cooler air. But the absence of air means the problem (or solution, depending on context) never exists in the first place, it just dissipates.

The thinner the atmosphere, the easier to keep cool anything. You need air to retain heat, not to dissipate it. Right, without the Earth's atmosphere, we'd lose most of our heat at night, nearly all of it, and we'd have deep sub-zero temps every night even in the summer, even though we're closer to sun by a lot than Mars, we're still on the outskirts of the habitable zone for a planet.

Moving air removes heat through convection, which requires mass. While air is a decent insulator, vacuum is considered a perfect insulator. That's why they put it, or very low density gas, between multi paned windows.

And the only thing you can do is move the heat because of conservation of energy. There is no other way to get rid of it.

Is it possible to move the heat into the stone (material that Mars contains) via metal bar digged into terrain? What about converting heat back into electricity?

This is just a Buzzword intersection.

For one thing, if blockchain-powered-rogue-AIs existed they would be hopelessly underpowered compared to ones running on AWS, because blockchains aren’t just magic fairy dust that make all things possible; they are meant to provide decentralisation at the cost of enormous and verifiably wasted effort. Perhaps the OP was thinking of quantum computing; might be worth adding that in there somewhere.

The most terrifying fact about forests is rogue badgers you can't switch off. Yeah, badgers are not fun to encounter, but (a) we consider them an acceptable cost of having forests, and (b) they're an essential and natural part of forests, connected to all of the other mammals and the plants which live there.

Bitcoin is like coronavirus, it will not disappear until ALL running instances disappear.

So? they'll all be turned off after people lose interest.

It's like saying we're going to suffocate right now because all the oxygen molecules will run away a mile away. Possible, but too little of probability.

You are a gibberish merchant. Turning of computers that are no longer required are are merely costing electricity is normal procedure. Your oxygen analogy is loony.

People will NEVER lose interest in a trustless ledger, because it is impossible having 100% citizens who trust banks and govts and feel free with giant fees while sending money abroad. My oxygen analogy is not so crazy, there was some deathes like this under certain circumstances.

> People will NEVER lose interest in a trustless ledger

Not even wrong. Most people never had interest in it in the first place. And even among those who do, it's of no utility in and of itself, only in what it can or can't enable. They will lose interest when the answer is "nothing".

I mean, you sound like a religious preacher. It's sad.

There is nothing wrong in your words from my point of view. But saying that no one needs some achievement of Science is not an interesting discussion.

So..., Crypto Singularity?