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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Aug. 17 - Aug. 23, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: MrMind 17 August 2015 07:05AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 21 August 2015 08:16:12PM 4 points [-]

Oh, dear... From Marginal Revolution's comment section:

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?

What if Satoshi Nakamoto is Roko’s Basilisk?

Comment author: ZankerH 23 August 2015 08:27:09AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Lumifer 24 August 2015 02:40:09AM 1 point [-]

Oh, I know -- this is a case of weird meme propagation, not of lizard overlords tricking humankind.

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