The Culture Versus Bitcoin

[ffutures]

Silly idea for someone else to write - The Culture, or some similarly advanced technology, discovers Earth and uses its computational powers to corner the Bitcoin market and take over the world (or at least destroy Bitcoin). I don't write finance or high-level computing well enough to make this interesting.

Comments

[pmcray.livejournal.com]

It is not known who created Bitcoin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bitcoin), but whoever or whatever Satoshi Nakamoto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto) is, it is highly sophisticated. Only one technical issue has been discovered in the Bitcoin protocol and that was quickly patched. The question is whether "Satoshi Nakamoto" is, say, a renegade NSA (or, indeed, GCHQ) programmer or whether, as I suspect, the Bitcoin operation is being run by the NSA or some other parapolitical operator for its own (obscure to us) ends. It could even be the Culture.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

So long as it isn't Skynet (the fictional one, not the Navy system).

[pmcray.livejournal.com]

You have probably seen this: http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/darpa-tried-to-build-skynet-in-the-1980s-1451000652.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'd heard of it, hadn't seen this article - thanks!

[armb.livejournal.com]

Bitcoin mining is already dominated by the small number of people prepared to run custom hardware for it: http://brokenlibrarian.org/bitcoin/

While there will be screams from some directions and sighs of relief from others (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html) when it collapses I doubt anyone could get an interesting financial thriller out of it.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Oh well, it was a nice idea while it lasted.

[armb.livejournal.com]

It's entirely possible a decent finance thriller writer could prove me wrong.

And for an alternative point of view: http://theumlaut.com/2014/01/08/bitcoin-internet-of-money/

If we agree that BitCoin isn't (or shouldn't be) a useful currency as it is, but that much more interesting things might be built on top of its ideas, the aliens could then disrupt those things.

But if you can write a convincing "radical new future economy built on top of BitCoinPlus", there might be more of a market for it without adding aliens.