Are Bitcoin miners creating a huge decentralized brain for superintelligent AI?
According to bitcoincharts.com, Bitcoin network exceeded EXA scale long ago, it currently operates on approximately 80.7 zettaFLOPS per second. On this computational speed, Bitcoin network outperforms every supercomputer on TOP500 list combined, and is the fastest supercomputer on Earth.
By some estimates from last year, mining operation consumes 30.1 terrawatt hours (TWh) per year of energy, which is equivalent to the energy used by the entire nation of Denmark annually.
That being said, it's hard not to think how painfully inefficient and wasteful the whole mining process is, having in mind that it's all about calculating sha256 over an over again, until defined criteria is met, just to prove that some CPU power was applied. It's called POW protocol or system, and it's present as a main mechanism of securing the public ledger a.k.a Blockchain in many other cryptos as well.
What if?
Recently an idea suddenly crossed over my mind. What if we are unwittingly building a huge decentralized brain for superintelligent AI to take over at some point. Brand new, digital gold rush could be feeding on people's greed and desire for quick profits, and as a result we might totally lose control over it.
Mining hardware that was previously used to perform countless hash operations could be suddenly repurposed to train large distributed neural network. And it might not be constrained only to Bitcoin. There is another more sophisticated realm of Ethereum smart contracts which can also bi manipulated in many different ways.
Any additional thoughts and comments on this topic are welcome!
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