Bitcoin Is The Hulk

The more you beat the Hulk, the stronger he becomes.

Same with Bitcoin.

Especially if it is beaten by the other 2 energy guzzlers.

Part 1 - Energy Guzzlers

The Industrial Revolution - a man, and the Information Revolution - a woman, have together produced a bunch of child technologies with an appetite for energy that humans cannot comprehend.

These include: Bitcoin/Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and Quantum computing.

Interestingly, we humans fear the “Nuclear Power Baby Formula,” yet it might feed these triplets without us breaking our backs and losing all sleep, trying to figure out how to raise these superpowered kids.

We always go for the easy “fossil fuel formula”. As handy as french fries. We are going to regret this sooner or later.

Now, consider the Bitcoin/Blockchain baby. This year, it made 15 years and is now consuming about 100TWh per year from a global electricity energy budget of ~ 28,000TWh (2021).

Pretty tiny, but if this grows x10 every ten years as it has done, it will cause some concern.

The same can be said for the AI baby (it apparently needs twice as much electricity as the world is using right now!) and the deceptive Quantum Computing baby says “I use extra coldness, not extra heat” but heat creates extra coldness.

I covered quantum computing’s expensive energy budget here.

Here is the kicker. Bitcoin, unlike AI or Quantum Computing, does not need to use all this energy.

The harder we dig, the more energetically costly it is. If you relax, it gets easy as well.

(The allusions to yin and yang, and gaining strength from the lightness in Buddhist monk practice are simply phenomenal.

Bitcoin might be Physics and Maths, but it’s also a template for human philosophy).

The amount of energy we use in BTC might be a measure of just how stubborn vs humble our society is.

Let me explain.

What does most of the energy consumed by BTC, do?

• mine more BTC (a fast declining use case)
• secure the network from attack
• verify transactions

The first one -- mine more BTC, is getting less valuable over time.

Bitcoin mining as a business for getting new BTC coins has a limited time frame. Circa 2140, the last such business for profit will close shop.

Your great-grandkids might feel sad, but the payoffs will be better.

This leaves 2 things.

One -- Secure the network from attack.

If this needs more energy, it means we have refused as a society to accept better money. So, we (mostly) vote for new politicians who attack BTC with their machinery, over and over. Then the hackers follow suit, so BTC also does what it does. Demand more energy to secure the network.

Second -- verify transactions, will speak to just how corrupt our society will have become.

In a 1984-esque world where no transaction record can be trusted, BTC will consume so much energy it will embarrass us.

“Why are you putting garbage transactions in the record, fren?”

If we reverse course, just a few checks and all nodes will nod. Very good. Block added.

Bottom line: BTC is being provoked to grow its appetite by big politics, hackers, competition with the US dollar and its friends, cheap energy options, and refusing individualized power from decentralization (the other two babies are ultra-centralized behemoths. Quantum computers are so centralized you cannot own one unless you have billions of dollars in funding and command an army of Ph.D.s in Quantum Physics).

Otherwise, if only we organized our society so that Bitcoin Mining was hardly attacked, and the printing of money and the minting of coins was not as profitable as farming potatoes in one’s backyard, all would be well and Bitcoin would lose its bad label of energy guzzler.

Alas, we cannot help hating on new, weirdly powerful technologies.

OK, Romanoff, you did this.

Don’t Beat Up Hulk, Please

See, people hate on the Hulk because they want to order him around for their own benefit, but cannot.

Bro cannot be contained.

You keep poking him.

He gets stronger.

The same goes for Bitcoin.

So far, ridicule and word missiles have been thrown at the BTC.

It has been pronounced “dead” nearly every year.

It is shorted apriori by almost all humans. Even I expect it to go down soon (so I can buy some :D)

But WHAT IF Bitcoin (Hulk) had a sibling rivalry with AI (Saitama) and Quantum Computing (the Alien called Clark Kent)?

Hoho. Here we go.

I told you not to beat up Hulk.

Hulk vs Saitama (BTC vs AI)

I am currently writing a story where this might unfold, and here is a brief summary:

AI cannot hack Bitcoin directly. That would take longer than the age of the universe to open 1 wallet.

But by undermining op-sec with AI-powered cameras and computers, seed phrases can be stolen. Hence, bitcoins can be stolen.

This will likely heat up when dollar inflation gets so bad that Bitcoiners, once again, become the nouveau riche in the eyes of the fiat born, fed, and grown.

Most people, really.

Broke people.

If evil no-coiners with dev skills use AI to engineer the theft of BTC and cryptocurrency in general, some anti-hero Bitcoiners with dev skills might engineer AIs to earn Bitcoin faster than most humans, only to burn it (or hide it really well in ultra-cold hardware wallets).

Hence, an interesting scenario could exist where Bitcoin’s price value rises faster and faster because bitcoins are intentionally being burnt or removed from the circulating supply.

Something like this

Note: If AI resources are being devoted to BTC, then BTC just made AI its workhorse. And all energy spent therein effectively is BTC energy.

The problem is in such a wild west world, one gunslinger normally emerges as the apex predator.

In my story, I call this character "The Zero Balance” - A bioengineered cyborg hiding underground, manipulating Bitcoin’s and most cryptocurrencies’ supply to his/her little-known ends. Usually to just burn them all.

(Manipulating fiat money account values is trivial for them).

Why would it work?

From the simple fact that destruction is easier than construction, burning BTC takes nearly no work while mining BTC takes a lot of work.

Surfing entropic decay is easy, reversing entropy is hard magic.

The Zero Balance could even be the reason that they are saving the climate. Culling BTC’s footprint to make it weaker.

Truth is, though, people hate being told what to do. By forcing people to hold fewer BTC and other crypto reserves, their interest in it becomes greater.

BTC Hulk can’t take people who try to beat him into submission.

Another fact is that one dev, like one chess player, can rule them all.

So The Zero Balance would be a lone ranger, and he would be perfect.

Until another Zero Balance takes his position.

Wonder what world this would create.

Where money is best shared freely and never hoarded.

A pretty decent world, perhaps.

Hulk vs Superman (BTC vs Quantum Computers)

Now while Artificial Intelligence has no hope of actually hacking a Bitcoin wallet, a Quantum Computer does have this hope.

Hell, a quantum computer could be so powerful it could hack any and all our electronic circuits. The same way a massive magnetic storm/EMP fries all electronics.

Imo, a quantum computer works better as a digital shredding machine, not a secrets-uncovering machine.

(Maybe we shall use it to erase all the child porn lurking in the shadows).

In fact, a quantum computer could destroy large parts of the digital world the same way a nuclear bomb could destroy large parts of the physical world.

It could be bye-bye NFTs on some marketplace, for example.

(Say after the Bitcoin OP_CAT protocol connects to quantum computers in a bid to solve Merkle tree search).

Would Bitcoin stand a chance?

Well... “The Quantum Hacker ” - a genius quantum computer scientist living underground with his ‘secret’ quantum computing behemoth, would have achieved what The Zero Balance would not have achieved if they mess with Bitcoin big time.

However, his energy signature would give him away. The problem with using a lot of energy is that you cannot hide yourself after the fact.

Too many people will notice.

They’ll then attack you, arraign you before a judge who will imprison you for an eternity in Azkaban, and they’ll rebuild their Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a Phoenix. Like Smartphones, it’s going nowhere.

Future of the 3 Energy Guzzlers

As we said, Bitcoin can live on a smaller energy budget if people become more honest.

Like Dr. Bruce Banner and not Hulk, it has more work to do helping us solve scientific fintech problems.

And its siblings - AI and Quantum Computing. What of them?

Given their possibly insatiable energy appetite, they might be largely imprisoned on planet Mercury. To enjoy an extreme of heat for AI, and cold for quantum computing.

The way they like it.

Down on earth, the BAQ (Bitcoin/Blockchain, Quantum Computing, and AI) triad could be one of the most fun and most crucial technological collabos on the internet.

Anybody with big AI or Quantum Computing skills could try to integrate Bitcoin into their experimentation.

For example, AI robots like Sophia and fully AI chatbots should be given a chance to hold wallets and make money in crypto, build ads, and engineer new chain solutions. Meanwhile, quantum developers could forget modeling climate for a change and try to generate weak/strong passwords for crypto wallets, weak/strong comm channels for Bitcoin and crypto txs, or model Bitcoin mechanics on QCs to see strengths and weaknesses either in code or hardware design (AI is also handy for this one).

This is penetration testing like nothing before.

Certainly, because big tradfi money flows into AI and Quantum Computing, many experts therein wouldn’t touch DeFi more less Bitcoin with a ten-foot pole.

We are still early.