Satoshi Nakamoto?
1) How scary would it be to realize that Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Unfriendly AI slowly creating an insane amount of wealth? (For a broader, but more positive context read Max Tegmark’s intro chapter “The Tale of the Omega Team” from his book “Life 3.0″, pg 3-21)
2) Proof that “Satoshi Nakamoto is either: 1) dead or in prison, OR 2) is not a human”: Any human who is alive and free would have withdrawn from their initial Bitcoin wallet by now.
3) Nobody will ever shutdown Bitcoin as long as its making them money! That plus distributed blockchain. How is that not a recipe for CPU immortality?
4) And if I’m wrong: LessWrong, will you make it your mission to figure out who Satoshi Nakamoto is? To make sure they are… human.
5) If I was a superintelligent AGI with lots of money, I’d pay Elon Musk whatever money he wants to create physical startups that will be able to create Terminators and go to Space.
Why would a human withdraw from the account but an AI wouldn’t? It seems like you’re assuming either:
The correct decision is to not withdraw the money. No human could be smart enough to figure this out, but an AI would. Are you an AI?
The correct decision is to withdraw the money, and the AI is stupidly not doing it. Why is the AI stupider than a human?
I suppose Bitcoin’s wastefulness would be a good cover for an AI wanting to use a bunch of computers without making people suspicious. I doubt it’s the fastest way a super intelligent AI could make money though.
Uhm, Satoshi has 1 million bitcoins, which is $6.8B right now. He has made that over 9 years. How many other companies / people have done that? This is a ridiculous outlier. What kind of human wouldn’t start using that money by now? May be a very wealthy billionaire, may be a large company, or may be AGI. But the probability it’s one of the first two that doesn’t care about a few extra billion dollars decreases every day.
Obvious kinds of humans include:
Dead humans. (Who didn’t manage to leave the coins to their heirs.)
Cryonically preserved humans hoping to use them later. (Including an obvious specific candidate.)
Humans optimistic enough about Bitcoin to think current prices are too low. (We know Nakamoto had resources, so it seems a safe bet that they could keep living on ordinary means for now.)
And the obvious: you don’t know that all of Nakamoto’s coins fit the standard assumed profile. It’s entirely possible they intentionally mined some with the regular setup and are spending a few from that pool.
If Satoshi Nakomoto would be an AGI that would be very strange because it means that the AGI has a lot less power than we would assume.
The fact that you mention Terminator in this way suggests that you have a bad model of AGI. Terminator is far from what any of the serious people who think about AI-risk are thinking about.
An AGI also doesn’t have to outsource the development of hardware to another person such as Musk.
On the subject Gwern (used to be a LW regular) invest a significant amount of time into the question of who Satoshi Nakomoto happens to be. Enough for him to be the person which a person “leaked” information when they wanted to impersonate Nakomoto.
> How scary would it be to realize that Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Unfriendly AI slowly creating an insane amount of wealth?
Extremely scary, and equally unlikely. It’s vastly more probable that there are more mundane reasons for the lack of withdrawals, e.g. he lost the thumb drive containing the necessary private keys, or deliberately destroyed the ability to access that wallet earlier in the project before it became clear how valuable it would become.
Bitcoin blockchain == Clippy
Satoshi Nakomoto == Deep Mind??
I mean, just on priors, how likely is it that “Satoshi Nakomoto” can’t be found precisely because they are not a real person (and are an AGI)? (Or a large organization / billionnaire, I suppose.)
Relatedly, basic advice for AI companies: never, ever hire anyone remote you haven’t met in person.
If there’s an AGI out there, it being hired by AI companies isn’t an important worry.