(Note: The below described issue is entirely separate from the current AGW, GCC or fossil fuel emissions releated woes of Bitcoin economy and would remain an issue even if the future of mining becomes entirely solar, wind powered!)
Polish SF writer and futurologist Stanislaw Lem is best known for his space romance novel Solaris and the adventures of pilot Pirx, but he also wrote the Diaries of Ijon Tichy, short stories about a freak-science news reporter.
In one such story titled Professor Donda an excentric genius computer boffin leaves MIT after his project is denied big funding and enters services of a central african dictator, whose poor country soon buys a top of range IBM mainframe and acquires high-capacity memory units for it through smuggling. Meanwhile envoys sent by the dictator collect or purchase collections of curses, jinxes, hexes, cusses and any expressions of ill wishes, all around the world in any languages. Prof. Donda publishes a paper in a junk-tier sci journal, about a new a system of measurements for digitally processed, ESP-derived information but noone believes he's that loony.
Ijon is asked to investigate due to his skill in approaching weirdos. He travels on site and learns Donda sold the project to the dictator and his tribal clan promising to digitize, index and re-combine all of the world's jinxes in the mainframe - resulting in such a gravity of grudge that heads of neighbouring enemy countries and those of rival clans will surely drop dead. Ijon befriends Donda and witnesses him manipulate people in power and corrupt bureaucrats to obtain ever more funding for advanced hardware - especially high density RAM upgrades and a super sensitive balance which can detect weight differences less than ten millionth of a carat even in large objects. He uses a fraction of the computer's power to crudely optimize the country's sketchy economy, resulting in a boom that lends him credence and infocomm use starts to spread in the capital city.
Eventually Ijon accompanies Donda on a jungle mission to secure an old drum made of sacred monkey hide for a tribal elder whose favours cannot be bought through bribes. During their journey the suprisingly skilled survivalist prof reveals something is expected to happen soon in the capital while the mainframe runs an unprecedented large batch job. Indeed, one night Ijon turns on the shortwave radio to listen to world news as usual, but there is silence on all stations, even local AM radio only emits unmodulated. Eventually they reach a town but its teletype link is down.
Donda explains they are trekking to be safe in the countryside since there must be unrest in the capital already. He explain his masterplan: research at MIT led him to notice theoretical inconsistencies in the ratio between energy, matter and information, even though all 3 can be transformed into each other. To precisely determine mass of information he wanted a huge computer to fill and a super-balance to measure it but academics dislike controversial ideas. In his quest for funding of a comp-sci breakthrough, Donda exploited the stupidity of a corporal-turned-dictator who still believes in witch healers, etc. After all, flavour of processed information doesnt matter, it can be wisdom or pure BS as long as lots of it can be collected. Using RAM built with highest density memory modules, the mainframe eventully collected so much jinx in such a tightly packed space that its info mass equivalent reached singularity and was entirely erased in an act of creating a child universe.
Prof. Donda however, expected the singularity event to be localized within the horizon of his IBM mainframe and not cause a runaway effect that wipes out all tightly packed (i.e. electronically stored) information in a shockwave travelling at the speed of light around the world, into the solar system and beyond. Months later they encounter a drifting ballonist bringing news that sail ships fleeing from USA and Europe reported outbreak of war as their infotech-based societies collapsed. Donda predicts tech civilization can be rebuilt in a few generations if care is taken to stictly limit density of storage but remarks our own Universe may had also been created in a similar mishap...
Well, Bitcoin is not primarily about storing large volumes of information, though the need to have a copy of all transactions since Day 1 in each participating system is kind of heavy. Yet, if information has equivalence (transformability) to/from energy and consequently mass, then each Bitcoin represents a weight proportional to the energy expended for its creation (E=mc2). Surely, current ASIC miners turn almost all of their 2-3kW per piece power consumption to mere waste heat, but superconducting circuits and quantum computing will raise the efficiency of turning energy into information to near the theoretical maximum as allowed by Shannon and Carnot, so most of each Watt burned will end up in a byte rather than heat.
Currently it takes 12 to 25 Terawatt-hours of electric energy to mine a single Bitcoin (estimates vary widely between those extremes) but that already huge number could soon increase 10 or 100-fold if demand for crypto currency continues to rise. Until 2140 AD mining energy usage could grow a further 1018 times even with max. efficiency advances. Thus a single Bitcoin mined during the last days could represent so much energy used up in its creation as to be equivalent to a large star. Imagine storing such a bitcoin on a then-current 512 exabyte Micro-SD card where memory cells are only 3 muons across and voila you have enough density of info = energy = MASS to cause a singularity, creating a cosmological black hole that proceeds to swallow ... what? Info, matter, the planet wholesale with mankind included?
Alternatively, Bitcoin system could be seen as a world simulation breaker attempt, i.e. when the info-singularity event happens the VM which runs our Universe won't be able to handle the exception and crashes, kind of opening a hole in the sky and man gets to see Gods. (Note: cyber-nihilism thinks we all don't exist and just being run inside a simulation. In recent years this theory been researched in several universities for experimental proof, with grants provided by a few dotcom billionaires.)
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