This is how we know that mankind cannot be trusted to develop harness and maintain an all-powerful AGI :
absolutely everybody who is working on the project is more interested in the value of their own stock options than what happens in the future when this thing gets loose.
Bitcoin was bad enough. Decentralized, digital money! Networked computers with spare CPU cycles (think, SETI@Home project) cranking out something VALUABLE!
A developer named Laszlo Hanyecz was the first person to use Bitcoin for a commercial transaction, on May 22, 2010, when Bitcoin was a little over a year old, he bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. The day is now known as "Bitcoin Pizza Day."
Completely unregulated, other people create other forks of cryptocurrency, and use them to PUMP UP the value of Bitcoin itself. Computers in far corners of the universe generate trillions of "Tether" coins, which are then used to buy BTC.
A digital asset, that always goes UP! Numbers go UP! That got everyone's attention.
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Now those two pizzas cost Laszlo 380 million dollars. Cryptocurrencies drain more electricity than the entire country of Argentina.
And just when it seemed things couldn't get any worse, they started selling NON-FUNGIBLE digital assets, like a unique URL pointing to a JPG image online. For 69 Million US Dollars!
In 2009 the TARP program was the US Government buying shares of high-finance companies that were about to go bankrupt --- using taxpayer dollars. So now the American taxpayers own Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and AIG? No, it didn't really work out that way, did it.
Also, the number of people who were paying a $300,000 mortgage for a house that was only worth $180,000 was incredibly high.
Hope somebody can come up with a list of ways that a dramatic crypto crash will cause harm to US taxpayers --- again.
I really wish he would keep riffing on the neuro-scientific fundamental principles that always assume "the future will continue to exist, of course it will" as a way to explain and describe religions and how and why they exist, he was about to come up with a Grand Unifying Theory that could "solve" religion... he was so close....
Every person on Earth, using their country's Unique Identifier credentials (like Social Security Number, National Insurance Number) to identify themselves to Facebook, will be entitled to receive their "forty acres" of Metaverse land, at a going rate of $1000 per acre, a value of $40,000. Just for signing in to claim it! Everyone will rush to create Facebook accounts and claim their land. And/or sell their land to others.
Meanwhile, Facebook has found a way to pretend that the "space" in their MMORPG is valuable, and will just be raking in the money, they'll need to hire extra guys with rakes.
absolutely everybody who is working on the project is more interested in the value of their own stock options than what happens in the future when this thing gets loose.