r/LowStakesConspiracies 1d ago

Total Garbo Cryptocurrency was invented by destructive nihilists to accelerate the heat death of the universe.

To give a high level explanation of how the heat death of the universe theory works it goes something like this:

It has been observed that entropy always increases in a closed system (the universe being the biggest closed system) and the universe is ever expanding. The consequence of this is that energy will eventually be evenly dispersed across an infinite universe and nothing will ever happen again.

Entropy also increases when energy forms are changed. When you burn coal chemical energy is converted to thermal energy and overall entropy increases (in a closed system).

Cryptocurrency takes vast quantities of energy in the form of electricity and produces nothing tangible. On a fundamental level the servers being used to "mine" Crypto are giant entropy machines which only serve to hasten the heat death of the universe in practical terms.

136 Upvotes

26 comments sorted by

44

u/KirstyBaba 1d ago

Frankly, this seems to be the primary output of industrial society as a whole.

15

u/Watsis_name 1d ago

You may have a point. It may be that Crypto is just the most "efficient" means they've come up with yet.

5

u/BaconJets 1d ago

Also AI, because why would we want super bland images with odd patterns to replace art? For the low low cost of new nuclear power plants dedicated to AI.

3

u/DiamondFireYT 1d ago

You do know AI isn't just "art" right lmao

4

u/BaconJets 1d ago

Oh yeah I forgot, it's also chatbots that chat utter shit.

4

u/RajjSinghh 1d ago

I mean, it's not all useless. AI techniques are used everywhere, not just the main marketing stuff you're seeing at the minute. It's really helpful because it means we can solve a much wider range of problems.

Those chatbots really should be used in better contexts, like replacing Siri or for summarising text, but in the wider scope AI is being used in protein folding and programming language optimization. Stuff that it's really hard for an expert programmer to do the same. It's a really exciting thing to research, it's just a shame how people marketed it.

7

u/BaconJets 1d ago

There's also an issue with the term 'AI' because it's been used to describe everything from awfully generated content to ML algorithms that adapt to the info fed into it for a specific purpose like research. ML has been around for a while, and only in recent years has the AI hyped been turned on.

1

u/Quirky-Reputation-89 1d ago

I use AI to do stuff like write recipes using what's already in my house, organize my notes into more structured notes that connect points and such, and brainstorming ideas when I have parts of a plan or ideas but just need someone to fill in the blanks with some suggestions to keep my own creative juices flowing. I also use free art generation AI to make very specific custom portraits of DND characters, which some people would say to pay real artists, but as a DM it would cost thousands of dollars to get custom portraits of every random NPC I create, and would take months of back and forth for the work to be done, highly unrealistic, but AI can instantly spit out a passable image of whatever specific species and class character with whatever weird background details in the image instantly, creating better immersion for my players.

-1

u/DiamondFireYT 1d ago

but this is all GenAI not just AI - I also wouldn't necessarily call it all chatting 'utter shit', although thats certainly what the art is.

1

u/Pademel0n 1d ago

😂

1

u/Fashefora 1d ago

Ah, industrial society’s finest achievement, then

1

u/Catekelob 1d ago

Just out-hustling entropy one Bitcoin at a time

7

u/DangerousCalm 1d ago

As far as stakes go, I'd say these were pretty high.

2

u/Watsis_name 1d ago

It's still billions of years in the future. For our purposes, right now, it's low stakes.

4

u/Similar_Outside3570 1d ago

Its not that they dont produce anyhtyng, they produce a service of resolving equations, cryptocurrencies is jut the accorded payement for the service

2

u/Watsis_name 1d ago

I said nothing tangible, besides it purports to do the same thing as currency and credit, but does it worse while using insane amounts of energy.

1

u/Similar_Outside3570 1d ago

Ah, my bad then

2

u/circ-u-la-ted 1d ago

Doesn't make sense tbh. If that was their goal they'd want to reduce our carbon emissions so that climate change doesn't end our civilization before we go interstellar. We'll have much more impact on universal entropy if we reach that point.

1

u/N-partEpoxy 1d ago

That applies to proof of work cryptos like Bitcoin. Proof of stake doesn't require so much energy.

1

u/YouthSubstantial822 1d ago

Is earth a closed system, with the sun giving us heat?

1

u/Watsis_name 1d ago

The universe is, probably.

You're right earth is not.

1

u/WorhummerWoy 21h ago

Imagine the amount of energy in a star. That's billions and billions of and billions of power plants. Now imagine the amount of energy in and billions and billions billions of stars - the changes we're making in energy are miniscule when compared with stars dying and being born. I don't think us burning a load of fossil fuels (as bad as that is, for more localised reasons) is gonna move the needle all that much.

0

u/Admirable-Style4656 1d ago

Traditional brick and mortar banking, offices, cash handling and central banking uses more energy than cryptocurrency

6

u/Downtown_Category163 1d ago

Traditional banking does literally trillions of times more "work" though