"But we spent all this energy to prove that the work done by our distributed mining networks could be trusted. It's trusted!

Aliens: "Um, so... yeah, we were more interested in trading novel technologies and refueling our ships. But seeing as you all look like you're starving to death and have destroyed your system's resources, how about we just donate a few universal constructors and a bunch of feed stock for them. We've got enough fuel to make it to Proxima Centauri, so we're good for now. Oh-- we're hard coding the universal constructors to "food" only though because your life choices have been... well never mind that, our philosophy is not to judge."

Uninvited additional aliens: “hey guys, sorry to interrupt, you should try protomolecule-chain. It solves the problem of boot-strapping an interstellar proof-of-work ledger. There’s some problems with inter dimensional dragon environmentalists, but that’s neither here nor there.”

Don't worry, long before then we'll pass the Crypo Event Horizon, when it becomes uneconomical to compute anything but crypto, and civilization will gratefully collapse. Our descendents will curse the blockchain and evolve other means for exchange of value.

Right now a non-trivial chunk of compute power, storage and engineering effort is spent on advertising and marketing. I'd rather take crypto, at least it's easier to ignore.

Marketing doesn't inflate hardware prices by 500 %.

That's debatable, and really depends on what hardware you count.

Precious metals are reasonably compact, easy to store and have inherent value due to their relative rarity.

Bring back the gold standard, and enjoy your popcorn as the entire solar system rushes to build supermassive particle accelerators that bombard base metals with all sorts of stuff until they turn into gold. It really is the same principle as brute-forcing meaningless hashes until you get a predetermined prefix. Only in this case the desired prefix has 79 protons.

Black hole accretion disks are more efficient for that:

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464790d2497de

Things only have value for their utility. Anything else is a consensual hallucination.

There is some overlap here with the plot of a science fiction book Accelerando. I guess the singularity is here but it's not what we expected.

> science fiction book Accelerando

For those who haven't read it yet, it's available for free on the author's website: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

Ah yes-- I remember reading that around the time it was released and couldn't really wrap my head around was "economics 2.0" was actually supposed to be. 16 years later I'm starting to understand.

That's one smart book

That comment makes me miss Douglas Adams.

This reminds me of my sci-fi dystopia idea:

An intergalactic network of wormholes enables rapid travel and communication between worlds, but the collective energy output of the universe's stars is devoted entirely to bitcoin mining, ultimately accelerating the heat death of the universe.

Stars burn whether the energy they produce is used or not, so this doesn't accelerate the heat death of the universe. You'd have to merge stars for that (because larger, heavier stars have a higher rate of fusion).

Technically if you wanted to maximize energy production you would split every star apart into dwarf stars that lived 100s of billions of years. You don't want them burning at all. Then you would take their matter and dump it in a black hole and capture that energy.

That's the premise of Xeelee Sequence novels :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeelee_Sequence

Not to mention if you could get total conversion of mass to energy going, you could just scare all the stars into inert hydrogen icebergs and use the hydrogen to fuel your total conversion reactors. Much more efficient than fusion.

Another thought, an advanced bitcoin miner type thing uses new physics where the environmental destruction used to power it is basically to increase the progress of the Big Rip (perhaps only locally though), but maybe the reason we always thought expansion of space was always happening is because older aliens were already doing the same thing for their blockchains.

I can only recommend Accelerando from Charles Stross.

I wish he’d start writing science based speculative fiction again.

The Laundry Files are pretty entertaining.

That they are! But Accelerando and many of his other earlier books were mind-blowing.

Sometimes I need to take a break from the singularity, you know?

Sure, but it's almost been a decade!