One day a swarm of self replicating probes will turn up and start building a Dyson sphere around our sun. The purpose is to power the alien equivalent of Bitcoin mining.

Another storyline I came up with is this: Imagine that an alien civilisation has the ability to send electromagnetic signals faster than light by some mechanism such as a micro wormhole but not ships and such.

They still want to destroy other civilisations before they become a threat. They are able to connect to some unsecured wifi networks and start posting on forums. The username: Satoshi Nakamoto

Consider a Blockchain where proof-of-work mining takes place by solving a hard problem: for a given set of parameters, determine how long life will last in a realistic ancestor simulation. Consider also a play-to-earn game in the form of a realistic ancestor simulation where players grind menial portions of the game and sell the artifacts of their progress in a market backed by the aforementioned Blockchain. With apologies to Bostrom, we must accept exactly one of these as true:

- that this is not technologically possible with current or future tech

- no one would possibly do something this stupid

- it is nearly 100% certain that our universe exists in someone's hair-brained web3 Ponzi scheme

You forgot the possibility that the outside civilisation is destroyed (eg by itself) before such simulation technology becomes technically feasible.

Not sure whether I should welcome my simulator overlords or search for weaknesses in Bostrom's argument.

Wow this is so weird, I've had this exact same idea before! I don't know if you're familiar with Dark Forest strikes from the Dark Forest book, but in the book, or the one after that, aliens use bombs that slow the speed of light in the space of single solar systems, to prevent civilizations from becoming threats. Always thought it would be funny if actual dark forest strikes were just the bitcoin whitepaper and bitcoin/crypto eventually use up all available resources before civilization can become a problem lol. Hope someone makes this an actual story someday.

This is gold!

Considering Humanity's capacity and even drive for destruction (entropy incarnate, that's us), by having handed us this concept they will have certainly accelerated the destruction of potentially hostile civilisations... but also their own, the rest of the universe, and whatever surrounds it.

There is some really good fiction to be found in this vein on https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY/

Would torrent this movie

crypto is basically mimetic crack.

Isn't this roughly what happened in Accelerando? We split the solar system and gave everything below the asteroid belt over to the marketing bots.

Yep. It's a good book. To read it from the author's site: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

Economics 2.0 in the later third of the story.

> Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally becoming visible on a cosmological scale.

> There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone around old Earth. Earth's biosphere has been in the intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization can fix them – gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball of wool the size of a young red giant.