"I wonder if someone will hack Bitcoin will day". This question pops up from time to time so I looked into it. The answer's a bit mind-warping.
In 14 years, Bitcoin's underlying protocol has never been successfully hacked to date. But services built on top of Bitcoin's network like exchanges and wallets, have been compromised.
From how in 2014 Mt.Gox, a Bitcon Exchange, was hacked and thousands of Bitcoins were stolen. Or how FTX went insolvent as the result of fraud and money laundering.
I reckon if there's a point where Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning get advanced enough to brute-force hacking Bitcoin, the only constraint would be energy.
I asked ChatGPT4 what would it take to hack Bitcoin and if it could make it easier to visualize what that would mean in units of energy.
ChatGPT4 came back referencing that it would need an incomprehensible amount of energy.
So I followed up asking if ChatGPT4 could visualize this for me with the energy from our sun as a unit of measurement.
ChatGPT4 was clear that it would be an unfathomable amount of energy needed. It would take an obscene amount of suns to generate the energy to even begin to hack bitcoin. And that amount of energy from suns don't even exist in this universe.
Another way to conceptualize this is the Beach SandMetaphor. Imagine every single grain of sand on every beach in the world. Now, picture each grain representing a full lifetime of the universe (about 13.8 billion years).
Even if you were to go through each grain one by one, each lasting as long as the universe has existed, you'd need to repeat this process for every grain of sand on every beach in 1.29 septillion universes (that's 1.29 followed by 24 zeros) to approach the time needed for this cryptographic task.
It’s crazy and incomprehensible.
Mathhh.
Originally, I was worried because of AI brute forcing hacking with developments of Large Language Models (LLM, e.g. ChatGPT). But realized it requires energy
Theoretically, let's say Artificial Intelligence gets so advanced, it can jump to an infinite amount of multiverses. This would give way to an infinite amount of suns.
By the time AI harnesses multiverse amounts of unlimited suns, there’s bigger problems to worry about.
I heard from Jordan Peterson that the sense of awe and wonder is the result of phenomena, a feeling of the divine.
We're all either cosmic dust in an infinite multiverse or cosmic beings in a infinite multiverse. I choose to believe we're cosmic beings. Life's more fun that way.
See below for ChatGPT4's full response.
If you want to dwell down the rabbit hole of being a Time God, watch one of my favorite videos called Timelapse of the Future. It's a journey through what feels like infinite time. This gave me a feeling of awe. Maybe it'll do the same for you.
