This is the clear replacement for computational resources when the EMP apocalypse that so much fiction predicts finally comes about.
There will be accelerated breading programs selecting for ever smaller & smaller crab sizes, and while Intel is stuck trying to perfect 10 centimeter crabs, TSMC will be creating cutting-edge football field sized processors running on 3 centimeter crabs.
Garbage collection in code will take on a whole new meaning as dead crabs are aggressively removed and repurposed into the local food supply, while protestors picket TSMC because the edible crab meat from 3cm crabs is miniscule & uneconomical to extract.
Bitcoin will become massively deflationary as hash rates plummet and vast quantities of the world's computation & food supply are turned towards mining 1 or 2 blocks a year, but transaction fees sky rocket.
Hilarious comment. But this is HN so I have to nitpick the minor flaws I noticed:
> Bitcoin will become massively deflationary as hash rates plummet and vast quantities of the world's computation & food supply are turned towards mining 1 or 2 blocks a year, but transaction fees sky rocket.
(1) Mining difficulty is scaled to the hashpower of the network. In the long run the EV of ten minute time between blocks is maintained.
(2) Fun fact, BTC tx fees already spiked high years back, during the bitcoin civil war. The day I had to pay an $80 transaction fee was the day I dumped BTC and never looked back. The tx fees were not due to some true technical limitation but rather an artificially imposed constraint when BTC got taken over from within by a faction that wrested control of /r/bitcoin and censored all dissent, convincing the unending hordes of speculators that the block size was a holy constant that could never be touched without ruining the vaguely-defined “decentralization”. Just a fun bit of history that felt relevant.
> Mining difficulty is scaled to the hashpower of the network. In the long run the EV of ten minute time between blocks is maintained.
The key part here is “in the long run”. IIRC the difficulty is only adapted after a certain number of mined block, so in case of a mining power collapse you still need to mine blocks at the old difficulty for a while, which would be really slow in the aforementioned scenario before a really long time has elapsed (more than a thousand years).
Anyway, in such scenario, you would probably not have a worldwide reliable network anymore, so the whole concept of bitcoin would just be be obsolete.
> the block size could never be touched without ruining the vaguely-defined “decentralization”
Fun fact: All forks of Bitcoin which attempted to remove it actually ruined their decentralization in the process and are now either dead or valued <1/100 of Bitcoin. Seems like the market values a stable and secure Layer 1 over altcoins promising free lunches.
When the hash rates are at 1 per month, I don't think we will have enough hashing power, probabilistically, to match 10 minute marks. Verification of the hash to validate and consent to the block will also be at 1 per month, for consideration.
> Ethical note: No specific license was required for this work. The duration of any single experiment was so short that each crab never reached dangerous level, that the crabs were kept in comfortable condition, and that after all experiments the crabs were released to their natural habitats. Furthermore, on visual inspection,no crabs appeared to have been injured or adversely affected by the experiments.
The way this ethical note is phrased seems to suggest the experimenters basically went to the beach and picked up a bunch of crabs and then released them again, as opposed to any sort of standardized procurement process, which I find amusing.
It's particularly amusing given that, once the experiment was done, it would have been perfectly acceptable to toss them all into a boiling pot of water at a local restaurant.
As a matter of fact, loosely construed, that might be what they means by "natural habitat"
How would one prove that? It's easy to show crabs can make logic gates - just do it. How would you prove wombats can't ever implement logic gates? Maybe you just used the wrong treats, and peanut butter snacks would make them motivated enough to train.
> It's easy to show crabs can make logic gates - just do it
That's just an artifact of the way we reason about the world. We take as an assumption that induction works for "positive" events (we showed that these crabs can make logic gates) and can't accept the same evidence when it pertains to "negative" events (we showed that crab movements _are not_ uniformly random -- no you didn't; what if you didn't feed the crabs the right kind of peanut butter?).
What's more complex: the logical gate made of crabs or an individual crab? What's more complex, a corporation or a person? A worm or a single cell in a worm?
It would take an AWFUL lot of crabs acting as logic gates to model a crab brain or an entire crab. A single logic gate by itself is clearly less complex than a soldier crab.
But if you really could model a crab brain perfectly in a turing machine (not clear you can), then let's make a crab brain out of crab logic gates, and then use those mega-crab-brains to make more mega logic gates, and put together a bunch of those to... you'd probably run out of crabs.
Although now I question my original statement -- is a single logic gage made out of crabs clearly less complex than a crab? I mean, it's made out of multiple crabs, how can it be less complex than one crab?
As a software engineer I'm so used to thinking abstraction, that I just sealed it off as a "a logic gate, don't look below the covers".
A logic gate made of crabs is a "leaky abstraction" when the crabs start dying, need to be fed, etc.
The law of large numbers let's you abstract in such a way that the group can appear simpler than the individual unit. Of course, to fully simulate it across every single possible scenario, one would need to model all the individual units in order to accurately model the group, and so technically the group is more complex to fully model.
Unclear if question is genuine, but I would say that each level is capable of performing computations (and/or acting in the world) in ways which are inaccessible to other layers.
I know saying 'things are hard' is an obvious conclusion, but that doesn't make it wrong!
'Soldier crab' is a name attached to several unrelated crustaceans. The crustaceans studied in the paper are a variety of soldier crabs that are, in fact, true crabs.
Readit News
There will be accelerated breading programs selecting for ever smaller & smaller crab sizes, and while Intel is stuck trying to perfect 10 centimeter crabs, TSMC will be creating cutting-edge football field sized processors running on 3 centimeter crabs.
Garbage collection in code will take on a whole new meaning as dead crabs are aggressively removed and repurposed into the local food supply, while protestors picket TSMC because the edible crab meat from 3cm crabs is miniscule & uneconomical to extract.
Bitcoin will become massively deflationary as hash rates plummet and vast quantities of the world's computation & food supply are turned towards mining 1 or 2 blocks a year, but transaction fees sky rocket.
> Bitcoin will become massively deflationary as hash rates plummet and vast quantities of the world's computation & food supply are turned towards mining 1 or 2 blocks a year, but transaction fees sky rocket.
(1) Mining difficulty is scaled to the hashpower of the network. In the long run the EV of ten minute time between blocks is maintained.
(2) Fun fact, BTC tx fees already spiked high years back, during the bitcoin civil war. The day I had to pay an $80 transaction fee was the day I dumped BTC and never looked back. The tx fees were not due to some true technical limitation but rather an artificially imposed constraint when BTC got taken over from within by a faction that wrested control of /r/bitcoin and censored all dissent, convincing the unending hordes of speculators that the block size was a holy constant that could never be touched without ruining the vaguely-defined “decentralization”. Just a fun bit of history that felt relevant.
The key part here is “in the long run”. IIRC the difficulty is only adapted after a certain number of mined block, so in case of a mining power collapse you still need to mine blocks at the old difficulty for a while, which would be really slow in the aforementioned scenario before a really long time has elapsed (more than a thousand years).
Anyway, in such scenario, you would probably not have a worldwide reliable network anymore, so the whole concept of bitcoin would just be be obsolete.
Fun fact: All forks of Bitcoin which attempted to remove it actually ruined their decentralization in the process and are now either dead or valued <1/100 of Bitcoin. Seems like the market values a stable and secure Layer 1 over altcoins promising free lunches.
The way this ethical note is phrased seems to suggest the experimenters basically went to the beach and picked up a bunch of crabs and then released them again, as opposed to any sort of standardized procurement process, which I find amusing.
As a matter of fact, loosely construed, that might be what they means by "natural habitat"
"Logic Gates Can't Be Implemented by Wombats"
But I get what you are saying, if I were writing a paper it would be along the lines of:
"Response reinforcement in wombats: Failure to obtain logic gate behaviors".
That's just an artifact of the way we reason about the world. We take as an assumption that induction works for "positive" events (we showed that these crabs can make logic gates) and can't accept the same evidence when it pertains to "negative" events (we showed that crab movements _are not_ uniformly random -- no you didn't; what if you didn't feed the crabs the right kind of peanut butter?).
Logic Gates Can Be Implemented by Wombats
Deleted Comment
But if you really could model a crab brain perfectly in a turing machine (not clear you can), then let's make a crab brain out of crab logic gates, and then use those mega-crab-brains to make more mega logic gates, and put together a bunch of those to... you'd probably run out of crabs.
https://youtu.be/xP5-iIeKXE8
As a software engineer I'm so used to thinking abstraction, that I just sealed it off as a "a logic gate, don't look below the covers".
A logic gate made of crabs is a "leaky abstraction" when the crabs start dying, need to be fed, etc.
Deleted Comment
I know saying 'things are hard' is an obvious conclusion, but that doesn't make it wrong!