Hypothesis:
bitcoin is well-modeled as an emergent superintelligence optimizing for btc instead of paperclips. If so, we've got a problem.
It will be too big to fail and we will close a school somewhere to bail out the value of a string of ascii.
The governments of the world could, at great cost to themselves, but not beyond what they could withstand if necessary, I think, destroy bitcoin.
If bitcoin was a superintelligence, I think it would have dealt with that already?
Just because something can be modeled as an intelligent agent in some respects doesn't mean that it has extreme intelligence.
The agent that is bitcoin is only one part of the agent which is the market. People mine bitcoin because they want to, often because they want to profit monetarily. They profit monetarily because people want bitcoin. People want bitcoin for a variety of reasons, but mainly for either speculation, or for ease of certain types of monetary transactions.
If we say that bitcoin wants btc to be mined, what does gold want? Does gold want gold to be mined? I realize that there are of course differences, and important ones, but I'm not sure why they contribute much to bitcoin being modeled as intelligent.
I suppose that the possibility of bitcoin changing as a system in a way that people agree on might change something, but I'm not sure how much.
If bitcoin were truly optimizing for the amount of bitcoin in existence, and was able to modify itself to this end, why wouldn't it remove the block reward halving feature?
No, instead, the rate of bitcoin production mostly aligns with the originally intended schedule. The difficulty is adjusted over time in order to keep the time between blocks relatively constant.
The incentive for miners is not "If you use more computational power, the (expected value of the) amount of bitcoin produced will be greater, and you will get that extra amount.". It is "If you use more computational power, the amount of bitcoin produced will be the same, but you are likely to get a larger proportion of it.".
It doesn't act by incentivizing people to take actions which cause there to be more bitcoin (uh, on the margin I mean). As incentivizing people is the only way that it acts, it therefore doesn't act to maximize the amount of bitcoin produced.
So, it is not an agent acting to maximize the amount of bitcoin produced.
Hm, in that case...
It is true that those holding bitcoin are incentivized to cause the price to increase (though this is also true of other currencies.)
But I'm still not sure how it behaves "acts" particularly intelligently towards that end.
Do you mean maximizing the total value of bitcoin, or the price of 1 bitcoin?
I don't think bitcoin is able to incentivize people to increase the price of one bitcoin if it comes at the cost of them having less value overall (e.g. if there is an action that would lead to everyone having 1/3 as much bitcoin (with the rest becoming unrecoverable) and it also resulted in the price of bitcoin doubling, the people holding bitcoin wouldn't be incentivized to collectively take that action.), so its ability to maximize the price of 1 bitcoin doesn't seem like a goal it could achieve maximally ruthlessly.
Maximizing the total value of bitcoin held...
hm, I'm still not seeing how modeling it as extremely intelligent helps.
By "Optimizing for BTC" do you mean optimizing for the highest number of transactions? You can't mean total BTC outstanding because that's pegged to an equation.
And in terms of the "intelligence" are you referring to the protocol itself, or the human/machine apparatus around it that's trying to make money?
On the face of it, it doesn't seem particularly different the the "emergent superintelligence" optimizing for USD, but I like your idea of looking for emerging fixed incentive structures as a place for AIs to run amok.
Clarification: I should have said "optimizing for value of BTC".
Not protocol, the emergent system that has as its goal the maximization of the value of BTC.
Creating bitcoins is merely a subgoal, developed as a means to propagate more freely between regions controlled by hostile agents.
I don't know the endgame, but consider if the rational decision of any investor becomes, with high confidence, to convert most of their money to bitcoin. What happens to the rest of the economy?