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Comment by DavidSJ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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

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.

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