In Max Tegmark’s book Life 3.0, the sentient AI raises capital by creating a media company and then commercializing inventions, which gradually overtake those of human-run companies and come to dominate the marketplace.
That approach sounds too much like a human trying to imagine the best ideas of a superintelligence. Like someone trying to imagine the supercars of the future in the age of the steam engine.
Seems to me that creating a bunch of new currencies with ready exchange to USD, blowing up a quick bubble of demand, and then cashing out at the peak would be a lot more the type of operation you’d expect from a superintelligence.
I’m not making any serious suppositions here — but it did strike me as an interesting interpretation of recent events.
The primary reason I don’t think this is a reasonable explanation is that it took too long for BTC to become an overnight success — almost 10 years. Presumably way too long for a sentient superintelligence.
Then again, the best approach for predicting the behaviors of superintelligence may be to assemble a list of your best hypotheses and then cross them all out. Because if you could come up with it, the superintelligence already ruled it out.