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What if you couldn’t? Imagine an AI running in the cloud, self replicating, totally free of human input, no physical presence anywhere, with sole access to a bitcoin wallet from which it pays expenses and to which it receives revenue. No assets that are seize-able. No goals other than to collect more and more profit. How do you stop it from operating?

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Seize all its physical assets and make it illegal to trade with. Bitcoin is arguably impossible to control, but real world assets not so much. Property rights as they currently exist are ultimately enforced by state violence. A number in a blockchain only has meaning if those who enforce physical property rights allow it to.

And if the AI manages to actually assert control of property on its own, it is no longer a market actor, it is a revolutionary army.

Disconnect the servers it's running on.

It thought about this before you and is currently running on hundreds of thousands of zombie home computers unknowingly infected with malware.

Make it a deal it can't refuse.

Then you distribute the Antivirus patches.

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