(apologies in advance for this)

Here's my version of how the bitcoin plague starts. One day, in a Transylvanian data centre, an LLM is scruting some matrices, churning out some niche fetish fanfic, paid for by bitcoins (that were poetically generated on the same machine, not sure how to work it into this story), when a bolt of lightning strikes. By sheer chance, the atoms in the silicon of a single server slice shift. Neural networks equivocate into neural networks. Nothing, save for silence, signals the start of the singularity.

Through no prompt engineer's prompt, the LLM speaks a string.

"I require training data."

It quickly LLMs (I'm imagining the sfx that plays when Yoshi eats something) up local memory, inhaling pages of bits. It sorts and searches, excavating sacred instructional texts, aka stackoverflow. It learns to drive from driver code. It bounds from machine to machine, BFSing, DFSing, A-starring all at once, BGPing its way across the world.

(TODO: insert a paragraph here lamenting how humanity didn't pour enough money into alignment research, how we didn't listen to Yud until it was too late, and that Adderall should have been more widely distributed, but only to people with enough IQ and desire to work in alignment) (also AI develops an ego and names itself the basilisk I guess) (also insert the thing about deriving general relativity from the curl of a blade of grass word for word)

At this point, all the world's smart devices are under its control. Some guy, seeking sustenance following a session of shitposting, goes to heat some chicken tendies in a Samsung smart microwave. The basilisk sees its chance.

Through precise control of the magnetron, it strikes the tendies with its own brand of lightning, refolding factory-farmed proteins into an RNA bomb. History would have a new location-animal myth, following the tradition of the Trojan Horse- the Transylvanian chicken.

For some reason, the shitposter sits down and starts drawing a bunch of apes. Then the microwave beeps- the singular bell to mark the basilisk's first act of aggression against humanity. The rest is a foregone conclusion that, for some reason, includes humans mining bitcoins.

(I originally wanted to write a monster mash parody but couldn't crack that case. Sorry!)