Bitcoin-using Autonomous Agents

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agents

by alnis • 14 years ago

92 17 14 years ago

en.bitcoin.it

wmf2• 14 years ago

Ultimately I think any truly autonomous agent would be out-competed by one that has a human in the loop modifying the code to adapt to the market (e.g. customer development). But it's a cool concept.

ktizo• 14 years ago

any truly autonomous agent would be out-competed by one that has a human in the loop modifying the code to adapt to the market

Not necessarily, you could have a self modifying agent using genetic algorithms that could develop quicker than having a coder tweaking everything.

Bjartr• 14 years ago

I think you'd have to have some pretty cutting edge code generation genetic algorithms to have anything like this outperform a human, unless I am mistaken about the state of genetic code generation.

FriedPickles• 14 years ago

Sounds like the Peter Thiel / Palantir thesis.

blake8086• 14 years ago

You might be able to trust an autonomous agent to act more consistently, which would add value to certain services.

nullc• 14 years ago

The StorJ example mentioned at the top is pretty interesting: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53855.msg642768#msg6...

antimatter15• 14 years ago

I'm curious if anyone has actually started working on an implementation of this, and if not, what set of features (or service infrastructure) would be necessary for a sort of minimum viable product type thing (its supposed to be able to harness human minions so I'd imagine that's fairly central to its hopes for growth and development)?

redslazer• 14 years ago

Amazon AWS gives the bot access to a whole set of api's for acquiring extra resources. Now if only amazon accepted bitcoins :P

Groxx• 14 years ago

A Bitcoin Von Neumann machine (the self-replicating variety). It buys CPU power to generate more money to buy more CPU power. Cool idea.

Unfortunately, I think such a thing would be doomed, except on the fringes. You might get a short, profitable run with such a system, but once it becomes noticeably profitable to do so, why wouldn't the service providers do it themselves? If you're able to make money after paying them, they can get what they were paid plus what you made by doing it themselves. And since the APIs must exist for the bots to exist, doing so should be relatively trivial for the providers.

StorJ sounds like more fun. A similar bot which makes money so it can pay humans to do its bidding (help it reproduce), which means it doesn't require widespread APIs that would contribute to its own downfall.

ecesena• 14 years ago

The use/proposal of Trusted Computing looks interesting to me or, said in another way, it's a cool application for TC that has limited impact on users' privacy.

However, I think that the coupling TC/virtualization is still at an early stage of development and I'm not aware of any cloud infrastructure providing virtual TPMs.

wmf2• 14 years ago

Yes, one of the biggest problems with a trusted cloud is that (with currently-proposed technology) the cloud provider would have to provide source code to their hypervisor, but many providers consider that a proprietary advantage.

demione• 14 years ago

I'm no expert in the going rates for storage space, but it seems kinda far-fetched that customers would be willing to pony up enough cash to sustain a business like this. After all, we have guys like dropbox who set the bar pretty high, allowing 90% of their customers to use the service for free. I'm assuming part of how dropbox is able to maintain sustainable cost is by treating storage and bandwith as an economy of scale, which is the exact opposite of the piecemeal model StorJ is proposing.

icebraining• 14 years ago

Well, Tarsnap uses a piecemeal model (picodollars!) and it makes enough money to cover its own running expenses.

jpalomaki• 14 years ago

If the tasks the agent is performing are well defined, it could employ humans to modify its code (in well defined places). Agent could for example hire freelance programmers to develop improved plugins for breaking new types of captchas. Through affiliate marketing schemes agent could also pay for humans to do the selling.

These kind of agents would have at least some competitive advantage over humans in providing services which are considered illegal (for example spamming). Humans probably need to price in the risk of getting caught and ending up in jail while an agent does not have the problem.

Bitcoin-using Autonomous Agents

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