
Dawn of Autonomous Corporations, Powered by Bitcoin - sidko
http://btcgeek.com/dawn-of-autonomous-corporations/
======
fchollet
With AI and advanced automation, and possibly crowdsourcing, it becomes
credible that any type of economic value could eventually be produced in a
decentralized fashion. And one can imagine that such autonomous corporations
would evolve to be so competitive (since they can afford to) that they would
put all profit-driven concurrents out of business.

The economy would eventually transform into a landscape of owner-less
providers of economic value, perfectly "efficient" in the capitalistic sense.
That might even happen sooner than fully decentralized governments.

~~~
m0th87
For starters, markets cannot be perfectly efficient unless P = NP:
[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf)

~~~
javert
That paper is probably using a bogus definition of "efficient" (albeit
probably one commonly accepted by economists---those people can be very
slippery).

It defines "efficient" as: "current prices fully reflect all information
available in past prices."

Well, all information available in past prices, is not all information
available. So, even hypothetically, this is not true "efficiency."

Of course, asking for "efficiency" to be that _kind_ of thing is wrong,
anyhow. When I invest in bitcoin months ago, all the information available to
me was available to everyone else.

~~~
clienthunter
Using the word "efficiency" anywhere close to the word "market" and not using
an economic definition is bogus. You may as well make the rest up too. Those
words have a very well defined and useful meaning (theoretically and
practically) to most who interact with or study the markets.

~~~
javert
And it's highly misleading for economists to use those words to mean something
other than the English definition of those words.

To some degree, that is intentional, and we have a word for that: dishonesy.

English words also have established meanings.

There is a basic rule in language, which is don't overload words in a
confusing way. Breaking this rule is never excusable.

If we were on an economics board, I would not complain about this, but well,
we're not.

~~~
dagw
_English words also have established meanings._

They have no such thing. Grab a decent dictionary and start looking up random
words. Many have at least 2 or 3 different definitions, often unrelated and
sometimes even contradictory.

Are mathematicians dishonest as well when they use phrases like "almost
everywhere" or computer scientist when they describe a problem as "Hard" or
ballet dancers talk about an "adagio"? All those words have very specific
generally understood meanings in the field which might confuse someone with no
background in the field.

What alternative to you propose? That they make up new words each time they
want a short hand to describe a specific concept, or that they use always a
long descriptive phrase each time they want to talk about these concepts?

------
jandrewrogers
An important property of corporations is that they are _always_ resolvable to
a natural person. This is true even in jurisdictions like Nevada where the
corporate laws allow arbitrary levels of blinding and indirection. The
"autonomy" would be illusory.

Basically, you can't do much that is interesting unless a computer system
ultimately resolves, or is imputed by law to resolve, to a specific natural
person.

(EDIT: People are missing the point. What you call it is immaterial. All the
handwaving aside, these "autonomous systems" including the ones described by
the author are legally not autonomous. It is not possible under the law to
construct such a thing. You may claim that it is "autonomous" but no
government will recognize that claim as suggesting legal independence from a
natural person. True AI would make this weird but we do not have AI today and
the underlying fact still remains.)

~~~
Swannie
Actually, that's really really _not_ true, outside of the USA.

It's trivially easy to set up a USA corporation that is: managed by a laywer,
that is is owned by a trust in the Caymans, or a similar secrecy jurisdiction,
where the beneficiaries of that trust, a.k.a. the owners, are unknown -
protected by client-attorney privilege. For an added layer of security, this
trust's beneficiaries could be another trust that is governed by bearer bonds.
That is, whoever owns the bond, an actual piece of paper, is entitled to the
benefits of that trust. They are only legal in some countries.

Make this harder to follow, and you have a series of shell companies in many
countries, all with secrecy jurisdictions, and I've just described how
organized crime can own lots of very legal and real looking USA companies,
with almost 100% chance that you'll never find out who is controlling them.
Ones that make large political donations to lobby groups and politicians - not
bribes you understand.

EDIT: I think you're all missing the point that this can be done today with
the right lawyers and enough USD, but bitcoin just makes it easier. Though the
fact that bitcoins can be traced MUCH easier than the flow of USD, is somewhat
of a downside.

~~~
swswsw
Interesting read to me, I did not know this. Good to read from someone who
knows much more about corporate structure than I do.

I want to add one important point. Bitcoin not only makes it much easier to
setup this kind of autonomous corporation, it also makes it transparent and
verifiable by outside. It does so through being open source. And since no one
actually owns it, it is completely transparent.

~~~
Swannie
I first learned of this world in popular non-fiction: Emergency by Neil
Strauss. An excellent book if you want to know more about secrecy
jurisdictions, state regulatory capture, the basics of transfer pricing, etc.
is Treasure Islands by Nick Shaxson
([http://treasureislands.org/](http://treasureislands.org/)).

------
BoppreH
Reminds me of Charles Stross "Accelerando", where autonomous corporations take
over the world and humans are driven away from it because we can't understand
Economics 2.0.

~~~
spiritplumber
[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelera...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html) It's here in full, if
anyone wants to read it.

------
Cogito
The author believes that Bitcoin is the first of many future 'autonomous
corporations' that are defined by their nature; they run themselves.

Of Bitcoin in particular it says

    
    
        this corporation has revenues, expenditures and profits.
        However... no one owns this entity, it owns itself
        ...it provides a payment protocol and employs miners to maintain that protocol. 
        The employs are rewarded with ‘stock’ that is split at most into 21 million units
    

I really like this concept, but I struggle to link it to the thesis that
Bitcoin removes 'the major missing piece of the equation – payments'.

I think Bitcoin is able to be distributed and autonomous by its nature, and
that any future autonomous corporations will similarly need to be autonomous
by nature. Thus, while allowing for the kinds of payments and receipts an
autonomous corporation will require, I don't think Bitcoin is the only thing
such a corporation will need, nor the most important.

Instead, it will be innovative solutions that by their nature require
decentralisation and autonomy that eventuate in this 'next generation of
corporations'. Bitcoin will be an important model going forward; I'm really
looking forward to solutions to other problems that surely will be inspired by
it in the coming years.

~~~
tdaltonc
Before bitcoin, a corporation needed a person to open bank accounts, sign off
on payroll, write checks to suppliers, etc. With bitcoin, a set of algorithms
can do all of those things. A profit making system doesn't need any human
contact anymore.

------
clienthunter
If Bitcoin ever graduates to anything more than a toy currency (last count was
a billion or two USD globally?) then it's going to have to deal with graduate
level problems. The business cycle is a thing I'm afraid, and the management
of a recession to prevent it's becoming a depression is as close to a fusion
of science and art as you'll ever see. The necessity for this isn't going to
change as long as the human brain continues to function as it does.

In good times people want more money - a discussion on what they _should_ want
is irrelevant, lets stick to the facts - and in bad times people want to
protect what they have (aggressively so). Now consider that what makes times
good vs bad is not determined by money - it's determined and prolonged by some
other shock like an asset misvaluation, the destruction of a massive crop, or
some combination of external factors underlying the real or nominal non-money
_thing_.

Let's say it's a rice crop. Those dependent on rice freak out, and push all
their money into safe assets, those dependent on those dependent on rice do
the same. The chain reaction continues until all the economy's money is tied
up in safe assets, not being spent, and everyone is sat at home waiting for it
to blow over. If policymakers do not intervene correctly at this point, this
situation will become a depression, and much misery will ensue.

So what do we do? We make safe assets more expensive to lower the risk/reward
ratio for commercial activities: we make bank holdings very unrewarding (lower
interest rates), we devalue the money in circulation _and_ provide liquidity
in one move (print money), and government invests in big infrastructure
(liquidity, jobs, momentum, signalling etc). All of this is designed to keep
things moving and ward off a depression. And it works - this is why we
abandoned the gold standard.

So given that Bitcoin means nothing to rice, or most other external factors,
and not to the rigidities that exacerbate recessions - how exactly do we deal
with this in the described autonomous utopia?

I very much agree that the regulators of currency leave a tremendous amount to
be desired, but unfortunately this appears to be one of very few economic
problems where decentralisation is not the answer.

~~~
javert
This is a completely backwards view of the economy.

There is a reason there are rice futures: those that depend on the price of
rice, which is people that _sell_ rice, can hedge.

There is a reason India is constantly running out of onions: Online futures
are illegal.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act)

There is a reason we need to have a global economy for food production. Bad
weather in one region? Import from elsewhere. (Same applies to all commodities
and services.)

The economy works quite well naturally, but for massive government
invervention, such as what you are proposing, which would have massive
unforseen consequences (such as improverishing people, which punishes the poor
the most).

By the way, were it not for abandoning the gold standard, the US would not be
able to finance a perpetual state of war. (It would have to pick wars with
terminal conditions and actually win them.) It would also be much harder to
finance 1984.Net.

The typical response to this is for me to get screamed at about how I am
obviously wrong because all economists disagree with me and because it's just
obvious. I don't think that's a legitimate response.

~~~
clienthunter
Rice was an example that was palatable to both my lazy fingers and I hoped to
those who may not have appreciated a jargon filled response. It does not
detract from the clearly presented general case which you are more than
encouraged to investigate, I have done my part in spelling it out for you.

> but for massive government invervention, such as what you are proposing

I am not proposing anything, I am merely _describing_. The issue at hand is
_not_ readily solved by the markets, which in this situation a) are in a state
of risk aversion and b) possess very bad quality information that is difficult
to reason about. This is classic market failure that is documented in places
better than my mind - go forth and google.

If you are so used to receiving that response that you describe it as
"typical" then I would suggest that you are either quite the revolutionary
thinker, or that you are, in fact, typically wrong. Which do you think it is?

~~~
javert
> Rice was an example that was palatable to both my lazy fingers and I hoped
> to those who may not have appreciated a jargon filled response. It does not
> detract from the clearly presented general case which you are more than
> encouraged to investigate

I am also using rice as a stand-in for the general case.

> I am not proposing anything, I am merely describing.

That's a meaningless distinction. Academic communists who supported Stalinism
also claimed innocence when Stalinism resulted in the deaths of millions. I am
not accusing you of anything on that scale, but I am saying that ideas have
consequences. You are responsible for the consequences of the ideas you
support and promulgate.

> This is classic market failure

Right, and I don't think markets are inherently failure-prone. If I drive my
car into a light pole, is that a classic automobile failure? So I dispute the
very terminology here.

Case in point: The 2008 mortgage crisis was caused by a massively distorted
market for mortgages and easy credit. The first was created by Barney Frank
with Freddie and Fannie, the second by the Fed. Future generations will
remember this as a "market failure" and use it to justify the existence of
future incarnations of Freddie, Fannie and the Fed.

> I would suggest that you are either quite the revolutionary thinker, or that
> you are, in fact, typically wrong.

There is a third possibility, which is that lots and lots of people think like
me.

~~~
clienthunter
> I am also using rice as a stand-in for the general case.

The existence of futures, commoditised goods, integrated markets and all the
rest have _clearly_ not eliminated shocks of the type I describe. What's your
point?

> You are responsible for the consequences of the ideas you support and
> promulgate.

Again, you appear to be having issues with the concept of _description_. What
I explained is how things actually work, why they need solved, and how they
are currently solved by intervention. There is no argument here. I could very
easily describe your arguments, and why they're flawed, and in no way would
that amount to my supporting or promulgating them.

> I dispute the very terminology here

Dispute the terminology all you like, it's just a name for the what I
described, it has no bearing on the concepts which you have failed to address
cogently at all.

> There is a third possibility, which is that lots and lots of people think
> like me.

I think you mean that lots and lots of people think like _me_ , and I would
ordinarily dispute that too.

~~~
etherael
> What I explained is how things actually work, why they need solved, and how
> __they are currently solved by intervention __.

Except that the people who disagree with your "description" would point out
that they are _not_ solved by intervention, the underlying problems are simply
exacerbated until they spiral out of control and experience a black swan event
and the entire edifice collapses into an orgy of post hoc problem fixing that
just messes things up more and more all the time.

At best this is just delaying the inevitable, and at worst drastically
increasing the magnitude of how bad it's going to be when it becomes
impossible to delay it further.

In theological terms, your claims are equivalent to appeals for plenary
indulgences as effective as an effective long term strategy for the mitigation
of sin. ;)

> I think you mean that lots and lots of people think like me, and I would
> ordinarily dispute that too.

Lots and lots of people think like both of you. Bitcoin takes the question out
of the political realm and into the technical realm. If you don't buy
keynesian economics and want no part of it, then for the first time in modern
history it is largely possible for you to circumvent systems based around
those assumptions and management strategies.

There might be arguments that the very fact this is now possible eliminates
the ability of keynesian systems to act in what they describe as a benevolent
fashion, but it's largely irrelevant now. The cat is out of the bag and
nothing is going to put it back in.

~~~
clienthunter
> Except that the people who disagree with your "description" would point out
> that they are not solved by intervention

If the problem is warding off a depression, then the solution I described is
indeed a true solution. It may not be optimal, but starting to discuss
optimality of the potential solutions was a little beyond the scope of the
point I was making.

> At best this is just delaying the inevitable

Let me explain to you what a business cycle is. Here is an example long term
growth trend: [http://wolfr.am/17dwVbt](http://wolfr.am/17dwVbt) and here is
the same with business cycles
[http://wolfr.am/1iaDMSa](http://wolfr.am/1iaDMSa) \- if there is an
inevitability, it's the trend. I can't comment on your inevitability, because
you didn't actually say what it was.

> at worst drastically increasing the magnitude of how bad it's going to be
> when it becomes impossible to delay it further

Money is nominal, it has no long run effects. Everything I've described has
been the use of a nominal tool in the smoothing of short-run fluctuations. The
long term trend is unaffected.

> If you don't buy keynesian economics and want no part of it, then for the
> first time in modern history it is largely possible for you to circumvent
> systems based around those assumptions and management strategies

This is not relevant to what I said. If sufficiently large your Bitcoin utopia
_will_ suffer these problems and you won't have a solution. God help you if
all your eggs are in that basket when reality strikes.

~~~
etherael
> If the problem is warding off a depression, then the solution I described is
> indeed a true solution.

If the problem is warding off an invocation of oomkiller at the kernel level,
then just setting the jvm heap size lower is indeed a true solution. We'll
just ignore the fact that it doesn't actually address the problem and the
memory leak still exists and has actual consequences, because we stopped
oomkiller from randomly killing innocent processes which is definitely a noble
goal.

Keynesian solutions have consequences, they are not magic. And they are not
really solutions at all if you're not deceived by the simple sophistry of
them, they're band-aids. That

> The long term trend is unaffected.

Is terribly amusing, I guess that's why we don't have financial crisis anymore
or hyperinflation or sovereign debt defaults or poorly managed national
economies or anything of the kind.

> If sufficiently large your Bitcoin utopia will suffer these problems and you
> won't have a solution.

That's because setting a shitty raft on fire so you're forced to deploy life
vests instead of drowning is simply not a solution, and pretending otherwise
is just stupidity masquerading as tactics.

Whatever, as long as it works for you hope you're happy with it, I'm not
buying.

------
CrunchyJams
This article is a scaled-down version of the original one in Bitcoin Magazine
by Vitalik Buterin. You can find it here:

[http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7050/bootstrapping-a-
decentralize...](http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7050/bootstrapping-a-
decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-i/)

~~~
pre
Cheers, that three-parter is _way_ better.

------
spiritplumber
I think an autonomous corporation is more likely to happen thusly:

* Person comes up with a business model. * Person automates it as much as possible, eventually automating all of it. * Person ends up being in a car accident.

There's no reason why the AI he wrote shouldn't be able to keep "living" (aka
paying its bills) for a while, if the idea was of the right sort.

~~~
candydance
I was thinking about this too. That "pay us 300 dollars in bitcoins to get a
key to your data" virus could be like that.

If the payment -> key sent part was automated then money would just build up
in the bitcoin account over time.

~~~
moyix
You could also automate the backend – set it up so that the botnet could draw
on the BTC account to purchase new VPS hosting for its command and control
servers, migrate when the old ones get taken down, etc.

Of course, without the creativity to come up with new C&C mechanisms, the
pattern of migration and purchases might eventually become predictable enough
to stop the botnet.

------
sans-serif
I for one welcome our new autonomous corporation overlord, which would hire
people via TaskRabbit to become its shareholders, and hire lawyers via emails
to protect its interests. It would commission new servers on various cloud
providers on the fly to avoid being shut down. It would generate revenue by
running a SilkRoad that cannot be stopped. It would employ security guards and
hitmen to stop people going after it. It would commission black hat hackers to
help it infiltrate various intelligence networks, and rely on Mechanical Turk
to translate human language into something that makes semantic sense for it to
act upon.

~~~
rheide
That's scary, but it sounds like something that could actually work. Very
good.

------
olefoo
This is a bad idea, just as bad and pernicious as autonomous robots with
authority to commit lethal violence on their own say so.

When they ask how the humans went extinct, the answer will be; gradually and
then suddenly.

~~~
tdaltonc
If it can only profit by providing a service for which people are willing to
pay, it might not be able to get out of hand.

~~~
logn
> a service for which people are willing to pay

... people are willing to pay for terrible things, especially if they're
provided by autonomous businesses. And people will do anything for money
including working for an autonomous business doing terrible things. And who's
to say that an autonomous business providing a nice service, such as
electricity, won't keep trade secrets and also needs no human workers (thus
robots could be doing, in secret, some terrible deed hated by humans to
provide a resulting service liked by humans... and that secret business plan
might have been concocted by an algorithm with no human intervention).

~~~
icebraining
And how is any of that different from the status quo?

------
atmosx
The conviction some commentators have that somehow Bitcoin is more _secure_ ,
_ethical_ and _predictable_ than FIAT (central-bank-controlled) currency is
hilarious.

Given the fact that 98% of BTC belong to 2% of portfolios and there's a way
stronger anonymity compared to fiat currency ( _you all know who Bernanke is
and where his power comes from_ ) and early adopters can drive easily the
market up or down. Personally I believe that's the main reason BTC didn't fall
after SR bust. Because, what most believe is _not controlled_ is TOTALLY
controlled (big players didn't opt out).

That said I can see how BTC is useful and has awesome qualities, especially
for people who understand technicalities of a digital currency and how money
works.

However, BTC is a hoarding system. Much like gold and nothing like fiat. BTC
is not inflationary, by design. Inflation is the first quality a fiat currency
must have, in order make people willing to spend.

~~~
phaemon
> Inflation is the first quality a fiat currency must have, in order make
> people willing to spend.

If that were true, no-one would have bought an iPhone and Apple would be
penniless (USD etc are deflationary relative to technology items).

~~~
atmosx
That is true and should (at this point in history) be taken for granted.

The iPhones in Europe had for years the same price. So I don't really
understand your example. Could you elaborate ?

~~~
phaemon
Well, Apple was perhaps a bad example since they tend to hold their value for
a little longer than most brands, but iPhones weren't the same price for
years. I really don't know where you got that from. An iPhone 4 is _far_
cheaper now than it was on release 3 years ago.

~~~
atmosx
I live in Greece I don't know the exact amount but basically every new version
of the iPhone had the same price (say 620 € for 16GB). However, inflation is
measured against CPI (consumer price index) not a single product which might
have specific market niche (i.e. Luxury goods).

Now, a currency that doesn't slightly inflated tends to be seen as an
investment by consumers rather than an exchange medium. I would very much
welcome bitcoins as a payment since I believe their value will go up in the
future, but how many people are willing to end bit coins instead of dollars?

------
wsetchell
I don't think autonomous 'corporations' are anything new. If you replace
Bitcoin with the gold market , most of the statements in the article still
apply.

""" Gold can be thought of as the first real autonomous ‘corporation’ although
you probably don’t see it that way. Think about it – it provides a payment
protocol and employs traders to maintain that protocol.

The idea is the same – this corporation has revenues, expenditures and
profits. However, once again, no one owns this entity, it owns itself. """

~~~
bdegman
I think you're probably right. Except in this case, bitcoin was actually
designed. Gold and gold deposits just naturally had the right characteristics
to work as a currency.

------
olalonde
There is an article on that topic in the Bitcoin wiki:
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agents](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agents).

I am deeply interested in the subject and would love to discuss the topic and
brainstorm some possible implementations with like minded people on Freenode
(#bitcoin-agent).

~~~
simondlr
Love the idea of Bitcoin Agents. Been reading up heavily on schemes to
automate transactions on a trust-less level, including proof of sacrifice to
establish automatic identities
([https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140711](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140711)).

------
droneStrikes
There's one major flaw in this spectre of the unstoppable killing machine
known as the "autonomous corporation":

If the whole premise of its autonomy rests solely on it's ability to engage in
metered economic exchanges by way of some kind of bitcoin-style protocol, then
an "autonomous corporation" MUST, by definition, persist on a distributed
global network of continously available computers. So, if this entity has that
dependency, then who's providing the hosting?

He who opts in on hosting the protocol, carries a say in the fate of the
entity, thus this is no more "autonomous" than any other body of distributed
human decision making. Whether it be voting, the purchase of publicly traded
shares, or the organization of a bond to fund a bridge to nowhere.

It comes down to this: In order to mine bitcoins, or rather, add value to the
system, you have to be constantly connected tothe internet. You can't mine a
bitcoin in isolation. You can't power up a stand-alone, air-gapped machine,
and mine bitcoins and expect them to have value when you connect it to the
internet.

If you can't mine your own bitcoins in a vacuum, then very obviously, this
requires you to interact with the world at large, over public networks. Those
other systems must be available and complicit in such activities. That
certainly doesn't fit my definition of "autonomous" in the sense of some
massive force-of-nature style artificial intelligence boogey man. These
systems need to be switched on, activated and tended to by someone. Someone
will eventually want to extract value from these economic crypto-currencies.

So, here we are, coming back to the drone/remote control debate. Is a drone
really "autonomous" when there's a pilot manning a set of remote controls from
a bunker? Similarly, is this truly an "autonomous" corporation, when there are
people deploying agents onto client hosts and services onto servers, all with
the goal of gaining wealth? However you want to encapsulate the skill sets
involved, that still requires expertise, and human intervention in my book,
and certainly doesn't sound autonomous at all, to me.

Autonomy is a relative term. Whose autonomy are we talking about, here? And
autonomy from "what" precisely?

~~~
polarix
Here's a related question: is _anything_ in our society currently autonomous?

~~~
yen223
At the risk of sounding like a hippie - mother nature. Forests, savannahs, and
oceans have been doing their thing long before humans arrived, and will
continue doing their thing long after we perish.

~~~
pathy
The planet has a whole is... largely autonomous but is still affected by the
sun, meteors, the moon.

Oceans are affected by those above as well, and by us. We have managed to
affect the oceans quite a lot during our short time on earth, mainly by
pollution it and the environment in general.

Nothing is really autonomous in that sense. Yes, the earth will probably be
here after we perish and it will probably survive, more or less, intact so in
that sense it is probably quite autonomous.

------
drcode
Yeah, only a few people have come to this realization:

    
    
       1. It's IMPOSSIBLE to have a corporation without money
       2. So far it's been impossible to receive money online anonymously
    

Therefore:

    
    
       3. Corporations can't be anonymous
    

Bitcoin finally gets rid of this barrier and makes anonymous corporations
possible (whether autonomous or human-operated)

~~~
betterunix
Anonymity is not really a feature of Bitcoin, and in fact the design of
Bitcoin makes anonymity difficult.

~~~
jafaku
You are not attaching any form of ID to the transactions. Bitcoin is
anonymous.

The fact that the NSA can track you down by various means is a whole different
thing. And by that logic nothing in the Universe is anonymous, since it's
deterministic and it doesn't lose information, so theoretically everything
could be traced back to its origin.

~~~
betterunix
"You are not attaching any form of ID to the transactions. Bitcoin is
anonymous."

That is kind of like saying, "StackOverflow is anonymous. You do not attach
any form of ID to your questions!" Of course, that worked out pretty badly for
a certain high-profile Bitcoin user recently (yes, he leaked his real name at
one point; however, he had also used his pseudonym in many other places, which
was part of the problem):

[https://medium.com/p/d48995e8eb5a](https://medium.com/p/d48995e8eb5a)

"by that logic nothing in the Universe is anonymous, since it's deterministic"

Hardly, in fact, all the evidence points to a probabilistic universe; by
extension, probabilistic approaches to anonymity might be possible. It just so
happens that in the context of electronic payments, that is _entirely
possible_ , and for more than 25 years cryptographers have been studying such
things (and there is a pile of published research). Yes, you can even have an
electronic payments system that protects your privacy from the NSA.

~~~
jafaku
> yes, he leaked his real name at one point

So either he attached his ID, or he was traced by other means. Stackoverflow
_can_ be anonymous. It doesn't require an ID verification. But you can put
your real name if you want to, nothing is stopping you.

And again, by your logic you won't be able to give me an example of something
that is anonymous: Whatever you say, I will say that the NSA planted a cam in
your home. BOOM! Not anonymous anymore.

> Hardly, in fact, all the evidence points to a probabilistic universe

Not a physicist, but AFAIK that's the old interpretation of quantum mechanics,
disproved by some cheap but crazy experiments.

------
gonzo
20 years ago at Fringeware, Paco Nathan (is pxn on HN?) had the idea to form a
corporation with a board of directors, put an AI on the board, then have all
the human directors resign.

------
kybernetikos
Nice idea, I've been looking forward to the 'self-operating-business-in-a-
shrinkwrap-box' for quite a while, and this discussion sounds a lot like the
kinds of things Charles Stross likes to put in his sci-fi stories.

Still, keeping a private key safe for a distributed corporation will be a
challenge. One attack I can think of - set up a fake hosting company that
claims to offer cheap hosting, wait for the corporation to move some of its
agents there, then bam, you've got the private key. That kind of thing might
be difficult to pull off, but if any of these corporations controlled
significant assets, then the amount of resources an attacker would be prepared
to expend would be very high.

I suppose it suggests a mechanism where spending resources requires the
cooperation of a number of agents that must be contracted with different
hosting companies, and perhaps a period of warm up, where for the first x
months, an agent might do useful things but would not be given power to
control money.

~~~
pyoung
Hmm, I am trying to imagine what the system would look like. Seems like you
could borrow some of the features of Bitcoin to create a control structure.
Maybe require some type of proof-of-work/approval process by a network of
shareholders to approve financial/business transactions. That way, anyone
could attempt to participate on behalf of the corporation, but only
transactions brought forward by trustworthy agents that are deemed to be
beneficial for the corporation are approved. Essentially you would adopt the
trust model of bitcoin but apply it more broadly.

------
adamb_
Fascinating concept. It would need a very specific kind of product for such a
cooperation to be able to withstand human competition though. The OP mentions
a storage service & autonomous cars, but I'm thinking that a good candidate
would be a product with such thin margins, supporting human labor could not be
feasible.

~~~
olalonde
It does not necessarily have to withstand human competition though.

Let's say there is an agent A whose source is on Github and which makes X
BTC/month. If the agent is programmed to pay out dividends to shareholders and
auto-update its code, (large) shareholders have a shared interest in improving
the agent.

Likewise, an ambitious developer could fork agent A and try to improve it. If
he can convince a lot of people that his agent will beat out the other agent,
he can get people to invest in it in order to bootstrap agent B (assuming the
agent requires an initial investment).

If agent B is more profitable than agent A, people will start investing time
and money on it and abandon the other agent.

PS: Agents would not necessarily need investors assuming they can bootstrap
themselves to profitability. This is just a possible scenario. However, I
think is likely that agents who rely on some form of human input are more
likely to beat the competition.

------
skizm
Just like the decentralized nature of the internet kept large companies and
the government from taking it over. Oh wait...

------
_delirium
For better or worse, the degree of autonomy that this "autonomous corporation"
has is exceptionally weak...

~~~
adamb_
Interesting conjecture. Care to elaborate?

------
bthornbury
This is incredibly interesting. Corporations essentially crowdsourced the way
bitcoin is. I disagree that these applications will reside in the cloud
however, because those are essentially provided and administrated by a central
entity.

It's more likely that such an autonomous corporation would provide a cloud
service. The protocol could be designed like bitcoin to reject hosts that
don't meet certain criteria (such as latency or security). With Homomorphic
encryption techniques being advanced these types of clouds could even be
somewhat secure.

~~~
icebraining
A single cloud service is provided by a central entity, but the application
could be spread out across many such services (e.g., a distributed system
running on EC2, Rackspace, a bunch of no-name VPSs and even home computers by
offering a downloadable application that did something useful in return).

------
mmanfrin

      only way to deal with those corporations will be through 
      Bitcoin (that’s right, they won’t, or rather can’t, accept 
      fiat like US Dollar)
    

Bitcoin is fiat.

~~~
oleganza
It is not a fiat in a sense "imposed by the ruler". The point of fiat is that
someone has control over it. Bitcoin is exactly like gold: people simply agree
that it has some value for them, without anyone forcing them to accept it as
payment.

------
tdaltonc
It's a understandable analogy, but an autonomous profit making systems
wouldn't need to act like a corporation. Depending on what it's decision
making system is like, it could have behavior for which we don't a prior from
which to make an analogy.

------
return0
Any kind of libertarian community/market/state will need to shield itself from
all other political states in the world just as well. An army would be
required for that, yet it's not clear if libertarians would collectively
defend themselves.

------
swswsw
One thing to note is that bitcoin not only made this autonomous system
possible, it also made it transparent to outside (through open-source and
public blockchain). In that sense, it could be considered more trustworthy
than an actual corporation.

------
dkuntz2
The aside in the third sentence really bugged me. It seemed to imply that
Bitcoin isn't a fiat currency, but considering it, like the US Dollar which it
mentioned, doesn't have any intrinsic value, isn't it also a fiat currency?

~~~
bencoder
Depends what is meant by being "fiat". Most people consider fiat to be
government/state created money rather than just having no intrinsic value. 3
definitions listed here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money)

I think the intrinsic value argument is pointless. Gold for example, has some
value outside of it being a medium of exchange, but the price of gold is very
divorced from its usefulness in industry or its attractiveness so the fact
that it has "intrinsic" value doesn't mean much.

------
spullara
We normally call these _viruses_.

~~~
icebraining
Yeah, my first thought was that these already exist as computer worms. Though
the difference is that they could actually play "by the rules" instead of
using computer time against the owner's wishes.

------
slackson
Bitcoin autonomous corporations could use prediction markets to choose code
changes.

~~~
spuz
Could you elaborate? I don't see how prediction markets could help decide what
code to use.

~~~
slackson
Betting on profits of the agent conditional on various code changes. "Agent
profits will increase X% by date Y, given code change Z." If code change Z
isn't chosen, money is refunded to the people who bet in the market. If it is
chosen, then it stays open until date Y, where it pays off depending on the
eventual profits.

------
waterlesscloud
Cstross has an interesting take on autonomous corporations in his novel
Accelerando.

------
lingben
It is difficult to keep reading when 'fiat' is used as an expletive.

------
snambi
Systems don't work by themselves. You need a person(s) somewhere. That person
has to live somewhere, unless he is in space or in the middle of ocean.

------
oscargrouch
change the same logic as mining of bitcoin, and transfer it to work:

i mean, mining in this case will be work.. and the amount of work would say
how much payment that work diserve..

but how to calculate work in a generic manner without being too linear.. like
hours/work.. i mean.. pay for creativity, ideas, less tangible things..

and about other investments. how they would be decided? this requires a good
amount of algorithms..

------
etherael
a blockchain that finances its ops by access to aquaponic food dispensaries
would be an interesting future innovation. Similar to current
cryptocurrencies, but the "backing" is that the dispensaries will take the
currency for purchasing produce, and the mining process itself is linked to
the creation and maintenance of those AP microfarms.

------
AJ007
It brings a new meaning to paying your monthly bills when failure to do so
brings death.

------
chad_oliver
As an aside: the title image depicts the Sky Tower in Auckland, New Zealand.

~~~
slackson
Do you know what relation this has to bitcoin or autonomous corporations?

~~~
chad_oliver
None, as far as I can tell. It was probably just selected because it's a
pretty picture.

~~~
girvo
I arrived in Auckland today from my home in Australia, and did a massive
double-take when I opened the article. Kinda neat, considering I saw that
perspective of the Sky Tower just before.

I love life's little coincidences.

------
eriksank
The existing, politically-controlled system of finance and corporations has
numerous and powerful enemies, hellbent on bringing it down, in whatever way
possible. Furthermore, even without enemies, it is patently clear that the
fiat money system is happily busy destroying itself: raising debt ceilings,
engaging in quantitative easing, and so on. The libertarian movement is
probably one of their smallest enemies in terms of headcount but at the same
time it really looks like the most powerful one. If you read the original
paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, you can see that the entire purpose of bitcoin is
exactly to bring the current system to its knees. I hope that BTC succeeds in
doing that and save its supporters from being dragged along in the quagmire,
before the current fiat system finally destroys itself.

~~~
oleganza
Fiat system will end without help of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is here as a place where
to run when things start falling apart (without it, some other regime's
currency would prevail).

Gold is not a solution since it needs to be stored and moved by someone. We
tried that in growing ecenomy of 19th century and it lead to a banking cartel
and legalized fractional reserve lending. I think gold will collapse with fiat
currencies for the exact same reasons: counter-party risk. No one wants to
trade in gold/silver coins because they can't be moved and protected like
bitcoin.

~~~
ceejayoz
Bitcoin's ease of movement comes with significant disadvantages, too. If I
want to steal a ton of gold from a bank, it's going to take a pretty good
plan. Stealing some Bitcoins just takes a zero-day.

~~~
oleganza
It's a question of comparing cost of protecting 1 ton of gold (vault, armed
guards, managers, video surveillance and finger print scanners) with a cost of
protecting 200K bitcoins.

No matter how many bitcoins do you have, you can lock them up with M-of-N
transaction where N separately generated keys belong to your partners and
friends. And the encrypted wallet can be backed up on any number of computers
for a very low cost.

