
What happens when a software bot goes on a darknet shopping spree? - DeltaWhy
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/05/software-bot-darknet-shopping-spree-random-shopper
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delinka
In the US, I suspect a prosecutor would successfully gain a conviction against
the bot's operator. This verdict would be repeated several times over a dozen
years before any judge or jury ever tried to see it another way. And, IMHO,
the only other way this could possibly result in anything other than trouble
for the operator is if these bots were not only self-replicating, but also
self-funding. They'd have to earn funds, open bank accounts, start VPS
accounts, etc, and bombard lots of innocent people with illicit goods before
any court would entertain the idea that no human was responsible.

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tbrownaw
How could an independent bot (legitamately) earn bitcoins? A cheap vps to live
on would be $5/mo, so it wouldn't take that much. It would need to provide
_some_ sort of service that doesn't require human intervention, and is worth
paying for.

Darknet markets take bitcoin, and at least some VPS providers do as well, so
no need to get "real" bank accounts and evade know-your-customer.

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gburt
What if I were to gift it capital and have it simply collect
interest/dividends from the exploitation of said capital (either via loaning
it out with an algorithm or by building a profitable business with it)?

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tbrownaw
Yeah, but _how_ do you exploit that capital without interacting with the
human-only financial/employment systems?

You can hire humans for things over informal channels with no intermediary,
but what do you do for reputation/accountability when said humans need to keep
low enough volume to not interest the tax authorities?

I guess algorithmic trading on decentralized/anonymous bitcoin markets is one
way to have no humans, if you can get the volatility low enough.

How do you exploit capital with (almost) no human involvement?

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kolinko
It's not about no human involvement, but no human oversight.

Imagine a trading bot that hires people to improve it's source code, and other
people to oversee those people, but there's nobody in charge - i.e. nobody to
tell the bot to stop doing what it's doing.

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dyadic
I find the legal culpability of this fascinating.

Right now it is an extremely concrete example, and really easy to say that the
originator of the bot is at blame and should be prosecuted for buying illegal
items.

But, how advanced does a bot have to be before it itself is at blame? What if
they'd programmed it to reach out and purchase from any vendor it could find?
What if it wasn't programmed to do anything but made random acts, took
feedback and then learned from it?

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Sven7
There is a bot called WallStreet that is never to blame for anything it does,
which really is much more fascinating.

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frik
It's called HFT and is done by bots:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
frequency_trading](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading)

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andrewfong
I doubt there's any serious risk of criminal liability here. The key for most
crimes is showing (human) intent (by the coders, the operators, or someone).
The intent to purchase random items for art via some automated process isn't
the same as the intent to purchase drugs for personal use.

That said, if you decide to keep any drugs you get from the not rather than
immediately disposing of them, you've demonstrated the requisite intent to be
guilty of possession, so there's that.

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JoeAltmaier
I thought intent was important for sentencing, but not for assessing
innocence? If its clear you killed a guy, then you are guilty of something.
Whether its 1st degree or manslaughter depends on intent.

