

Bitcoin-using Autonomous Agents - alnis
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agents

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Groxx
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.

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wmf
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.

Some similar musings from history:
<http://www.research.ibm.com/massive/bump.html> <http://www.cap-
lore.com/Agorics/Library/agoricpapers.html>

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ktizo
_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.

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Bjartr
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.

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astrodust
Genetic algorithms excel at a particular set of problems. Those problems are
pretty general in scope, and are often tricky to solve by humans that don't
have the requisite intuition or time to explore the problem space more
thoroughly.

You can't solve chess with a genetic algorithm, at least not to my knowledge,
but you could sure as heck make a challenging checkers player with one.

~~~
DavidSJ
Real world businesses require the integration of many knowledge domains in
order to succeed. The specialized niches where genetic algorithms excel are at
best a small subset.

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jpalomaki
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.

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

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demione
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.

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

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antimatter15
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)?

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

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ecesena
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.

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wmf
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.

