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Dawn of Autonomous Corporations, Powered by Bitcoin
- fchollet 13y agoWith 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 13y agoFor starters, markets cannot be perfectly efficient unless P = NP: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf
- clienthunter 13y agoInteresting read. Did you write it?
- stanfordkid 13y agodo you really take that paper seriously? In human systems epsilon of the best approximation is pretty relevant. If N (time scale) is millions of years and epsilon is tenths of cents for the reduction to work then it is functionally irrelevant.
- DannyBee 13y agoThe paper is essentially to show that there is a disconnect between mathematical rigor and economics :) In this, it does very well.
- javert 13y agoThat 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 13y agoUsing 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 13y agoAnd 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.
- clienthunter 13y agoBut we are discussing an economics paper and its use of the phrase!
- pathy 13y ago1) We are discussion an economics paper as another reply notes. Of course we are going to use the economics definition of efficiency. We can hardly use anything else, can we? It has NOTHING to do with dishonesty. 2) Jargon. Don't tell me that software development doesn't have weird uses and definitions of words. Meanings of words changes over time, languages aren't static. The term efficiency in the context of economics is rather well established and part of the English language, despite what you may personally think about it.
- OvidNaso 13y agoThis is about informational efficiency, very different from the physical efficiency he is talking about.
- VMG 13y agoIrrelevant. This is about relative efficiency, not absolute.
- api 13y agoMood music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3VNkSos_vo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3VNkSos_vo
- olalonde 13y agoThere 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 13y agoLove 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).
- CrunchyJams 13y agoThis 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-decentralized-autonomous-corporation-part-i/ http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7050/bootstrapping-a-decentralize...
- pre 13y agoCheers, that three-parter is way better.
- AJ007 13y agoIt brings a new meaning to paying your monthly bills when failure to do so brings death.
- adamb_ 13y agoFascinating 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 13y agoIt 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.
- drcode 13y agoYeah, 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)
- adamb_ 13y agoI don't believe the OP is suggesting the company doesn't make money, rather there's no specific group of people who partake in the profits. Why does the money received need to be anonymous?
- kaonashi 13y agoPresumably to avoid prosecution for tax evasion.
- adamb_ 13y agoI think it would be more interesting to imagine that such a company could theoretically pay its taxes. If such an entity is to be trusted and utilized by the majority, having it "play by the rules" to some extent could be valuable.
- eriksank 13y agoThere is no moral value whatsoever in playing by politically-controlled rules. To libertarians your statement sounds very anti-libertarian and to religious people, your statement sounds like a blasphemous heresy.
- kaonashi 13y ago> To libertarians your statement sounds very anti-libertarian And to reasonable people, it sounds reasonable.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoCstross has an interesting take on autonomous corporations in his novel Accelerando.
- BoppreH 13y agoReminds 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 13y agohttp://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera... It's here in full, if anyone wants to read it.
- triplesec 13y agohere it comes. Merely accelerates the ineluctable march of capital, which you can conceive of a conceptual mathematical-material virus kept in check so far by social forces and technological constraints.
- BillyMaize 13y agoDaemon/Freedom was an amazing two book series to look at as well, one of my favorite books of all time.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pranjalv123 13y agoYou could use something like Shamir's Secret Sharing [0] to make sure that most of the funds would need multiple people to approve expenditures, and give small amounts of money to groups within the organization. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing
- Cogito 13y agoThe 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.
- drcode 13y agoRight: The bitcoin blockchain already meets all of OP's criteria!
- tdaltonc 13y agoBefore 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.
- _delirium 13y agoFor better or worse, the degree of autonomy that this "autonomous corporation" has is exceptionally weak...
- adamb_ 13y agoInteresting conjecture. Care to elaborate?
- spiritplumber 13y agoI 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.
- seiji 13y agoMore concrete example: Make something that scrapes content and SEO-izes it. Add affiliate links. Run on AWS. Make payout to affiliate commissions to the same account that pays AWS. Make the system capable of growing/shrinking its AWS capacity on its own. bam. self-perpetuating and potentially self-optimizing/growing income with zero outside intervention (except for when google corrects around it).
- mcphilip 13y agoI think this is an interesting example but it doesn't address the concerns that a single actor could modify the program behavior at will, making the system hard to trust if multiple parties are trying to benefit from it. I believe a key idea of autonomous corporations is the inability of a single participant to alter it's function without consensus of other participants. Does anyone have an example other than the BTC blockchain that provides a valuable service guaranteeing consensus is required for changes to the system's behavior?
- pyoung 13y agoSeems like consensus is the tricky part. In the case of the affiliate link example, where all of the business is online, you could host the code under a version control system that allows people to fork and modify the code, but requires majority approval for that code to get deployed. Also if all of the financial assets are in BTC, you could have a corporate wallet that is governed similarly (so expenses and disbursements need to be approved by the majority). Of course this isn't exactly an 'autonomous' system, more like a decentralized system.
- jandrewrogers 13y agoAn 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.)
- dusklight 13y agoCould you give some examples please?
- judk 13y agoShareholders
- polarix 13y agoThen I suppose we shouldn't call it a corporation. Does "Autonomous Economic Systems" sound better to you?
- DannyBee 13y agoYes. Corporations are legal fictions, and have their own set of legal rules. Besides being resolvable, they exist somewhere. They are registered/incorporated/created/etc. There is some jurisdiction. There is usually an agent. There are all sorts of agency/etc laws that would have to be built to support such a system. Corporation is literally the wrong word for what this describes.
- crystaln 13y ago
- droneStrikes 13y agoThere'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 13y agoHere's a related question: is anything in our society currently autonomous?
- yen223 13y agoAt 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.
- skizm 13y agoJust like the decentralized nature of the internet kept large companies and the government from taking it over. Oh wait...
- mmanfrin 13y agoonly 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 13y agoIt 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.
- vinceguidry 13y agoIt's pretty much the opposite of fiat. A fiat currency can have its value directly manipulated by the issuing state through excessive currency issue or regulation, manipulation by 'fiat'. Bitcoin is only worth what people think it's worth. It's not regulable in the sense a national currency is and the supply is controlled not by state actors, but an algorithm.
- olefoo 13y agoThis 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 13y agoIf 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- logn 13y ago> 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 13y agoAnd how is any of that different from the status quo?
- DennisP 13y agoUntil one day it can profit by providing a service for which other autonomous corporations are willing to pay.
- gonzo 13y ago20 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.
- wsetchell 13y agoI 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 13y agoI 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.
- eriksank 13y agoThe 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.
- eru 13y ago> [...] the current fiat system finally destroys itself. You have high hopes.
- eriksank 13y agoThe currency of the Roman empire got debased (silver content of coins) until it became worthless. The combination of raising the debt ceiling and the practice of quantitative easing do exactly the same today. Eventually, even the imperial Roman treasury ("fiscus") began to refuse its own coins for payment of tax liabilities. They switched over to paying taxes in kind. So, yes, in my impression, history is indeed repeating itself.
- oleganza 13y agoFiat 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.
- spullara 13y agoWe normally call these _viruses_.
- icebraining 13y agoYeah, 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.
- tdaltonc 13y agoIt'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.
- clienthunter 13y agoIf 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.
- polarix 13y agoConsider that with bitcoin the "safest" asset is also the most liquid (easiest to exchange).
- clienthunter 13y ago
- chad_oliver 13y agoAs an aside: the title image depicts the Sky Tower in Auckland, New Zealand.
- slackson 13y agoDo you know what relation this has to bitcoin or autonomous corporations?
- chad_oliver 13y agoNone, as far as I can tell. It was probably just selected because it's a pretty picture.
- girvo 13y agoI 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.
- swswsw 13y agoOn the comment section of the article, someone is asking the exact same question. :) The author answered: "I liked to shot of the tower … looks like it’s reaching out into space and time!" http://btcgeek.com/dawn-of-autonomous-corporations/#comment-95 http://btcgeek.com/dawn-of-autonomous-corporations/#comment-...
- slackson 13y agoBitcoin autonomous corporations could use prediction markets to choose code changes.
- spuz 13y agoCould you elaborate? I don't see how prediction markets could help decide what code to use.
- slackson 13y agoBetting 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.
- oscargrouch 13y agochange 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..
- sans-serif 13y agoI 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 13y agoThat's scary, but it sounds like something that could actually work. Very good.
- bthornbury 13y agoThis 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 13y agoA 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).
- lingben 13y agoIt is difficult to keep reading when 'fiat' is used as an expletive.
- dkuntz2 13y agoThe 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 13y agoDepends 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.
- etherael 13y agoa 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.
- atmosx 13y agoThe 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 13y ago> 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).
- clienthunter 13y ago"Deflationary relative to technology items" Sorry, what?
- phaemon 13y agoDeflation is relative. One thing is deflationary relative to another. Dollars are deflationary relative to iPhones. Dollars are inflationary relative to Oil. People will buy oil because if they wait to buy it tomorrow their dollars will buy them less. People won't buy iPhones because if they wait to buy it tomorrow their dollars will buy them more.
- atmosx 13y agoThat 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 ?
- kybernetikos 13y agoNice 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 13y agoHmm, 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.
- return0 13y agoAny 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 13y agoOne 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.
- snambi 13y agoSystems 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.