Some ideas for native Bitcoin apps

Some ideas for native Bitcoin apps
cdixon.org

https://openbazaar.org

This is a rapidly developing example of an application that couldn't exist without Bitcoin.

Before Bitcoin was a thing, I was thinking about the Erlang VM's "reduction-counting" processing paradigm, and noticed that it was a lot like having a dom0-scheduler "treasury" with domU-process "citizens", where each citizen gets paid a basic income every scheduling interval, and then can spend it to "purchase" time-spent-aware on a virtual core.

In Erlang's model, processes lose whatever they don't spend in a given interval—this is necessary to prevent a process from "saving up" and then blocking the VM for seconds at a time. However, if rather than putting a cap on wealth, you just cap spending per interval, then processes could do lots of other clever things with their income: trade it, invest it, spawn subagents that consume it, etc. This would be a very interesting platform for running goal-directed AI agents on: somewhere between Core Wars and Heroku.

Now, if the only "ledger" of reductions was in the local dom0, you'd have nothing more than a toy server: a sort of fishtank for agents to interact within. But throw a blockchain at the problem, and now agents could pay to spawn sub-agents (or copy themselves) anywhere that'll take their dom0's currency.

Interestingly, since cryptocoins are all pretty fungible, this would imply that the "intelligence" of an AI—or of a hypothetical Hansonian brain-emulation, for that matter—could be measured in units of dollars-spent-per-second.