Will market incentives evolve Bitcoin into a fully autonomous AI?
First how do we conceptualize the concept of a market? Well according to Wikipedia a market:
A market is one of the many varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange. While parties may exchange goods and services by barter, most markets rely on sellers offering their goods or services (including labor) in exchange for money from buyers.
Will Bitcoin evolve into a bot?
If we understand the concept of universal Darwinism and think of each blockchain as a sort of species on it's own evolutionary trajectory then perhaps we could simulate different trajectories based on market assumptions. If the market influences the evolutionary trajectory then perhaps we could understand where different blockchain projects could land along their evolutionary path toward destiny.
I suspect that Bitcoin and similar Proof of Work cryptocurrencies will evolve into fully autonomous agents. What would a fully autonomous Bitcoin look like? Well imagine if Bitcoin did not require any human beings involved in maintaining it. If Bitcoin could mine itself by paying human beings for CPU resources or perhaps simply stealing CPU cycles? What if Bitcoin evolves into a virus like infrastructure fueled by botnets and AI?
On the other hand there are some who want to build layer 2 on top of Bitcoin in the form of the Lightning Network and off chain scaling. I'm not entirely sure how these ideas could influence the evolutionary trajectory of Bitcoin but I have my skepticism about the need for off chain scaling.
Blockchains as autonomous agents
If we look at Proof of Stake then it is very possible that Proof of Stake blockchains in my opinion can evolve into autonomous agents. Autonomous agents described by Wikipedia:
An autonomous agent is an intelligent agent operating on an owner's behalf but without any interference of that ownership entity. An Intelligent agent, however appears according to a multiply cited statement in a no longer accessible IBM white paper as follows:
Intelligent agents are software entities that carry out some set of operations on behalf of a user or another program with some degree of independence or autonomy, and in so doing, employ some knowledge or representation of the user's goals or desires.
While I have not run simulations due to not having the resources to do so, I speculate that Ethereum running on Casper is more likely to evolve into an autonomous agent over the years due to market forces. First I would expect that after a certain market cap the large stakeholders under Proof of Stake will have to either be corporations or be decentralized conglomerates which hold the multi-sig wallet anonymously. Corporations would be necessary because I do not think individuals will be able to protect private keys beyond a certain level of money and I think anonymity if the corporations fail to be able to protect private keys or if decentralized autonomous corporate style structures are of greater efficiency.
In a sense, Ethereum would evolve toward and be domesticated by the stakeholders in the chain who hold Ether currently and or into the future. The stakeholders would be in the position to influence the development of the network and provide the security under Casper. This is very different from Bitcoin where there might not be any human beings at all involved in mining in the future and there is no stakeholder model of control of Bitcoin. For this reason I suspect Bitcoin can evolve into a fully autonomous AI which exists for it's own purpose while Ethereum seems likely tied to humans through Proof of Stake where it acts as an autonomous agent to fulfill the goals of it's stakeholders.
Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2034
Suppose by 2034 Bitcoin is fully autonomous AI. It mines itself, generates tokens from stealing and savaging CPU resources, and pays for whatever it can't take. If it needs human labor or robot labor or other AIs then it pays them in Bitcoins. It becomes smarter every year as it gains more CPU resources and no one really knows exactly what it is or what it will become.
Suppose also by 2034 Ethereum is an autonomous agent AI more akin to an autonomous business with stakeholders. These stakeholders could in theory by either human beings or other autonomous businesses which could even include Bitcoin itself as a stakeholder in Ethereum. It's unknown whether or not the majority of stakeholders in Ethereum will be humans, or AI, or whether the humans will organize as corporations or as decentralized entities in cyberspace, but as of right now I do not expect individual control of private keys to scale up well which means control of private keys will require more sophisticated organizational structures such as the firm, the corporation, the non-profit, or weird new decentralized DAO like structures.
By the year 2034 I expect AI to really be reaching the AGI phase. If AI is in the AGI phase then it is very possible Bitcoin could be one of the first serious AIs due to the market forces around it promoting efficiency gains by any means. This could at least in theory provoke Bitcoin to adopt the latest AI and remain on the cutting edge in terms of taking big risks in AI for efficiency purposes.
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Darwinism
- https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@dana-edwards/will-an-artificial-intelligence-ultimately-become-the-global-mining-cartel-ai-as-mining-monarch
@dana-edwards thanks for sharing this informative post. keep it up
mmm, strange reasoning... Maybe it is possible, but my brain doesn't buy it. AI can do a lot, but still, a human mind and brain is so sophisticated and has Billions of years of evolution behind it, I just can not believe AI can produce something similar in such a short amount of time... But maybe I am just being naive...
The full capabilities of a human mind are not necessary to run a business more efficiently than a human. AI is capable of being a truly raitonal agent in game theory. AI is capable of processing information far beyond what limited human can handle. In the paper "Toward an Attention Based View of The Firm" we can see that the main bottleneck in business is scarcity of attention. The human decision makers have very limited attention and also very limited ability to process information. Most importantly of all the human decision makers are naturally irrational (inefficient) and this inefficiency in humans is why AI at least for something like Bitcoin mining have every advantage.
The human brain might have advantages at nursing, at raising children, at care taking, but when you talk about the cryptocurrency mining business or trading you are talking about data driven processes which benefit from big data, ability to process the data, ability to reason over knowledge, in ways which a human brain cannot scale to keep up with.
An automated Bitcoin mining business will always be able to do more with less resources which means lower transaction fees, which means greater efficiency of operation, at least based on all the economics and game theory an irrational player has no advantages.
In economics, game theory, decision theory, and artificial intelligence, a rational agent is an agent that has clear preferences, models uncertainty via expected values of variables or functions of variables, and always chooses to perform the action with the optimal expected outcome for itself from among all feasible actions. A rational agent can be anything that makes decisions, typically a person, firm, machine, or software.
In game theory and classical economics, it is often assumed that the actors, people, and firms are rational. However, the extent to which people and firms behave rationally is subject to debate. Economists often assume the models of rational choice theory and bounded rationality to formalize and predict the behavior of individuals and firms. Rational agents sometimes behave in manners that are counter-intuitive to many people, as in the traveler's dilemma.
I know what I'm saying probably sounds ridiculous but if you want real world current evidence who is better at trading? Human beings or bots? When bots are better at trading then it means the bots are smart enough to be better rational agents than humans who at best pretend to be.
References
blockchain, very good keep it up.thanks for sharing with us.
Awesome Post !
Blockchain est un venir révolution
Bitcoin terminator is coming
Quite the mind blowing insight, thoroughly enjoyed reading it albiet being scary to say the least. A sencient AI is a huge possibility, hadn't thought as Bitcoin, Ethereum or any other crypto as a possible "evil" or tyrannical one. People need to be aware of the dangers of letting go of their control. Cryptos are here to serve us, not the other way around
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John Conor where you at!
hi,dana-edwards,nice to read about you.
am jeevansantoshi from india,am also new on steemit and welcome you to steemit.
i have followed you.So,can also follow me.
Best of luck!