The concepts of "automatic businessman", "incentive trees", "decentralized exocortex" and "crowd mining" defined

State of the art concepts in cryptospace defined

This blog post is mainly to introduce some of the concepts which myself and others have helped introduce to the crypto space over the past few years.

Automated businessmen aka "profit bots"

The concept of "automatic businessman" was originally coined by Ohad Asor. This concept of automatic businessman was also described by myself under the phrase "intelligent assistant/intelligent agent". Currently people think of some of these concepts as science fiction and that is okay because Proof of Work was also science fiction before Bitcoin.

An automated businessman is an intelligent agent which is programmed to seek a profit. Another phrase we can use to simplify the definition of this concept is a "profit bot". These concepts are just breaking through into the crypto-space.

We see at least in marketing that Bitconnect has used this concept of a "profit bot" for their network but because we cannot see their bot we cannot get beyond the "wizard of oz" situation. We simply do not know yet of any example of a profit bot which actually exists to generate profit for a network by trading but we do know theoretically that it is possible to build one.

The Bitnation example - Enter Lucy

We see a partial implementation of this bot design in Bitnation which has Lucy. Lucy is intended to act as an the exocortex function for Bitnation but is also designed to be iteratively evolved over time as AI becomes more sophisticated. Lucy once functional will be one of the earliest implementations of a bot of this type and one of the earliest attempts at building a decentralized exocortex. Lucy currently exists as an Ethereum smart contract which communicates with an Oracle, and is in the testing phase of being launched.

Crowdmining

Crowdmining is also an abstract concept which today people may think of as science fiction but all the technology and theoretical basis for building it is available. We can build a crowd mining platform today over Ethereum and there is at least one group trying to replace Amazon Turk with a version of crowdmining. Without going into too much detail, to crowd mine is to harvest "human computation", which is to say the effort of human beings to solve problems which AI cannot solve. There are many tasks, microtasks, etc, which humans will do if given the correct structure of incentives.

Crowdmining will allow for maximum participation in the economy by humans. The economic incentive structures for doing this have already been worked out and the "incentive trees" are the mechanism behind crowdmining. An incentive tree is as it sounds, it is a tree of rewards. Incentive trees attract people to networks by rewarding participants for bringing new people in (we think of this as referral marketing), while crowdmining supplies participants with opportunities to continue to contribute value to the network.

Conclusion

I hope this post was good enough to introduce people to the concepts which I believe represent the current and future trends in the cryptospace. I consider these to be the conceptual state of the art, just as Proof of Work or Smart Contracts were for their time the state of the art. I encourage discussion around these concepts and deeper investigation by developers, philosophers, and interested parties.

References

Amsterdamer, Y., Grossman, Y., Milo, T., & Senellart, P. (2013, June). Crowd mining. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (pp. 241-252). ACM.

Lv, Y., & Moscibroda, T. (2013). Fair and Resilient Incentive Tree Mechanisms.

Web:

1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/fair-and-resilient-incentive-tree-mechanisms/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocortex
4. https://blog.gems.org/introducing-gems-the-protocol-for-decentralized-mechanical-turk-8bd5ef29ca82