Quote from: niniyo on March 09, 2014, 07:06:08 AM

Thanks. Those threads are definitely of interest.

Reading them made me realise that a really good application of this idea would be to build a distributed altcoin exchange. Altcoin exchanges are essential because trading from BTC into an altcoin and back is almost like the zerocoin concept, so long as the exchanges are black boxes. Imagine a distributed exchange that replicated itself with the profit!

The obvious weakness here is that people with physical access to the hardware can steal its wallet or manipulate the software, and it would be easy to trick an autonomous agent into purchasing a VPS from you for this purpose.

To take this even one step further, and into a viable "proof of concept" capability, I highly encourage you to check out Open-Transactions.org which is a 100% open source powerhouse perfecly suited to these very types of tasks.

Except that in Open-Transactions (OT), the personalities (or "characters", if you will) are called Nyms (shortened from 'pseudonym').

A Nym can either be human, AI, or smart-contract driven; able to start it's own virtual corporation, exercise trades (as contracted; in the case of a smart contract-powered Nym), run their own "in-house" peer-to-peer exchange, escrow... you name it. And this doesn't even begin to scratch OT's real capabilities (i.e. asset-backed digital basket currencies, etc.)

But alas I am not a coder / developer, and it would appear that a fairly savvy amount of knowledge is required to compile it for Linux; hence I must wait for a more universal (browser-based?) app to manefest; hopefully as an open source-based community Project.

Here's the OT mainpage:

http://opentransactions.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Here's an in-depth article I wrote, introducing OT's undeniable open source awesomeness:

http://open-transactions.github.io/introduction/2014/01/16/revolutionary/