Quote from: nixxle on December 06, 2011, 07:46:48 PM

Governments will build millions of slightly-different evolving automated versions. This Gray Goo ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo ) will be dropped inside a hostile state. Currently probably Iran. Or China even?

The bots will try to profit off the economy of the hostile state. When successful profit-schemes have been found, other bots will be notified so they too can maximize profit. All profit will be turned in to Bitcoins. These Bitcoins will be "destoryed" (lost inside untracable wallet files). Thereby slowly grinding the economy to a halt as all money is drained away by these automatons. Descending the state into revolt and then anarchy.

That isn't what Gray Goo means. Gray goo implies nanotechnology (read tiny robots). This would be entirely programmatic.

If I was going to write one of these, I would make it a domain name and hosting service. Using genetic algorithms, it buys and sells domains, storage, and bandwidth from humans and other bots. It can trade successful strategies with peers, and when it amasses a certain threshold of BTC it can clone itself onto another server, while running the same or an evolutionary derivative set of code.

Quote from: chickenado on December 06, 2011, 08:35:19 PM

Quote from: RaggedMonk on December 06, 2011, 07:29:35 PM

I thought about this when I first heard about bitcoin. Haven't found a solution to the problem of memory providers stealing private keys though.

The solution exists. It's called fully homomorphic encryption.

See:

https://researcher.ibm.com/researcher/view_page.php?id=2661

If you combine a) fully homomorphic encryption with b) mutation, genetic algorithms, and mitosis you could end up with truly autonomous software agents, that collect bitcoins entirely for their own benefit.

They would be the bacteria to the computer virus.

The interesting thing is about these "computer bacteria" is that, just like real bacteria, they don't need complex AI to be successful. They could do something relatively simple like the example of inducing people to solve captchas, mentioned above. So this would be almost possible using today's technology.

As long as they keep finding people (and other software agents) who help them spread, they and their offspring could survive for a very long time and collect a large quantity of bitcoins that "belong" to them only and not a human being, not even the original author!

I'm not sure to what extent fully homomorphic encryption is resistant to brute force attacks though.

Very cool. I hadn't heard of this, thanks!