Bitcoin-using Autonomous Agents | Hacker News

Bitcoin-using Autonomous Agents | Hacker News #cryptocurrent

A Bitcoin Von Neumann machine (the self-replicating variety). It buys CPU power to generate more money to buy more CPU power. Cool idea.Unfortunately, I think such a thing would be doomed, except on the fringes. You might get a short, profitable run with such a system, but once it becomes noticeably profitable to do so, why wouldn't the service providers do it themselves? If you're able to make money after paying them, they can get what they were paid plus what you made by doing it themselves. And since the APIs must exist for the bots to exist, doing so should be relatively trivial for the providers. StorJ sounds like more fun. A similar bot which makes money so it can pay humans to do its bidding (help it reproduce), which means it doesn't require widespread APIs that would contribute to its own downfall.

Full article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4389283