Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

smart-contract, self-bootstrapping

software to crowdfund itself based on a

mission statement; operate; pay

dividends or other remuneration back to

crowdfunding investors; receive

feedback (automated or orchestrated)

through blockchain prediction markets

and decentralized blockchain voting; and

eventually dissolve or have periodic

confirmation-of-instantiation votes

(similar to business relationship

contracts evergreening or calling for

periodic reevaluations). Automatic

dissolution or reevaluation clauses

could be critical in avoiding situations

like those described in Daniel Suarez’s

science-fiction books Daemon and

Freedom, in which the world economy

ends up radically transformed by the

smart-contract type agents inexorably

following their programmed code.

Automatic Markets and

Tradenets

An automatic market is the idea that

unitized, packetized, quantized resources

(initially like electricity, gas, bandwidth,

and in the deeply speculative future,

units of synaptic potentiation in brains)

are automatically transacted based on

dynamically evolving conditions and

preprogrammed user profiles,

permissions, and bidding functions.73

Algorithmic stock market trading and

real-time bidding (RTB) advertising

networks are the closest existing

examples of automatic markets. In the

future, automatic markets could be

applied in the sense of having limit

orders and program trading for physical-

world resource allocation. Truly smart

grids (e.g., energy, highway, and traffic

grids) could have automatic bidding

functions on both the cost and revenue

side of their operations—for both inputs

(resources) and outputs (customers) and

participation in automatic clearing

mechanisms. A related concept is

tradenets: in the future there could be

self-operating, self-owned assets like a

self-driving, self-owning car.74 Self-

directing assets would employ

themselves for trade based on being

continuously connected to information

from the Internet to be able to assess

dynamic demand for themselves,

contract with potential customers like

Uber does now, hedge against oil price

increases with their own predictive

resource planning, and ultimately self-

retire at the end of their useful life—in

short, executing all aspects of

autonomous self-operation. Tradenets

could even have embedded,

automatically executing smart contracts

to trigger the building of new

transportation pods based on signals of

population growth, demand, and

business plan validity.

The Blockchain as a Path to

Artificial Intelligence

We should think of smart contracts as

applications that can themselves be

decentralized, autonomous, and

pseudonymously running on the

blockchain. Thus, the blockchain could

be one potential path to artificial

intelligence (AI) in the sense that smart-

contract platforms are being designed to

run at graduated stages of increasing

automation, autonomy, and complexity.

With Dapps, DAOs, DACs, and DASs,

there could be many interesting new

kinds of emergent and complex AI-like

behavior. One possible path is bringing

existing non-AI and non-blockchain rule-

based systems onto the blockchain to

further automate and empower their

operations. This could include systems

like chaining together simple if-this-

then-that (or IFTTT) behavior and the

open source Huginn platform for

building agents that monitor situations

and act on your behalf. A second

possible path is implementing

programmatic ideas from AI research

fields such as Wolfram’s cellular

automata, Conway’s Game of Life,

Dorigo’s Ant Colony Optimization and

Swarm Intelligence, Andy Clark’s

embodied cognitive robots, and other

general agent-based systems.

Chapter 3. Blockchain 3.0:

Justice Applications Beyond

Currency, Economics, and

Markets

Blockchain Technology Is a

New and Highly Effective

Model for Organizing Activity

Not only is there the possibility that

blockchain technology could reinvent

every category of monetary markets,

payments, financial services, and

economics, but it might also offer

similar reconfiguration possibilities to

all industries, and even more broadly, to

nearly all areas of human endeavor. The

blockchain is fundamentally a new

paradigm for organizing activity with

less friction and more efficiency, and at

much greater scale than current

paradigms. It is not just that blockchain

technology is decentralized and that

decentralization as a general model can

work well now because there is a liquid

enough underlying network with the Web

interconnecting all humans, including for

disintermediated transactions:

blockchain technology affords a

universal and global scope and scale

that was previously impossible. This can

be true for resource allocation, in

particular to allow for increasingly

automated resource allocation of

physical-world assets and also human

assets. Blockchain technology facilitates

the coordination and acknowledgment of

all manner of human interaction,

facilitating a higher order of

collaboration and possibly paving the

way for human/machine interaction.

Perhaps all modes of human activity

could be coordinated with blockchain

technology to some degree, or at a