[ExI] The second step towards immortality

[Kelly Anderson]

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 4:59 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

>  On 2014-01-07 03:04, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
>
> And why should they sit in some server forever when the instances could
>> change servers periodically?
>>
>
>  That would work so long as someone somewhere was interested in hosting
> the servers, if it was a Bitcoin like server, they would continue running
> so long as anyone viewed them as money because without the servers, there
> would be no way of having it be fungible.
>
>
> Hmm... there is a very cool idea here. What if running uploads acted as
> Proof of Work for a currency?
>

OOoooh, I likes it!


> The most basic version would be that you have a currency of
> upload-seconds. This would of course encourage people to farm uploads, so
> at first it looks like you would just get pointless copies. But it would
> make their rents low or negative: you want to have more minds around since
> that makes you money. If having the upload around is necessary for the
> mined currency to work virtual landlords also would not want to evict their
> tenants. The extra minds would want to make money too, either by normal
> work or by buying into colonisation ventures. Converting the universe into
> computronium is good business in order to stay ahead of inflation! So this
> approach would push posthumanity towards radical expansionism. Charles
> Stross would have a fit over this idea :-)
>
> Now, I suspect the above system is too simplistic and explosive to really
> work. It might be better to make the upload software act to check
> transactions rather than doing currency mining: you still want to have the
> uploads around, especially if the protocol makes you lose money via reneged
> transactions if you delete them, but the people who have an incentive to
> host them are mainly stable financial institutions.
>

I was thinking of the uploads as more like the chain or exchange of bitcoin
rather than the mining, but the idea could work either way. Bitcoin is
interesting in that it bound those two concepts together, which is one of
many brilliant ideas in that framework. There are many good ideas to mine
from Bitcoin and apply in different directions.

-Kelly
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