<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 4:59 AM, Anders Sandberg <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:anders@aleph.se" target="_blank">anders@aleph.se</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<div>On 2014-01-07 03:04, Kelly Anderson
wrote:<br>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">And why
should they sit in some server forever when the instances
could<br>
change servers periodically?<br>
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<div>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.<br>
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Hmm... there is a very cool idea here. What if running uploads acted
as Proof of Work for a currency? <br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>OOoooh, I likes it!</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
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 :-)<br>
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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. </div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>-Kelly</div><div> </div></div></div></div>