[tbrownaw]

How could an independent bot (legitamately) earn bitcoins? A cheap vps to live on would be $5/mo, so it wouldn't take that much. It would need to provide some sort of service that doesn't require human intervention, and is worth paying for.

Darknet markets take bitcoin, and at least some VPS providers do as well, so no need to get "real" bank accounts and evade know-your-customer.

[jfoster]

Not quite legitimate, but straightforward, I think we're imagining a bot that spreads like a computer virus, mines bitcoins, spends the bitcoins it earns irresponsibly, and has the goods shipped to random addresses. Would be rather eerie to be on the receiving end of goods that no human was involved in ordering.

[lotsofmangos]

How could an independent bot (legitamately) earn bitcoins?

Perhaps it could make and sell artworks.

[Houshalter]

Well of course if someone knew how to make an automated money making machine, they probably wouldn't share it. Let alone letting it roam the Internets freely. And competition would eventually eliminate any good ideas we do come up with.

However it's not theoretically impossible. Plenty of services are done over the internet with no human interaction.

[gburt]

What if I were to gift it capital and have it simply collect interest/dividends from the exploitation of said capital (either via loaning it out with an algorithm or by building a profitable business with it)?

[tbrownaw]

Yeah, but how do you exploit that capital without interacting with the human-only financial/employment systems?

You can hire humans for things over informal channels with no intermediary, but what do you do for reputation/accountability when said humans need to keep low enough volume to not interest the tax authorities?

I guess algorithmic trading on decentralized/anonymous bitcoin markets is one way to have no humans, if you can get the volatility low enough.

How do you exploit capital with (almost) no human involvement?

[kolinko]

It's not about no human involvement, but no human oversight.

Imagine a trading bot that hires people to improve it's source code, and other people to oversee those people, but there's nobody in charge - i.e. nobody to tell the bot to stop doing what it's doing.

[gburt]

I can see numerous ways. Selling a piece of (previously developed) software in Bitcoin is an easy one. The software will depreciate over time, but we're not talking about something that has to last forever, I don't think.

Automated trading is another. Selling advertising is another.

[bcbrown]

A tip bot that charges commission.