Autonomous Businesses

What happens when businesses don't have owners? Just like self driving cars, there may be a day with self driving businesses. As described by the bitcoin wiki it is possible for a program to run it's own business. The basic concept is, by using APIs and automated payment methods, a program may be able to purchase server space and collect its own payments.

This form of running a service has very little overhead. A programmer could design an entire business and have it algorithmically buy and sell services. And with competing businesses you could even have them compete against each other. Programmers could compete to see who could make the most algorithmically fit business. This is similar to how high frequency trading occurs, when the two different algorithms can try to "game" each other. Competition would be rampant in an environment where people are trying to out compete each other for business.

One of the first questions I can think of how could this be regulated? This method could eventually be used to run a service that authorities may want access to, such as a file server. Since the program is autonomous, there might not be a clear source of contact. Unfortunately this usually not an appropriate way to run a business in our modern society. One could even have the program report back to a server that is hosted on an anonymized network.

As cool as this idea is, it might not be very practical. If there are any bugs in your program, they could result in significant losses. Someone could even hack into the service and literally steal all incoming funds. It would be difficult to convince users to submit any personal information to a service that has no clear person in charge. Especially since It would be terribly difficult to recover from a catastrophic service disruption. What happens when a service loses all of its data? Autonomous businesses will probably not be a reality until someone is able to determine how the logistics of running such a business would work.

Image source:

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bitcoin_logo.svg