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Comment by mappum | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it would hold up if the bot was decentralized. For instance, it could be run on many servers around the world, administered by various people. Those servers could come to consensus in some way to define bot behavior, and could even send/receive money (e.g. Bitcoin multisig).

I don't think any court could take jurisdiction over an entity that lives in many countries. And even if one server got shut down, many more would still be active.

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The idea that the "software owns its own code" would not hold up in any court that I can think of. Building a system that spans jurisdictions, making it difficult for a court to claim the ability to rule on it is beside that point.

Laws change. I'm just trying to make a statement about this exact issue.

If an entity on the internet can't directly be controlled by anyone (kind of like Bitcoin), who is liable for its actions?

This might actually be possible in the near future with cryptocurrencies. Nobody "owns" a bitcoin wallet; spending the money inside is just a matter of having the private key. Assuming a service pops up to provide nonzero interest rates for holding bitcoin, you could grant the autonomous entity enough bitcoin to pay its own hosting bill indefinitely, then erase your copy of the wallet key and any privileged access you have to the server.

As for the actual software running the autonomous entity, all you have to do is provide an API so that the hosting providers du jour can bid on providing hosting service. Since the software uses nearly zero CPU or bandwidth, and the entity would be willing to pay above-market prices for its survival, hosting providers will be incentivized in perpetuity to register themselves and collect basically free money from the entity.

Irrational hosting providers might try to kill it, so you'd need some level of redundancy. Also, you'd want to require a TPM and a trusted computing platform to prevent recovery of the wallet key.

Anyway, that's how you'd create immortal software.

> Also, you'd want to require a TPM and a trusted computing platform to prevent recovery of the wallet key.

This is the part where you're going to run into problems. If the software can access the wallet key, then so can the hosting provider. If it can't, then how is it going to spend money? (Hint: look at the operations that a TPM actually provides; do they actually map in a useful way to things a Bitcoin agent would actually need to do?)

I'm not an expert on trusted computing, but I thought that TPMs can enforce secure boot and encrypt data that cannot be recovered if unauthorized software is running on the system. There are probably vulnerabilities in the implementation, but I thought that, in theory, it's airtight.

In principle, yes, if you know that the TPM's private key hasn't been compromised. At a minimum, you would need some way to verify that it's actually a tamper-resistant hardware chip, and not a software emulation.

I don't see how a software agent bidding on VPS hosting services could possibly know that.

It could just pay humans to go verify that for it. See http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-n..., or just think about the fact that services like Mechanical Turk and Magic exist.

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