I don't remember where I heard it, but I remember an interesting concept of a "ghost Uber service".
Imagine a future where Bitcoin is much more widely accepted and driverless cars are a thing. A well off guy buys a fleet of these cars and automates everything. They receive payment over Lightning to drive you anywhere in the city. They automatically service themselves by driving into a mechanic and paying them. They automatically clean themselves by going to car washes and interior cleaning services and paying them too. They replace the old vehicles with new ones using the profit. It automatically files taxes. You get the idea.
One day, the rich guy dies alone in his condo or house. He's a socially isolated fellow, so no one notices for a long time. All the while the Uber service he owned is automatically running itself. Eventually someone finds the dude's body a year or two later. Now the city has a conundrum. Do they let this ghost service continue? Who technically owns the business?
Really interesting stuff
yeah fascinating. will the future contain sentient AIs that are stacking sats in private gold piles and allocating them how they see fit? they could be completely out of the reach of any regulation or control, unless the underlying hardware that's running their code is compromised.
I'm wondering about the nearer term too, simple services online that are self sustaining and pay for their own hosting, they could even fix their own bugs with bug bountys paid to devs that fix them. and they could distribute any revenue they earn to their founders/creators
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