A Software Agent Without Human Control that Produces, Owns & Sells its Own Art.
or:
“Bootstrapping & Monetizing Decentralized Art Production with Meme Markets.”
Earlier this year in Berlin, I had awesome beers with Trent & Greg from BigchainDB. If you can have beers with them, you must. It’s always awesome. When in Berlin during the summer, and you have a bunch of crypto enthusiasts huddling around, of course the topic will veer to AI ArtDAOs: decentralized organisations/agents governed by smart contracts that produce art without human involvement. Trent wrote up his ideas here.
Recently, I’ve been spending my free time indulging in a concept called Meme Markets: a way to monetize networks around memes without a centralized 3rd party being involved. It will hopefully allow the creation of organisations & interest networks with no intermediaries. I’m still busy with protocol designs, but you can read the gist of it here. For the intents and purposes of this post, it will allow one to invest and coordinate around a common goal.
With Meme Markets, combining it with ideas from ArtDAOs, one can right now produce a free, decentralized economic agent without human control that produces art that it owns and attempts to sell.
It works as follows (this precludes some understanding of smart contracts & Ethereum):
- Coordinate around the #artDAO meme on Meme Markets.
- Buy action coupons according the hardcoded protocol.
- Dispense action coupons that votes up a commit hash that points to a piece of software.
- Using this software, every 24 hours, it uses the block hash of an Ethereum block to seed the software (that is the highest upvoted commit hash in the meme market at the point in time) to produce a unique piece of art.
- The smart contract then sets up an auction to sell this art (which is really a combination of 2 hashes that uniquely identify it: commit hash of software + block hash).
- When bought, the funds goes towards the meme market.
- One can trade the unique piece of art, reselling it as one prefers.
- To showcase this art in the real world, and proving ownership, one would print the artwork, and then have a cryptographically proven display show that with a specific key, that one owns that artwork.
- The value of the #artDAO meme market will grow as it produces more valuable art. The action coupons will increase in value to influence its decisions around what software to use.
Deciding what the meme market does with the funds is up to the meme market and specific implementation. It could go to a decentralized exchange that buys and dispenses the action coupons to keep liquidity & interest growing in the #artoDAO meme market. It could send the funds towards the highest meme fosterer (which would be for example, the humans that are producing & coding the software that takes the random seed to produce art).
The goal of the #artDAO meme market would be to continuously use its action coupons to vote on the software created by the humans. Better software that produces more unique art that results in more sales will be more crucial.
Action coupons that are being bought are primarily being paid towards people and services that propagate this meme/artDAO. More specific niche artDAOs can be created that foster creation of more specific art.
