The car of the future may ownerless as well as driverless

Since its launch in 2008, most of the public discussion about bitcoin has focused on its potential as a new digital currency that allows people to make online payments without going through banks or other financial middlemen.

But the past year has also seen growing interest in a host of non-currency applications for bitcoins core technology. Innovators are devising all manner of ideas to decentralize commercial and social activity: smart contracts that function without lawyers; stock exchanges without central clearinghouses; financial record-keeping systems that can be verified without an auditor; even tamper-proof voting systems that automatically guarantee one-person-one-vote.

These ideas treat bitcoins all-important blockchain ledger, a fully verifiable public database thats maintained by thousands of independent computers, as a platform on which to build secondary programs that strip out costly middlemen from peoples exchanges.

To many in Silicon Valley, this Bitcoin 2.0 movement also known as Blockchain 2.0 has parallels with the sweeping innovation unleashed by an earlier groundbreaking platform the Internet.

How might this new decentralized future look? The following passage from Wall Street Journal reporters Paul Vigna and Michael J. Caseys new book, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order, lays out one persons dramatic vision for a world managed by blockchain-based networks:

Mike Hearn, who worked for three years on security software at Google before quitting to devote himself to cryptocurrency development, offers perhaps the most far-reaching forecast of such potential in blockchain technology.

In a speech at the August 2013 Turing Festival in Edinburgh, Hearn envisioned an economy composed of autonomous economic agents. He used the example of a driverless taxi, one guided only by sensors and GPS technology.

The one-car taxi service would be run by a smart software program plugged into an automated, electronic marketplace Hearn dubbed the Tradenet. There, prospective passengers could post ride requests and receive competing bids from multiple driverless cars. They would choose their preferred taxi based on fare, travel time, and model of car and could negotiate the route based on durations and fares that the service derived by bidding in a separate Tradenet load space market, where variations in traffic conditions would offer differing market-based toll-road prices for each route.

If all that sounds futuristic but feasible, try this additional feature of Hearns imaginary taxi: it has no owner. The car owns itself or, more precisely, the operating computer program owns it. This program would pay the cars running costs and take in its own revenue; all of this would be made possible by cryptocurrency and the invention of the blockchain.

I suspect if I tried to go to the bank and open a bank account thats owned by a computer program, theyd tell me to get lost or theyd think Im crazy and report me to the police, Hearn said. But bitcoin has no intermediaries. Therefore, theres really nothing to stop a computer from connecting to the Internet and taking part [in the bitcoin network] all by itself. All you need to do to generate a bitcoin wallet is to generate a large random number, and pretty much anything can do that.

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The car of the future may ownerless as well as driverless