Replacing Witness Nodes with Autonomous Bots by kencode

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bitshares · @kencode · Jun 5 '16

$137.52

Replacing Witness Nodes with Autonomous Bots

I like humans, but... 

So, today I was thinking about our security... 
> Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature. -*Georgia Guidestones*
 
The Bitshares blockchain Witness nodes have to be run by humans right now. Can we replace those humans with bots that get voted in to do the same job? Our Witness nodes are scattered all over the Earth so as long as we have a routable internet or meshnet and electricity, then in theory we could just "hire" some reliable bots to run/secure our network, right? Autonomous bots that can upgrade themselves, are impervious to social engineering, can be coded with "3 laws", keep the blockchain on IPFS, reboot or wake-on-lan when necessary and so on... I think we could reduce our financial overhead and risk quite a bit by eliminating the reliance on those humans. I know that sounds bad, but please just follow along with me here if ya could... 
 
![Autonomous robots](https://ipfs.pics/ipfs/QmVYVge3YGK4qGBRbdGijD87Wg5VgUxM4a8Q758xQ8cLh9) 
 
Bots can save us money and lower risk. The (unpaid) Committee sets it up, and multisig takes care of the rest. 
 
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below, thanx! :)

👍 itsascam, steemed, fuzzyvest, steemroller, onceuponatime, samupaha, benjojo, coindup, ingenesist, asch, fminerten1, hossary, testz, proctologic, juanlibertad, valtr, teamsteem, linouxis9, steemrollin, pstrident, timifey2015, fractalnode, hcf27, methodise, n25052016, sonarous, jerome-colley, akaninyene-etuk, ranko-k, ombc, cryptorune, paliboy, appalachia, tinfoilfedora, bola, chappers, rubybian, nanzo-scoop, mrs.agsexplorer, mineralwasser, barrie

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@fractalnode · Jun 20 '16

How big is the moment geo diversification witnesses? What happens if it would be a great earthquake in the US, or other disaster affecting the entire continent. How fast network switch witnesses and who they will be?

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@joseph · Jun 5 '16

$4.25

You should watch: The Twilight Zone Season 5 Episode 33
"The Brain Center at Whipple's"

👍 steempty

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@pfunk · Jun 5 '16

The best witnesses are humans who have coded scripts to handle most issues automatically, so this is already almost the case.

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@pharesim · Jun 5 '16

$5.01

What do you imagine when you say "bot"? Bots are computer programs running on servers. Guess what steemd is?

Witnesses set up servers, that's nothing different to your proposal. The only change I can see is that we should set up and manage the servers for free in your opinion...

👍 pharesim, joseph, hcf27

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@kencode · Jun 5 '16

Precisely, there is still the electric cost of running the node, buying the Pi, and so on. We should have at least one node in every country. The Committee raises enough funds (use a UIA or a Worker) to create a new neighborhood of nodes, they get the nodes online and the chain on IPFS then step away. The Committee must ensure that the nodes are as Union-diverse, corporate-diverse and geo-diverse as possible (EU, NAU, AWS, Azure, DigOcean, Evennode, Slovakia, Amerika, India, Paris, Beijing, etc). A bot can literally be just a few lines of code (IFTTT) for a reboot, etc. It just sits there and does what it is programmed to do. Reliable bots rarely need human intervention so why should we pay so many humans to "manage" all these machines? If a bot is coded right, it is very lightweight and could just be a relay for another node in a sense, a ping, its own vpn even, protecting the other nodes privacy. Sorry if I am not answering the question good enough, still thinking aloud about this myself.

👍 fractalnode, hcf27, n25052016

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@pharesim · Jun 5 '16 (edited)

A Pi won't last long. When Steem goes mainstream witnesses need _really_ powerful servers with a good connection eating massive amounts of traffic, and those cost money either way. Monthly, a single fundraiser wouldn't be a long-term solution.

Putting contents on IPFS doesn't help a lot, you'd still need the basic blockchain outside to know which IPFS-hash belongs where.

And of course we already use scripts to manage the servers. We just don't call them bots ;-)

👍 hcf27

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@pharesim · Jun 5 '16

Oh damn SORRY! 
This is about BTS!

I'm not sure about what BTS witnesses need, but I'd expect them too to require a lot more than now if BTS hits mainstream. So that point doesn't change: won't work long-term.

👍 hcf27

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@teamsteem · Jun 5 '16

I know next to nothing about this but if you can code such a bot and proportionally redistribute the steem mine through it I would vote for you and most probably a lot of us would.

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@samupaha · Jun 5 '16

Hmmh... Actually this might be interesting. There could be a DAO that runs witness node. That would make the whole system even more decentralized.

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@tinfoilfedora · Jun 5 '16

It definitely needs to be more decentralized. 100 nodes could easily be dd o ss ed... Plus, paying those fees to people as interest would attract more users.Too bad they are all owned by the guys who write the code. 
I'm sure they can resist the urge to replace themselves with a small shell script...

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@pharesim · Jun 5 '16

No steem dev is acting as a witness.

👍 hcf27

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4 replies

@stan · Jun 5 '16

I love the concept, but one of the big things we rely on witnesses to do is to pass judgement on whether the code they are running is copasetic and is what the community wants.  Hard forks only happen when the right percentage of the human inspectors make the judgement call that new software should be adopted.  But perhaps you mean to keep that function but allow every human account holder with an electable reputation to be automatically issued hardware from the cloud?  For example if some benevolent whale were to offer enough free satellites in orbit to host the network and each elected account was automagically assigned its own satellite host...they could still be responsible for what software they upload to their free orbiting witness node...

👍 pstrident, kencode

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@kencode · Jun 6 '16

Stan, you always make me smile. Upvoted. :)

👍 hcf27

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