How Bitcoin Enables a Machine Payable-Web
21 has developed an open source software that makes it easy to perform Bitcoin micropayments over HTTP. The software allows you to get digital currency onto any machine headlessly, set up web services that accept and transmit bitcoin over HTTP, and discover other machines with similar services to autonomously trade with.
The overall effect is to turn digital currency into a scarce system resource on par with CPU, RAM, and hard drive space. That is, just as one can create a database index that spends disk space to save time, we show that one can instead spends digital currency to outsource a computation to save time. To illustrate the applications, they conclude with several working examples: bitcoin-aware intelligent agents, APIs that implement autonomous surge pricing, and the development of a market data structure as an alternative in many situations to the well known queue.
Balaji S. Srinivasan is the CEO & cofounder of 21.co and a Board Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Prior to taking the role of CEO at 21, Dr. Srinivasan was a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He was named to the MIT TR35, was the cofounder and CTO of Founders Fund-backed Counsyl, and taught a MOOC with 200k+ students at startup.stanford.edu. He holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University.