Equipping robots with crypto wallets to fund on-demand intelligence

Hi guys!

I’m thinking about an idea wherein a robot is equipped with it’s own crypto wallet that it has control over.

The robot could use its wallet to fund access to advance machine learning intelligence. It would just pay for what it uses, when it uses it.

For example, it could pay for powerful computer vision or natural language processing capabilities that wouldn’t be available to it through its on-board compute.

A platform like dhali.io (or something similar!?) might help for accessing the intelligence on-demand…

Question:

Does this sound like an interesting / viable idea and would anyone be interested in working on it with me?

Remember-- the blockchain is just a database, but you’re losing efficiency in favor of decentralization. But, wait, someone is running these robots, right? So you do have a centralized system. So… you’re losing efficiency to get decentralization, but then you’re centralizing it.

Whenever you’re thinking about anything with blockchain, ask yourself, “could I do this with a database”? Similarly, with crypto: “could I do this with centralized currency”?

When you think about these distributed computing applications in that light, you’ll then find that there are actually some products that do what you’re describing: for example, it’s very common to set up AWS for remote computation, and that could easily do what you’re describing (probably for a lot cheaper than a crypto rig).

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I think this has already been done.

I don’t understand why someone use such a service based on cryptocurrency when there are multiple, mature products, some of which have existed for over a decade. This seems like AWS Lambda, but with more steps.

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Not directly related, but worth a plug: Ruffin’s 2019 ROSCon talk on Logging and the Blockchain and my exclusive line of ROS-distro based NFTs