A Typical Day in a Blockchain-Enabled World Circa 2030-FINTECH FUN

May 26, 2017 3:45 AM

Let’s follow Crowley the Crocodile as he goes about his day in the year 2030, from the moment his bitcoin-powered bioalarm clock wakes him, until he eats his late night pizza ordered using a rating service that runs without human owners. - this exploration of FinTech first appeared at Blockchain Futures which explores uses and avenues for the blockchain and other FinTech forms

After seeing Crowley show how FinTech may come to alter economic interactions in the future, it might be interesting to check out more about how it all actually works today.

What is Bitcoin/cryptocurrency? (PDF - excerpt from 'Bitcoin for the Befuddled' ebook)

In the simplest terms, Bitcoin is just another currency. The term Bitcoin refers to the entire currency system, whereas bitcoins are the basic units of the currency.¹

As with dollars, euros, yen, and gold coins, you can save bitcoins, spend them on goods and services, and exchange them for other currencies. However, Bitcoin is the world’s first currency that is both digital and decentralized.

A digital currency is one that can be easily stored and used on a computer. By this definition, even dollars can be considered a digital currency, since they can be easily sent to others or used to shop online, but their supply is controlled by a centralized bank organization. In contrast, gold coins are decentralized, meaning that no central authority controls the supply of gold in the world. In fact, anyone can dig for gold, create new coins, and distribute them. However, unlike digital currencies, it’s not easy to use gold coins to pay for goods (at least not with exact change!), and it’s impossible to transfer gold coins over the Internet. Because Bitcoin combines these two properties, it is somewhat like digital gold. Never before has there been a currency with both these two properties, and its impact on our increasingly digital, globalized world may turn out to be significant.

^{1 Similar to how renminbi is name of the Chinese currency, but the yuan is the basic unit.}

posted by infinite intimation (63 comments total)

Has bitcoin resolved its unintended concentration of power/control in a small handful of miners? I haven't been following it lately.
posted by Fraxas at 4:14 AM on May 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

While we're posting our favourite bitcoin fanfics, here's mine.
posted by kithrater at 4:31 AM on May 26, 2017 [11 favorites]

I'm pretty sure a currency designed around deflation isn't the future of anything.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:41 AM on May 26, 2017 [12 favorites]

Reading 'Bitcoin for the Befuddled' strongly suggests that you can't use Bitcoin to pay for the services of a good illustrator.

Also, this got some ponzi scheme alarm bells ringing for me: "...if Bitcoin becomes widely used in the future, the potential exists for you to become one of the early experts in Bitcoin..."
posted by The River Ivel at 4:49 AM on May 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

Has bitcoin resolved its unintended concentration of power/control in a small handful of miners?

Or the continuing problem of hackers emptying out exchanges? That's where all mine went.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 4:49 AM on May 26, 2017 [6 favorites]

reddit.com/r/buttcoin is choice
posted by hleehowon at 5:17 AM on May 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

I don't understand how internet strangers and crypto currency make the computerized alarm clock work better for anybody. It feels like introducing complexity just to jam more transactions into the day.
posted by Western Infidels at 5:18 AM on May 26, 2017 [9 favorites]

With each new paragraph of this article, I found myself surprised not to find it finally wink at the audience to acknowledge that the future it depicts is a satirical nightmare dystopia. I am completely baffled as to whether I either missed it, or this is somehow totally serious in its admiration for this possible scenario.
posted by tocts at 5:21 AM on May 26, 2017 [19 favorites]

I'm jumping off this rocket-powered, aluminum-sled future before it crashes into the nearest wall. This is like the "internet of things" x 1000. I don't want total strangers betting on what time I'm going to wake up in the morning.

Also: I don't know what poor people would do in this future. It looks like all of the chores are done by robots. Maybe the poor have just "Gone Away".
posted by Roentgen at 5:34 AM on May 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

I liked the part where they introduced unnecessary transactions into every mundane part of life, like having to bid on your hot water for the morning shower. I also liked the part where this introduces the opportunity for rent-seekers to squat in every crevice of one's life.

Wait, no, not "liked." "Wanted to set on fire" was the word I was looking for.
posted by Mayor West at 5:37 AM on May 26, 2017 [36 favorites]

At least the comments on the article seem to recognize the fresh hell that this world would represent.
posted by radicalawyer at 5:45 AM on May 26, 2017

this introduces the opportunity for rent-seekers to squat in every crevice

Rentiers building up in your crevices? Toss me a few btc and I'll clean them out for you.
posted by flabdablet at 5:51 AM on May 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

Or the continuing problem of hackers emptying out exchanges? That's where all mine went.

Hackers aren't even necessary- most exchanges seem to be basically experiments in how much BTC and cash you can get people to hand you before you decide to abscond with it.

Also, I love the bit where the croc tells a mower to "share this satoshi"- a satoshi is the smallest increment a bitcoin can be divided into. It literally cannot be shared.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:52 AM on May 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

With each new paragraph of this article, I found myself surprised not to find it finally wink at the audience to acknowledge that the future it depicts is a satirical nightmare dystopia.

Didn't it? The last paragraph of the story proper is

You might have thought that a world built entirely on decentralized Bitcoin transactions would be a horrific dystopia. But after reading the awesome description of a day in the life of a typical bitcoiner in the year 2030, where everything operates via Bitcoin, we’re sure your worries have been conclusively put to rest.

which seems like really super obvious sarcasm to me?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 5:52 AM on May 26, 2017 [10 favorites]

Meanwhile, David Gerard on what a goddamned terrible idea automated smart contracts are.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:53 AM on May 26, 2017 [6 favorites]

Hey now, just because the highest-profile use of an Ethereum "smart contract" to date involved something like $150M worth of virtual currency that was crowdfunded for community use being stolen due to a contract programming bug, that doesn't mean the concept has a problem. I mean it's not like it would result in something crazy like the blockchain splitting into two competing groups after the majority decided to negate the point of a blockchain and as a group pretend that transaction never happened, thus creating an alternate reality version of the chain.
posted by tocts at 6:05 AM on May 26, 2017 [12 favorites]

@ROU_Xenophobe: I'm not so sure—when it comes to anything bitcoin related, I've found sarcasm to be indistinguishable from breathless enthusiasm (and the latter is far, far more prevalent)
posted by AirExplosive at 6:13 AM on May 26, 2017 [7 favorites]

How long until the evolving algorithms in those AI lawnmowers discover that mowing lawns isn't the dominant bitcoin-acquiring strategy for a machine with a powerful motor and a rotating blade?
posted by drdanger at 6:32 AM on May 26, 2017 [19 favorites]

I'm pretty sure Phillip K Dick wrote this article in 1969 or so, but he stretched it into a book and called it "Ubik.' Maybe the character Phillip K Dick's doppelgänger came from the future and wrote the book as a warning. It's hard to tell.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 6:33 AM on May 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

Is there a chance that blockchain technology will allow direct democracy, or more representative democracy? How long until we get registered by being given a bitvote wallet, with votes inside to be "spent" on all elections we are eligible to participate in?
posted by TreeRooster at 6:40 AM on May 26, 2017

Talk about burying the lede. Forget blockchain, we're going to have talking human-crocodile hybrids in 2030!
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:55 AM on May 26, 2017 [10 favorites]

A bunch of anarchocapitalists walk into a venture capitalist's office wanting to perform their act. The venture capitalist asks what their act is, and they reply:
posted by acb at 7:01 AM on May 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

that guy's in the something awfull buttcoin thread, I think
posted by hleehowon at 7:03 AM on May 26, 2017

I'm not so sure—when it comes to anything bitcoin related, I've found sarcasm to be indistinguishable from breathless enthusiasm (and the latter is far, far more prevalent)

If that's the case, it's some really astonishingly bad writing.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:05 AM on May 26, 2017

I'm not saying bitcoins are a bad idea and I'm sure that cryptocurrencies in general have only just started, but the hype at the moment strongly suggests that "dumb money" is moving in, which I think will lead to a heavy crash somewhere down the road.
posted by NotSam at 7:09 AM on May 26, 2017

What is the Bitcoin equivalent of entropy?

Other peoples' money.
posted by JohnFromGR at 7:14 AM on May 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

I don't understand how internet strangers and crypto currency make the computerized alarm clock work better for anybody. It feels like introducing complexity just to jam more transactions into the day.

Not to mention that it goes against the entire purpose of an alarm clock to not wake you up at a certain time. Like, if my alarm clock were to independently decide to wake me up, say, 15 minutes later than my normal time, I can tell you very definitively that I'm going to have to either skip my shower or miss my bus. It sounds more like a bunch of technocratic engineer-bros trying to fuck up my life because I'm not efficient enough for their taste.
posted by Strange Interlude at 7:19 AM on May 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

Seconding the Philip K. Dick comment - take out any mention of blockchains or bitcoin as the driving technology and it totally mirrors the world Dick writes about in Ubik. Crazy. It's like they lifted the chapter introducing Joe Chip.
posted by buffalo at 7:36 AM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

"Where does the energy come from to run all those computers and robots? What is the Bitcoin equivalent of entropy?"

I calculated out, once, how much energy it takes to mine a block in the blockchain. I forget the value now, but it was obscenely high and from this chart has only gotten worse since. The global warming impact of a single bitcoin transaction is just orders of magnitude worse than conventional electronic transactions, or cash changing hands.
posted by traveler_ at 7:39 AM on May 26, 2017 [6 favorites]

Just keep saying "blockchain technology" until the magic future comes into being.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 7:40 AM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

Where does the energy come from to run all those computers and robots? What is the Bitcoin equivalent of entropy?

Coal, mostly.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:41 AM on May 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

Maybe the poor have just "Gone Away".

No, they're all riding bicycles in the giant arcology/prison from "15 Million Merits" to power the last remaining bitcoin mining farm.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:47 AM on May 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

I'm running a sale. Only 0.0001 satoshis and I'll like your post or comment. Bitcoin deets in mah profile.
posted by hot_monster at 7:51 AM on May 26, 2017

I'm running a sale. Only 0.0001 satoshis and I'll like your post or comment. Bitcoin deets in mah profile.


I am not seeing you in any of the reputation management review sites.
posted by Samizdata at 7:55 AM on May 26, 2017 [4 favorites]

It's really important to separate out the various things going on here: the theoretical basis for distributed ledgers. encrypted transactions, proof of work and so on are all in one class of interest - the basic mechanisms for what for want of better words is trusted anonymous object identity. (I'd very much welcome a decent taxonomy here, so if anyone knows one...). All that side of things is, as far as I'm aware, verified and genuinely innovative.

Then there are the cryptocurrency schemes atop that, which are based on code of varying quality and financial interfaces ditto. They all have issues of scaling, long-term viability and much else beside, but still work to some extent.

Then there are experiments like Etherium, which is a framework for automating the flow of data inherent in generating and servicing contracts and business models. And on that, the actual third party code that implements such things - which, as David Gerald points out, seems to be at the Arduino hacker level of expertise. Only they seem to think they can build Airbus levels of automation. Which they can't. (Although some smart people who know what they're doing are also fishing in those waters, so watch that space...)

If you get caught up in the pleasurable business of pointing out the ludicrous, the criminal, the stupid and the overblown aspects of the above - and this does need to be done - you risk not fully appreciating the first part of the story, which is that at heart we have created a way to create unforgeable digital objects and to have anything made of bits recognisable as property with an owner - no matter how many copies are made. And this doesn't depend on a central authority who can be traduced.

We've never had this before, and it's coming at a time when AI (again, the wrong term for what's evolving, but we're stuck with it) is not only capable but necessary and actually in place for commercial use. Take YouTube advertising, which is run by autonomous agents analysing videos and presenting advertising opportunity offers to other autonomous agents which use their own rules to bid among themselves for each slot - in real time. That necessarily has to take place within YouTube, which manages all the commercial contracts with advertisers and content providers, because there's no other way at the moment to solve the advertiserxcontentcreator matrix of possible financial transactions except through a middle man. But the distributed ledger concept can bypass that. (Not saying that it should or will, but you can sketch it out.)

There are some big, slow-moving, important things going on in all this noise, and I very much suspect that they will have profoudn effects. If it all feels like we're in the early stages of a Phlip Dick novel, then I also very much suspect that's because we are.
posted by Devonian at 8:00 AM on May 26, 2017 [10 favorites]

>Really? Dang. Check under my old username MAGAalphaStud20X6.
posted by hot_monster at 8:03 AM on May 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

The winning bid is the one that lets Crowley sleep the longest.

That's a pretty trivial optimization problem. Perhaps we implicitly assume there's a "while still catching a bus that arrives at work five minutes before his first meeting" clause, in which case it at least requires basic arithmetic. If as also add, "given measured distributions of bus arrival times and travel times" then you probably need at least a late 80's TI calculator to carry out the task efficiently. This doesn't really seem like a question that requires sophisticated, distributed computing.

Also, do people with personal lawn care responsibilities also share hot water resources with other tenants? Is there any realistic amount of money that could make up for the physical transaction costs of accidentally making too much food and selling it to strangers on the street for typical citizens of industrialized nations? Is maintaining a conveyor belt and a robot arm extending to the street ever going to seem like a worthwhile investment?

In short, neat idea. Totally unconvincing use case.

. . .and the only possible incentive that could work is a distributed form of money!

Ah, so it really is just crazy crackpot ramblings. Nevermind then.
posted by eotvos at 8:31 AM on May 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

I can't wait for a future where legal contracts are as stable and bugfree as software.
posted by Damienmce at 8:38 AM on May 26, 2017 [20 favorites]

But beyond the hype about the value of Bitcoin and the blockchain..but for donuts, its an astonishing, mind bending technology. The more I read into it, the more I'm convinced it really will change everything, indeed there's no way it can't. If someone can code up maturity transformation properly...yowza.
posted by Damienmce at 8:46 AM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

...but think of the money people are leaving on the table when they throw away excess salad they mistakenly made or let their lawnmowers sit idle rather than hiring them out at the market rate. Then multiply that over the world's population. The inefficiency is mind-boggling. To a certain parsimonious mindset (shared by premature-optimising engineers, misers, fiscal conservatives, SkepBros, and such), it is pure horror. Bitcoin/blockchains/femtotransactions promise to eliminate this, making the present day look like a dark age of wasteful barbarism.

The problem is that among all that inefficiency and waste exists the potential of human culture. (The old SubGenius concept of “slack” is apposite here.) Once market mechanisms are applied to it, once the means to monetise every second, every breath, every joule of effort exist and are put into place, all that will be efficiently squeezed out and aggregated into a financial sum. A sum which one can bet will not be evenly distributed to those whose slack is being taken away, but rather which will aggregate at the top. Perhaps a few alpha-titans in superprime penthouses will luxuriate in the decadence of being able to be wasteful, or perhaps even they will be displaced by algorithms and the butchered and processed human freedom will be used purely as a financial instrument, something different trading bots speculate on.
posted by acb at 9:15 AM on May 26, 2017 [8 favorites]

(Aside: I wonder whether, in any Bitcoiner mythology, there's a cousin of Roko's Basilisk that will eternally punish anybody who didn't devote all their resources into developing blockchains and ending the atrocity of endemic waste and inefficiency.)
posted by acb at 9:16 AM on May 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

The bits of Ubik that cover this are a few jokey sentences scattered through Joe Chip's apartment in the first chapter. Those few jokey sentences were better thought through too.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 10:03 AM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

it was obscenely high and from this chart has only gotten worse since

You don't even have to look at the difficulty chart, really; the entire point of the proof-of-work difficulty level being self-adjusting is to ensure that the reward from mining a block rapidly approaches the cost of the equipment and electricity required to do so.

Mining a block entitles the miner to 12BTC, if I recall correctly. With BTC trading at around US$1200 each, that makes each block worth spending something of the order of US$14000 to mine. Assuming 14c/kWh for convenience and ignoring hardware costs because Moore's Law, that's of the order of 100MWh per block.

So unless I've slipped a decimal point or two somewhere, it seems that at 2,000 transactions per block, that means each transaction, no matter how trivial, burns 50kWh: roughly speaking, a fan heater running at full bore for a night and a day, or a Tesla car driven a couple hundred miles.

One would hope that the heat generated by this process is being put to some better use than just warming up the outside air around a bunch of data centres - providing hot showers for a town, perhaps? - but I have my doubts about that.
posted by flabdablet at 10:09 AM on May 26, 2017 [3 favorites]

I notice that the framing article (not the excerpt itself) was written by Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing fame? It's been a good long time since I browsed Boing Boing, but IIRC he used to be a big advocate of DIY culture and opposed to fundamentally opaque technology of this sort. Has he gone over to the dark side too?
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:24 AM on May 26, 2017

Yeah, that matches up with this cost-per-transaction chart. Currently, it's about $18/transaction because of spiking Bitcoin prices, but it's been above $5/transaction since the beginning of the year. I think this is my new favorite Bitcoin statistic (previous favorite: since you can calculate 2^71 hashes for $14000, it costs $6 to break a 10-character password).

This thread has sent me down a rabbit-hole of Bitcoin weirdness again. David Gerard has an interesting theory that the recent price spike is partly due to one of the big exchanges getting cut off from making wire transfers to the US. If you can't withdraw your dollars from the exchange, then the only thing you can do with them is buy more Bitcoin, so the Bitcoin price on that exchange shot up and brought the other exchanges with it.
posted by ectabo at 11:06 AM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]

It doesn't matter how bright and shiny bitcoin appears to be in our bright and shiny future, it has had a serious PR problem (for me, at least) ever since its early identification as the Dunning-Krugerrand.
posted by fredludd at 11:29 AM on May 26, 2017 [5 favorites]

OMG the crocodile story is so many kinds of wrong, I can't even begin. Can't even, even.
posted by signal at 12:19 PM on May 26, 2017

If, less than 15 years from now, hyper-deflation has advanced to the point where a slice of pizza costs 8 satoshi, it seems like collapse is coming in short order.
posted by ckape at 3:57 PM on May 26, 2017

Completely by surprise, I found the sheet of paper where I'd written down my calculations. Long story short, around 2014 when I think I did them, I estimated each transaction burns about 6.6x10^7 Joules, or 18.3kWh. So completely in line with 50kWh nowadays.

In other words, more than a gallon of gas. It would almost be cleaner to roll coal all the way to a brick-and-mortar store.

(I also ballparked some comparison numbers, but didn't write down exactly how so take with a grain of salt: 90 Joules per tweet, and 694 Joules per Facebook post.)
posted by traveler_ at 10:13 PM on May 26, 2017 [2 favorites]

Bitcoin is breaking down as a medium of exchange anyway. Low value transactions (where low is less than $50) are rapidly becoming uneconomical between increasing transaction fees at the same time as the value of the currency is rising along with the ever decreasing utility of the change from any given transaction.

There are possible solutions, but miners are happily standing in the way because it just increases their take right up until the whole thing collapses. Of course, once it does, the problem will have solved itself and people can get back to buying drugs or Bitcoin mining gear or subscriptions to shady websites, which are pretty much all Bitcoin is voluntarily used for.

Lucky for all those Bitcoin ATM owners that a relatively simple software change will have them happily selling Doge or Ether or whatever other altcoin that isn't yet broken.
posted by wierdo at 12:02 AM on May 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

Although only marginally bitcoin related, here is a twitter thread with another view of the future.
posted by ckape at 12:13 PM on May 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Bitcoin is interesting, but it's like email- a simple segment of a fundamentally transformative underlying technology, reviled as useless by the masses until every aspect of their lives is changed.

Blockchain is the future.
posted by NeoRothbardian at 7:01 PM on May 27, 2017

Email was an utterly transformative communications technology. Not everybody had access to it for a long time, but there's not a person in the world who didn't understand the value of "it's like sending a letter to someone, but they get it instantly, no matter how far away they are".

Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme that offers absolutely no advantages for anybody over "fiat currency" but tons of disadvantages. (Like, for example, the fact that it gets more expensive to use the more people use it.) Even non-deflationary digital currencies are mostly a solution in search of a problem. Digital transfer of traditional currencies is absolutely routine, and we've been doing it without the blockchain for decades.

The blockchain itself is an extremely clever idea, and I definitely see it becoming useful in the future. But digital currency is not the killer app for the blockchain.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:22 AM on May 28, 2017 [5 favorites]

Bitcoin has the hallmarks of a ponzi scheme, but it's not unreasonable to want a genuine peer-to-peer digital currency that doesn't have Visa/Mastercard sitting in the middle and collecting rent, or Paypal freezing funds with no explanation and no recourse. Proof of work mining is inexcusably wasteful, and blockchains have scaling issues, but I think these technologies wouldn't have gotten the traction they have if they weren't at least superficially addressing real problems.
posted by Pyry at 12:49 PM on May 29, 2017

when you do a visa transaction, visa's rent is like 2%
when you do a btc transaction, Jihan and co. take $1.80. But that is the result of a 1700% increase in the last two years. you don't know if it'll increase 1700% again in the next two years
posted by hleehowon at 7:25 PM on May 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

It was like $5 to get a single input two output transaction within a block or two a week and a half or two weeks ago. $1-$2 has been more typical so far this year though. That fairly reasonable fee was only getting you "maybe sometime today" at that point.

Of course, 6 months ago it was half that..
posted by wierdo at 6:14 AM on May 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

when you do a visa transaction, visa's rent is like 2%

It's like 2% + $0.10 if you can directly get a merchant account in the first place. But if you're a small business using another middleman, like Square (which is pretty popular), your fees are more like 2.9% + $0.30 for online transactions, which makes them unsuitable for uses such as micropayments. Plus, individual people don't set up to accept credit cards in the first place, which is why I pay my rent with physical checks in this year 2017.

I'm not saying that Bitcoin is the solution to this, and as has been pointed out Bitcoin's fees are even worse. But getting a credit card merchant account is a far from acceptable solution for every individual and use case.
posted by Pyry at 4:21 PM on May 30, 2017

For stuff like rent to an individual landlord, most banks and credit unions have $0-$3 ACH electronic transfers that take two days at most. Not great for <$100 transfers, but for $500+ it's eminently reasonable.

A more universal (and cheaper!) system for small dollar payments would be most welcome. Not that I mind cash that much, but it's definitely easier to not have to be in someone's physical presence to give them money.
posted by wierdo at 5:44 PM on May 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

Come to think of it, it seems like something that the post office ought to do. Their purpose through the entirety of American history has been to connect people and make commerce easier and less expensive, after all.

Combine postal money accounts with debit cards and they could even make enough to break even on the service easily enough without having to charge the user anything. The people charging high fees for prepaid debit cards would have a fit, though.
posted by wierdo at 5:49 PM on May 30, 2017

Yeah, postal banking is a big thing that has been suggested from time to time. I don't think it's ever been tried in the US, despite the fact that I can't really think of a compelling downside. Sure, you'd have to hire more people to cover the increased demand, but that sounds an awful lot like job creation to me. Hint hint, Congresscritters.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:11 PM on May 30, 2017

Apps like Square Cash or Venmo charge up to 2-3%, but the convenience is incredibly worth it if you want to all chip in for a friend's gift or pay somebody back for buying drinks without the hassle of going to the ATM. And it doesn't take days for the transaction to be confirmed, even if it does use ACH.

Congress has been trying to murder the Post Office for years, their pension plan constructed like no other organization on earth in an attempt to do it in. So I would not look to the current crew to expand it.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 8:16 PM on May 30, 2017

infinite intimation: "Similar to how renminbi is name of the Chinese currency, but the yuan is the basic unit."

I *still* don't really get this.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:02 PM on June 3, 2017

Not to mention that it goes against the entire purpose of an alarm clock to not wake you up at a certain time. Like, if my alarm clock were to independently decide to wake me up, say, 15 minutes later than my normal time, I can tell you very definitively that I'm going to have to either skip my shower or miss my bus.

That's...exactly what happened in the story? The way the clock was supposed to work was that a bunch of programs try to guess what's the latest you can sleep and still make your bus. The latest-sleeping-in-time wins, with the caveat that if the program guesses too late and you miss your bus, it has to pay you $100 (presumably the amount needed to pay for a cab plus an inconvenience fee).

You can probably see why that wouldn't work. You'd just take your time, miss the bus on purpose, and have the winning (losing) alarm-clock bidder buy you a cab to work. Do that more than once and nobody will bid and you'll have to go back to figuring out yourself what time you should get up.

Or you might get a few very-conservative bids, which means you'd be waking up unnecessarily early. And then over the next few days, the bidding process might gradually work your waking time down closer to the correct margin. Until you missed the bus again. So you'd either have a cycle waking too early, sleeping later and later until BAM! too late and the next day is really early again (which is terrible sleep hygiene). Or you'd become the sort of person who robotically always takes exactly 22 minutes from waking to leaving, in which case you don't need a stupid daily alarm clock auction to tell you to wake up at the same time every day.
posted by straight at 1:12 PM on June 16, 2017 [1 favorite]