{"id":21748,"date":"2018-07-20T16:38:53","date_gmt":"2018-07-20T16:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ci027cfe65100c2697"},"modified":"2018-07-20T16:38:53","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T16:38:53","slug":"achieving-truly-useful-proof-work-toby-simpson-fetchai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/business\/achieving-truly-useful-proof-work-toby-simpson-fetchai","title":{"rendered":"Achieving Truly Useful Proof of Work: Toby Simpson of Fetch.ai"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What\u2019s the best that can happen? That\u2019s the focus of Fetch.ai<\/a> in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI).<\/p>\n

Episode 025 of the What Bitcoin Did<\/em> podcast<\/a> featured a wide-ranging conversation between host Peter McCormack and Fetch co-founder\/CTO Toby Simpson about both best-case and worst-case outcomes for AI. But it wasn\u2019t all speculation: developments with Fetch in the here and now provided plenty of insight into the ever-increasing interconnection between AI and decentralization.<\/p>\n

Fetch, based in Cambridge, U.K., describes itself as \u201ca decentralized digital world in which useful economic activity can take place,\u201d one with an adaptive, self-organizing smart ledger at its core. While not available for a public test just yet, it claims to have a functioning internal system that has brought its plans to life. Within that system, Simpson fondly refers to the virtual \u201cworld\u201d that is being incubated. In it, digital entities called Autonomous Economic Agents (AEAs) represent Internet of Things (IoT) machines<\/a> and work independently of human control, all while connecting to the traditional world through Fetch\u2019s Open Economic Framework (OEF), which provides sensory input to the AEAs.<\/p>\n

The concept of an unpermissioned ledger is central to Fetch\u2019s smooth functioning and scalability, and Simpson was quick to point out that their own ledger is designed to pick up where traditional blockchain architecture leaves off, pursuant to their goal of eventually enabling billions of transactions per second.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re all drawing from the ideas of decentralized ledger technologies, and we\u2019re all trying to create and build a system where you can establish that global truth when you never quite know which individual parties you can trust,\u201d he noted. \u201cBut we had to do it differently. We had to paralyze [the] blockchain, effectively, so we could get a much larger number of transactions through the system, and we combine that with a bunch of other things in order to increase those volumes even further.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Simpson explained, it was this high-volume goal that led Fetch to develop what it sees as a key tenet of its capabilities, which it calls \u201cuseful proof of work\u201d (uPoW), a system that consolidates general-purpose computing problems into proof-of-work packages. The end result of its workings will, in theory, lead to a vastly more efficient distributed computing platform that can support a more stable ledger capable of achieving the massive scale Fetch envisions (this is outlined in greater detail in the Fetch.ai white paper<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got the Bitcoin network, and the Ethereum network, and you look at the huge amount of computing power that that has,\u201d Simpson said. \u201cYou\u2019re talking supercomputers over supercomputers over supercomputers. Wouldn\u2019t it be cool to be able to do something useful with that, for the benefit of their network and the users of the network? For us, this was originally about a sort of giant Tetris game, really, where you\u2019re trying to figure out which transactions don\u2019t collide with each other and don\u2019t share resources, because you execute those in parallel.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Fetch is able to execute its plan, Simpson hopes it won\u2019t just be a triumph for the firm he co-founded, but also a redemption of sorts for the negative environmental impact that blockchain technology has borne.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of people talking about it\u2019s a huge waste of energy \u2014 it could possibly go down as the biggest waste of energy of all time,\u201d Simpson said. \u201cYou think, \u2018Well, if we\u2019re doing something useful with it, then it\u2019s not anymore!\u2019 Then we\u2019ve got the globe\u2019s largest supercomputer, and we\u2019re doing stuff with it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s the best that can happen? That\u2019s the focus of Fetch.ai in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3463,"featured_media":21749,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[3482,1628,1739,1219,3483],"class_list":{"0":"post-21748","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-ltb","9":"tag-peter-mccormack","10":"tag-podcasts","11":"tag-proof-of-work","12":"tag-what-bitcoin-did"},"author_data":{"id":3463,"name":"David Weiss","nicename":"david-weiss","avatar_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/david-weiss-promo-image-96x96.jpg"},"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/achieving-truly-useful-proof-of-work-toby-simpson-of-fetchai.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3463"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}