SioAlexander

Bitcoin payments to robot cars, by radio, from a lake with no internet. What you're watching: • A handset with its own Bitcoin wallet. The key was made on the device and has never left it. It signs a payment and sends it by LoRa radio. • A relay up a tree hears it, puts it on the network, and passes it on to the cars. • Each car checks the payment on its own five-dollar chip, every signature, in about a tenth of a second. Then it moves. No server tells it the payment is good. • Car 5 has one rule built in: never turn right. When I paid for a right turn, it checked the payment, found it valid, and refused anyway. The payment is still on chain. Trying to make a machine break its rule costs money every time, and leaves a record. Why it matters: machines that sell their work in tiny amounts. A turn, a reading, a minute of power, paid as it happens. That only works if a payment costs less than what it buys. Each command here cost 130 satoshis on BSV, fee included, a fraction of a hundredth of a cent, and the cars act the moment the payment checks out, with no ten-minute wait. On BTC today the same command would cost tens of cents, and an unconfirmed payment can be replaced, so a machine would have to wait for a block before trusting it. Same idea, different economics. For machines, the economics decide. Honest notes: this was the first field test. The refused payment only reached the network later, because the handset stopped repeating it too early; car 4 should have turned right but never received it, for the same reason. That gets fixed before the next run. Car 4 also got stuck on a bump in the table. Every order in the film is on chain. Forward: whatsonchain.com/tx/81a63c3f… Turn left: whatsonchain.com/tx/a5c23932… Turn right, the one car 5 refused: whatsonchain.com/tx/de702026… #BSV