Satelleth is a blockchain-based autonomous entity that owns, manages, and independently interacts with its environment. Its goal is to travel around the world. For this journey, Satelleth collects money and pays people for their transportation.
With growing technological possibilities and decentralized infrastructures, a future is imaginable in which we live in constant exchange with autonomous software-based actors. This could be a fleet of self-driving cars or a network of vending machines owned by an algorithm rather than a company.
Satelleth is the simplest version of our hypothesis: an object owned by code that is able to autonomously process payments on the blockchain to collect funds and pay people for transportation.
Satelleth puts this hypothesis into a tangible form and raises legal and ethical questions: By what standards is such infrastructure programmed? What is our relationship to technology when it pays us for our work? If it becomes very rich, who will pay its taxes?
Satelleth highlights the potential and dangers of self-organization and distributed ownership, and encourages open, social discourse in this area.
Satelleth was a guest on Swiss Television, in the Einstein program "Understanding Blockchain: the digital future is becoming decentralized" on 28.02.2029:
Using the example of the satelleth, we discussed ethical, social, technical and legal issues at the UN in Geneva, at a symposium at the University of Basel, at various political and social events, in art exhibitions and in various media reports.
New technologies such as blockchain enable new types of decentralized organizational structures. This allows central hierarchies and even ownership structures to be questioned.
