This Robot Plant Needs You and Bitcoin to Reproduce

If androids dream of electric sheep, then Plantoids dream of digital currency.
The robot plant species, debuted at last month’s Ars Electronica festival by French artist group Okhaos, relies on bitcoin to stay alive and – once it has enough – even reproduce.
How does it work? Just as bees pollinate crops, members of the public ‘feed’ the plant by sending funds to its bitcoin wallet. As the balance grows, its leaves unfurl one by one.
Then, once it reaches its threshold – which varies from Plantoid to Plantoid – it will signal via “a display of colour and light” that it is ready to reproduce.
Okhaos’ website explains:
“Depending on their form and size, different Plantoids will require different amounts of funds, which they will store as ‘starch’ in their personal bitcoin wallets. Perhaps the initial Plantoid will need $1,000 to fully turn into a blossom.”
Using smart contracts running on the Ethereum blockchain, it will commission a team of humansOkhaos has found – designers, artists, coders – to create its offspring.
The project originated in a brainstorming session on ways to represent the blockchain in an artistic manner, one of Okhaos’ members, who wished to remain anonymous, told CoinDesk.
“It soon became clear to me that using the notion of a ‘Plantoid’ to instantiate a self-owned and self-sufficient art piece was the perfect way to illustrate the potential of this emergent technology,” they added.
The first Plantoid, which has so far received 0.01050490 BTC ($3.38) in online tips, is tucked away in Paris while a better location to display it is found.

This post was published at Coin Desk on November 1, 2015.