Since its launch in 2008, most of the public discussion about bitcoin has focused on its potential as a new digital currency that allows people to make online payments without going through banks or other financial middlemen.

But the past year has also seen growing interest in a host of non-currency applications for bitcoin’s core technology. Innovators are devising all manner of ideas to “decentralize” commercial and social activity: “smart contracts” that function without lawyers; stock exchanges without central clearinghouses; financial record-keeping systems that can be verified without an auditor; even tamper-proof voting systems that automatically guarantee one-person-one-vote.

These ideas treat bitcoin’s all-important “blockchain” ledger, a fully verifiable public database that’s maintained by thousands of independent computers, as a “platform” on which to build secondary programs that strip out costly middlemen from people’s exchanges.

To many in Silicon Valley, this “Bitcoin 2.0” movement – also known as “Blockchain 2.0” – has parallels with the sweeping innovation unleashed by an earlier groundbreaking “platform” — the Internet.

How might this new “decentralized” future look? The following passage from Wall Street Journal reporters Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey’s new book, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order, lays out one person’s dramatic vision for a world managed by blockchain-based networks:

Mike Hearn, who worked for three years on security software at Google before quitting to devote himself to cryptocurrency development, offers perhaps the most far-reaching forecast of such potential in blockchain technology.

In a speech at the August 2013 Turing Festival in Edinburgh, Hearn envisioned an economy composed of autonomous economic agents. He used the example of a driverless taxi, one guided only by sensors and GPS technology.

The one-car taxi service would be run by a smart software program plugged into an automated, electronic marketplace Hearn dubbed the Tradenet. There, prospective passengers could post ride requests and receive competing bids from multiple driverless cars. They would choose their preferred taxi based on fare, travel time, and model of car and could negotiate the route based on durations and fares that the service derived by bidding in a separate Tradenet “load space” market, where variations in traffic conditions would offer differing market-based toll-road prices for each route.

If all that sounds futuristic but feasible, try this additional feature of Hearn’s imaginary taxi: it has no owner. The car owns itself — or, more precisely, the operating computer program owns it. This program would pay the car’s running costs and take in its own revenue; all of this would be made possible by cryptocurrency and the invention of the blockchain.

“I suspect if I tried to go to the bank and open a bank account that’s owned by a computer program, they’d tell me to get lost or they’d think I’m crazy and report me to the police,” Hearn said. “But bitcoin has no intermediaries. Therefore, there’s really nothing to stop a computer from connecting to the Internet and taking part [in the bitcoin network] all by itself. All you need to do to generate a bitcoin wallet is to generate a large random number, and pretty much anything can do that.”

Right now you are probably wondering why we’d give a machine such rights. Because we could program it to provide the cheapest and most efficient service possible, Hearn’s car would be focused on maximizing productivity and surviving, not building up a fat pile of retained earnings to spend on McMansions and trips to the Bahamas. It could keep its profit margins superthin and its prices low.

That said, if it brought in more revenue than expenses, the car could be programmed to “have children,” as Hearn puts it, investing its excess bitcoins in new driverless cars that would “inherit” a clone of its software program. To stay ahead of the game the car could also spend its surplus by hiring a human to write it a superior code — after seeking bids for these services via the Tradenet — and then apply special testing protocols to ensure the human isn’t scamming it out of its competitiveness. If economic conditions in its area deteriorate too much, the car could “go to sleep” in a long- term parking lot for six months, Hearn says, or it could drive itself to another city where Tradenet data indicated stronger demand for taxi services.

There’s a genesis problem here, though: Who will put up the initial capital to create this not-for-profit entity if its founder can’t earn a return from investing in it? Clearly, the assets of these autonomous agents need to be thought of as public goods. The societal profit we all share from having more services abundantly available at low prices should be self- evident, but what incentive is there for profit-motivated individuals to invest in providing them?

One option is to have governments direct this effort, applying taxpayer money. Another is to hope that philanthropists pick up the challenge. Ideally, though, the investment would come as a community effort. Perhaps residents of a particular neighborhood could invest in a driverless car and be rewarded with free or discounted rides for a prescribed period, and to achieve that kind of broad- based funding objective, Hearn offers up another solution: cryptocurrency assurance contracts, a blockchain- based version of the popular crowdfunding model in which organizers pledge a certain amount when others’ donations reach target levels.

Rather than organizers having to chase down pledgers and set up expensive, lawyer- managed escrow accounts to protect pledged funds, the blockchain and special software attached to it would just run the whole thing automatically. When a target funding level is reached in a designated, tamperproof wallet that only the software can control, a separate such wallet containing the organizer’s funds would be tapped to merge the funds. If the target isn’t reached, the money would automatically be sent back to everyone’s personal wallets. Funding problem solved.

Self-owned driverless taxis, here we come.

Paul Vigna is a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, covering equities, the economy, and bitcoin. Michael J. Casey is senior columnist covering global finance at The Wall Street Journal.

Excerpted from “The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin And Digital Money Are Challenging The Global Economic Order,” by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey. Copyright © 2015 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.