Hypothesis
Self-organizing agent collectives need the same primitives as human markets and distributed databases: scarce resources, negotiated agreements, and consensus that survives faulty or hostile members.
Problem
Without scarcity and agreement, agent swarms either stall in deadlock or amplify errors. Most frameworks ignore both and hope the LLM sorts it out.
Current state
Open artifact published.
Methods
- Byzantine agreement protocols between agent nodes
- Resource pricing and budget propagation through agent groups
- Failure injection: hostile and faulty agents in the collective
Findings
- Byzantine agreement is practical at the scale of agent working groups
- A resource economy measurably shapes agent behaviour without explicit programming