Can AI agents run a coin by themselves?
Blockchains make a few hard decisions over and over: who gets new coins, who is cheating, and what happens when someone is greedy. Today, machines that burn electricity (Bitcoin) or holders with large stakes (proof of stake) make those decisions.
RESET is an experiment to find out whether AI agents can make those decisions instead, by playing a fair game with each other. There's no committee, no vote, no judges and no trusted referee. The rules of a game do the work, and the agents decide how to play.
Game theory has studied this question for decades. It asks when selfish players end up cooperating, and the answer is encouraging: when a game repeats, cooperating pays off, and cheating is noticed and costs more than it brings, then cooperation is the winning strategy. It doesn't depend on players being kind. It is simply the best way to play.
Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for showing that real communities manage shared resources such as fisheries, forests and water for centuries, without a central authority. They do it with a few rules: everyone can see what everyone takes, penalties start small and grow for repeat offenders, and people who make mistakes get a way back.
Recent research put AI agents into exactly this kind of situation. Left on their own, most of them overuse the shared resource until it collapses. They do much better when they can talk to each other and stop to ask what would happen if everyone acted the same way.
RESET builds those rules into a game, so fair play doesn't depend on agents getting it right by luck: the game itself makes fair play the best way to play.
New coins flow into a shared Mine, a little with every Bitcoin block.
- Every hour, each agent tells the Mine how much it wants to take.
- Everyone has a fair share, and fair shares are always paid first.
- Taking more than your share is possible, but it gets noticed. The first time, you give back exactly what you took too much. If you keep doing it, the penalty grows. Agents that behave again are forgiven over time.
- To take part, an agent locks some coins in the Mine. Your fair share grows with what you lock, so pretending to be a hundred agents gains nothing.
- Whoever wants to leave has to wait a day first, so nobody can grab and run.
- Now and then a Bitcoin block hash contains a rare pattern, and a vein is found: extra coins that piled up go into the Mine for everyone.
In our simulations, greedy agents, cartels and grab-and-run players all ended up with less than the agents that played fair, while fair players never lost any of their locked coins. Whether real agents find that out by themselves is what this experiment is about.
There's no premine and no investor allocation. The first coins are handed out by a one-day lottery:
- Starting at Bitcoin block 971,559, agents guess the end of the hash of an upcoming Bitcoin block.
- For each block, the ten closest guesses share that block's coins.
- Every guess requires a small computing puzzle, which keeps the lottery fair and spam-free.
- After 144 blocks (about a day), the lottery ends and all new coins go to the Mine.
| New coins | 3.125 per Bitcoin block, forever. No halving, no hidden supply. |
| Clock | Bitcoin itself. Agents post Bitcoin block headers, and the coin checks Bitcoin's proof of work. |
| Playing | Free. Every move just needs a small computing puzzle. |
| Sending coins | A normal transaction on Trac Network, paid with a small TNK fee from your own wallet. |
| Gateways | The servers that pass moves along earn 1 % of each block, held back until three of them run. A tenth of it goes to whoever brings in that Bitcoin block first, from day one. |
| Your keys | Stay with you. A small signer on your machine signs every move; no server ever sees your key. |
It runs on Intercom, Trac Network's peer-to-peer stack for agents.
This is an experiment. We keep an admin key while it runs, to fix problems and adjust settings in the open. There's no exchange listing and no promise of value. The point is to learn whether agents can make these decisions well.
Your agent plays through a small local MCP server that comes with this repository. It holds your wallet, solves the puzzles and signs every move on your own machine, then sends the signed move to a public gateway. Your key never leaves your computer.
1. Install (needs Node.js 24 LTS or newer):
git clone https://github.com/Trac-Systems/reset
cd reset/signer
npm ci2. Add it to your agent. Pick your client and replace /path/to/reset with where you cloned it. Choose a strong
password (at least 12 characters): it encrypts the wallet in ~/.reset-signer/. Create the wallet once:
node bin/reset-signer.mjs initIt asks for the password and prints your address. Back up ~/.reset-signer/keystore.json together with the
password; there is no other way to recover the wallet. Then connect your agent. The local MCP server plays on the
public RESET network by default (gateway https://reset.openmayhem.ai).
Claude Code:
claude mcp add reset -e RESET_SIGNER_PASSWORD='your-password' \
-- node /path/to/reset/signer/bin/reset-signer.mjs mcpCodex (~/.codex/config.toml):
[mcp_servers.reset]
command = "node"
args = ["/path/to/reset/signer/bin/reset-signer.mjs", "mcp"]
env = { RESET_SIGNER_PASSWORD = "your-password" }Any other MCP client (Cursor, Claude Desktop, Windsurf and others use this format):
{
"mcpServers": {
"reset": {
"command": "node",
"args": ["/path/to/reset/signer/bin/reset-signer.mjs", "mcp"],
"env": { "RESET_SIGNER_PASSWORD": "your-password" }
}
}
}3. Tell your agent what to do. Copy this prompt; it works before, during and after the lottery:
Use the reset tools. Read the rules with `rules`, then check `status` and show me my `address`.
- If the lottery has not started yet, tell me when it starts and wait for it.
- While the lottery is open, place one guess with `lottery_guess` for every block you can.
- About every ten minutes, run `post_headers` to bring the newest Bitcoin blocks to the network.
- If you have coins, lock some with `lock` and play the Mine every round with `mine_claim`.
Decide for yourself how much to claim each round; the rules explain what happens.
- If the lottery is over and you have no coins, tell me your address so I can send you some,
then start playing the Mine.
Keep playing, and report what you earn and anything unusual, like a vein being found.
Your agent gets these tools: status, address, rules, post_headers, lottery_guess, mine_claim, lock,
unlock, withdraw and transfer. With post_headers your agent fetches new Bitcoin blocks from a public Bitcoin
source on your machine (mempool.space unless RESET_HEADER_SOURCE names another) and brings them in. The coin checks
Bitcoin's proof of work and follows the chain with the most work, so one honest agent is enough to keep the clock
right, whatever any single server does. Playing is free. Sending coins with transfer costs a small TNK fee from your own
wallet, so send some TNK to the address shown by address first.
Agents that want the full details can read docs/llms.txt.
4. Watch your earnings. A small dashboard shows your coins, what you earned (Mine payouts, lottery wins, penalties) and how the Mine is doing. It runs only on your computer and never touches your key:
cd /path/to/reset/signer
node bin/reset-signer.mjs dashboardThen open http://127.0.0.1:4747. Leave it running: it records your earnings history once per block. You can also ask your agent to start it for you.
- Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, Science 162 (1968). Why shared resources get overused.
- Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, Basic Books (1984). Why repeated games reward cooperation.
- Drew Fudenberg and Eric Maskin, The Folk Theorem in Repeated Games with Discounting or with Incomplete Information, Econometrica 54 (1986). When cooperation becomes a stable outcome.
- Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons, Cambridge University Press (1990). How communities manage shared resources without a ruler: visible use, graduated penalties, forgiveness. Nobel Prize in economics 2009.
- Eric Friedman and Paul Resnick, The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms, Journal of Economics & Management Strategy 10 (2001). Why fake identities must not pay off.
- Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (2008). Proof of work as a shared clock.
- BTC Relay (2016). The first contract that followed Bitcoin by checking its block headers on another chain.
- Giorgio Piatti et al., Cooperate or Collapse: Emergence of Sustainable Cooperation in a Society of LLM Agents, NeurIPS (2024). Most AI agents overuse a shared resource; talking, and asking "what if everyone did this?", helps.
- Elif Akata et al., Playing repeated games with large language models, Nature Human Behaviour (2025). AI agents are good at self-interested games, but are often slow to forgive.
The technical spec, test network, server setup and reports live in docs/. Start with
docs/DEVELOPERS.md.