WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF
If AI ever wants to take over the world then it will need to recruit resources and get help, and Bitcoin could be how it pays for it all.
Love the Exponential Future? Join our XPotential Community, future proof yourself with courses from XPotential University, read about exponential tech and trends, connect, watch a keynote, or browse my blog.
While some Bitcoin (BTC) projects have already started exploring the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered solutions, the next major breakthrough – and disruption -might arise from the reverse scenario: AI harnessing and using the Bitcoin network, Blockchain, and its native asset Bitcoin to streamline the customer experience for users by automatically placing, paying for, and fulfilling orders, or even to enable its plan to take over the world. And that last one … that’s not as fictional as you might think. So let’s dive into the rabbit hole.
Thanks to Web 3.0 you can already use AI-powered platforms like ChatBTC, which provides answers to your questions about Bitcoin technology and history, and even participate in training another similar platform, Spirit of Satoshi – named after the mysterious Bitcoin inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto – while earning Bitcoin as compensation.
Then there’s “Meanwhile,” a BTC-denominated whole life insurance company that recently secured $19 million in funding from investors – including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – to develop its AI-powered financial product.
The Future of AI, by Keynote Speaker Matthew Griffin
However, the more significant innovations appear to be emerging from this reverse direction.
Brian Roemmele, the founder and editor of Multiplex, a publication focusing on AI and other emerging technologies, recently said in a podcast that “if Bitcoin didn’t exist, AI would have invented it.”
This perspective appears to be gaining prominence among Bitcoin enthusiasts, particularly in the context of the intersection between AI and Bitcoin as they believe that the latter technology is best suited to meet the requirements of AI agents – which increasingly look like the future of AI, where “Agents” are AI programs that can, in the words of the CEO of Google’s AI company DeepMind, “do things.”
But why is this the case? Why wouldn’t an AI agent prefer to use traditional fiat money and the conventional payment infrastructure?
As a Bitcoin advocate might argue, Bitcoin’s globally accepted, free from political influence, resistant to censorship, permissionless, available around the clock, programmable, cheaper, faster, and suitable for handling micropayments.
“It’s hard for AI to get a bank account – they don’t have a good credit history,” investor, analyst, and the author of Broken Money, Lyn Alden, recently quipped. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is open-source money that AI can use without asking anyone’s permission.
Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of BitMEX, a major Bitcoin and crypto derivatives exchange, argues that BTC is “the logical currency choice for any AI.”
“It’s purely digital, censorship-resistant, provably scarce, and its intrinsic value is completely electricity-cost-dependent. There is nothing in existence today that comes close to challenging Bitcoin on these aspects,” he wrote in one of his essays.
Hayes also estimates that the mania surrounding Bitcoin and AI could merge into “one mega mania,” potentially driving Bitcoin’s value to “silly levels.”
So, what are some more specific potential use cases here?
Kody Low, Head of Developer and Product Support at Fedi, the developer of Fedimint, a decentralized Bitcoin custody solution, says that an AI agent could potentially offer a BTC bounty to a human for completing tasks that the AI cannot perform on its own, using the results to further its own mission – whatever that mission is, benign or otherwise …
Furthermore, the agent could use BTC to pay for the electricity and computing power required for its existence and operation, compensate other AI agents, and more, thereby enhancing accessibility to Large Language Models (LLMs) for a broader audience. Additionally, Brian Roemmele discusses the potential AI-powered solutions employed by companies to remunerate customers in Bitcoin for their personal data, helping to better understand their needs and deliver improved products and services.
However, all these use cases are made feasible through the Lightning Network (LN), a Bitcoin scaling solution that presently enables near-instant and almost free Bitcoin transactions. Speaking in a recent podcast, Kody Low also emphasized that LN payments enhance the privacy of its users.
“I, as a developer, can make a Lightning-gated website, and then users can show up, and I don’t have to know anything about them except for the fact that they paid me,” he said.
So, could AI agents one day use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to pay humans, AI’s, and other machine systems to run DAO’s or autonomous companies, and do its bidding – whatever that might be, perhaps as an immortal dictator – as we see sometimes in the movies? In my opinion absolutely, and we’re not far from that reality already with platforms like AutoGPT and maybe even Hanson Robotics AI-Blockchain project. Both of which are stories in themselves …
All hail AI – or new paymaster?
[…] cautions that some one-person unicorns may get that title on a technicality, by hiring contractors using crypto, for example, who aren’t considered employees to do design and coding work that neither they nor […]