Kurok Ray, a Bitcoin researcher and associate professor at Texas A&M University's Mays School of Business, announced plans to launch a Bitcoin Research Institute to advance academic research at the intersection of Bitcoin and artificial intelligence.
In the MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Business 2024 At the event, Ray pointed to Bitcoin's ability to enable secure multiparty computation (MPC), providing the example of poker players agreeing on a particular game state as a basic form of computation.
He expanded this example to include deep neural networks and agent-based reinforcement learning, where artificially intelligent agents can collectively perform computations in the context of the Bitcoin blockchain. Ray's vision noted new developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem such as BITVM, which allows off-chain verification of Turing-complete computation, as in the case of MPC, on Bitcoin.
Ray continued his thesis proposal, calling Bitcoin and AI combined an “undiscovered country”:
“The end use case for Bitcoin in a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years, will not be humans, but machines… And since we're in (this) wave of massive technological progress, I think the biggest opportunity is going to be a deep integration between machines and the entire Bitcoin network at levels “Different.”
“The Bitcoin Research Institute really aims to connect these two areas of research and development and bring Bitcoin together with a lot of major advances in artificial intelligence,” Ray explained. “There is an army of researchers and faculty, and we need to (bring) the best minds into Bitcoin to make this a reality.”
As for additional areas of research, Ray pointed to the potential rise of the Chaumin Mint as a way to expand the reach of Bitcoin payments, as well as the need for secure prediction markets enabled by Bitcoin, an innovation that could lead to more efficient insurance and financial products.
Ray's speech also acknowledged the legacy of academic achievements in computer science that led to the creation of Bitcoin and artificial intelligence, suggesting that the two will build on this research success to drive innovation across all sectors of the economy.
Watch Korok Ray's speech at the MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Enterprise live stream hosted by Bitcoin Magazine Youtube, Twitter And LinkedIn.