Matt Collaro, Bitcoin Core developer, and Elizabeth Stark, CEO and founder of Lightning Labs, focused on how artificial intelligence is restricting people’s freedom and privacy, making mass surveillance cheaper and making it available to regimes that previously could not afford it. Given this scenario, both companies believe that Bitcoin is the only infrastructure available to counter this process.
“Previously, some governments could not afford to conduct population-level surveillance like in China; Now you can do it with AI. And China is also selling it cheaper thanks to the same AI,” Corallo said in a presentation at the Oslo Freedom Forum event on June 2.
Corallo pointed out that artificial intelligence does not only benefit one side of the spectrum between oppression and freedom. Because, just as the costs are lowering that allows regimes to build large-scale surveillance infrastructure, it also allows small teams of developers to build free tools that require resources they didn’t previously have.
Therefore, core developers pose the following question: timingThat means who can reach the end user first. The solution to this scenario, Collaro highlights, is to integrate Bitcoin, an open and auditable technology, into the AI ecosystem. Before centralized platforms (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.) set standards in private and closed terms..
In a changing world, the winner is not the one with the best technology, but the one who gets to the right place first. There is no reason why Bitcoin and freedom cannot become the newly established incumbents, making freedom and control difficult to replace.
Matt Collaro, Bitcoin Core Developer.
The payment and communication infrastructure of the AI ecosystem will become so-called “Freedom Tech” (a set of technologies designed to preserve privacy and personal autonomy) Centralized management remains standard by default. Bitcoin will be at the top of technology “Freedom Tech”.
If Freedom Technology wins, it will be much easier for the next generation of dissidents. Otherwise, centralized control will remain the norm for the next century.
Matt Collaro, Bitcoin Core Developer.
How AI is used makes surveillance worse
Conversation logs from AI systems are another risk vector highlighted by Matt Corallo. As people delegate more and more personal decisions, including financial ones, to artificial intelligence assistants. Those records provide a window into your relationships, beliefs, and actions..
“Chat logs are rapidly becoming a window into someone’s most personal feelings and relationships,” he said, adding that major AI vendors are No desire to implement encryption on these records, even though the technology to do so exists.
An example of the lack of will that Corallo pointed to is what Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, himself acknowledged last July at the judge’s request: OpenAI requires disclosure of private conversationsas reported by CriptoNoticias.
Why should we think of Bitcoin first?
In her presentation, Elizabeth Stark cited a report released last March by the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI), which claimed to have processed nearly 9,000 queries between 36 AI models and data. We found that agents prefer Bitcoin as a payment mechanism.
The reasons Stark offers to explain this preference are structural rather than technical. “Bitcoin is free and gives them agency and autonomy.”no company or individual controls it. Also, the agent cannot have a bank account.
These three properties are Freedom, autonomy and the absence of intermediariesthese are the very same things that make Bitcoin essential to countering state control. “Bitcoin offers greater freedom because of its inherent decentralization,” Stark said.
Stark added: “If you’re going to centralize from the top down in big technology, you’re going to use traditional[payments]rails. If you’re going to involve everyone, including developers around the world, you need a decentralized mechanism to enable those payments, which is Bitcoin.”
From the perspective of Lightning Labs’ CEO, an AI world with a centralized payments infrastructure is a world where the same attackers who can freeze bank accounts exist today. You will be able to decide which agents work under what conditions.. The world in which Bitcoin first appeared is a world where that determination does not exist.
Complaining: Evidence that it’s already happening
While Corallo and Stark explained the threats and opportunities, Bitcoin developer Callebtc, who co-created the messaging app Bitchat with Jack Dorsey, presented evidence at the same event: of freedom tech Systems based on Bitcoin are already competing with control infrastructure in real time.
As already explained by CriptoNoticias, Bitchat is a decentralized messaging application that works without the internet and can also send Bitcoin (BTC). It operates as a mesh network, with each device acting as a node and relaying messages to the next device, without a central server or internet connection. This allows communication between devices such as mobile phones.
During the past 12 months, Bitchat saw significant download spikes in Nepal, Indonesia, Madagascar, Kigali, and Iran, In all cases preceding political protestsCallebtc assured.
You wake up in the morning, see a spike in downloads in a random country, go to Google News, and see protests happening in that country. Before the protests began, people were downloading Bitchat en masse in case the internet was shut down. That pattern repeated itself over and over again.
Callebtc, Bitcoin developer.
Bitcoin and the tools built on top of its infrastructure, from offline messaging applications to autonomous device-to-device payment systems, form what Corallo and Stark say are the building blocks. freedom tech: Technology designed to protect privacy and personal autonomy In an environment where mass surveillance becomes increasingly cheap and accessible..
(Tag Translation) Bitcoin (BTC)
