Should We Connect AI to the Blockchain? with Colin Fitzpatrick

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Should we connect AI to the blockchain? Let's find out with today's special guest, Colin Fitzpatrick. Today's episode is brought to you by the bestseller Chat, GPT Profits. This book is the Missing Instruction Manual to get you up and running with chat g bt in a matter of minutes as a special gift. You can get it absolutely free@artificialintelligencepod.com slash gift, or at the link right below this episode. Make sure to grab your copy before it goes back up to full price. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you wanna make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now. Then you can come to the right place. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. You will learn how to use artificial intelligence to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by bestselling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. Now Colin, I'm very interested'cause a lot of people already in their minds because there was such a quick transition from NFTs, blockchain, everything to ai, that they're already tied together his heads. And I wonder what's your perspective initially for people that kind of think of AI and blockchain as integrated? Here's the thing. When AI came along, there was an awful lot of hype around metaverse and NFTs and blockchain and everything like that, which kind of went away to a certain degree as soon as AI came on the scene, because I think when people saw chat, GBT and like me, they went. This is the real deal, and this has use cases all over the place. And what you saw is an awful lot of crypto projects really pivoting and putting in AI in wherever they can. But for me I do believe that actually there's a very significant future for AI and blockchain together because I believe that AI is going to solve an awful lot of the problems that blockchain has had. I've been in crypto since 2016. It hasn't really gotten any easier. It's been a, it's always been a tricky onboarding and a big learning curve, and quite complicated to learn the underlying technologies and how everything works. And that hasn't gotten easier. If anything, it's actually got worse. So the way I see it is AI is like the missing link, the extra key to bring all this together. Because AI is really the operation of computers in a human form. No longer do we have to actually learn to speak to a computer in a way that it can understand us, it can understand us perfectly right now, and my specialty is AI agents, and that's what I do in my day job is AI agents for Web3. And what I'm seeing is a really fantastic turnaround in the ability for AI agents to. Take a lot of the pain away of some of the problems in user usability and user experience in the area of Web3. Because now we're getting to a stage where soon we won't have to worry about all these complexities about, what chain we're on and what defi protocol we need to use or what big, long string of characters is addressed. I think we know what we want done. We know what the answer is. And AI agents will take away a lot of that issue because they will just go and do the work for us. So I think the core issue starts with that AI blockchain, NFTs has such a huge amount of negative PR that it's, you almost expect the word scam after you hear the word crypto. Every time you hear a celebrities launching a coin, you're just waiting to hear the word rug pull. Sometimes it's days later, sometimes it's minutes after the launch. Like we just saw a pretty public coin launch recently, so there's such negative PR. All NFTs have basically dropped to no value at all, and all the NFT projects turned out to be. All smoke and no fire. So there's a massive negative perception around the blockchain because almost every single blockchain related project from the blockchain related video games to NFTs and blockchain contracts, people have misused or used them for illicit stuff. You always hear Bitcoin robbery, Bitcoin heist. It's always something negative. So with such a huge amount of negativity around it, how is it possible to carve out an area where that. Negativity isn't there? Is there something that AI can add into it that removes the ability?'cause it seems like the, it comes down to the fact that most people who get involved in these things don't get punished, which means people are doing it more and more.'cause it almost seems like it's implicitly permitted by the government. So there's more and more dishonesty. Like when you hear someone, oh, this person invested in coining got ripped off. Now we all think cave mTOR, it's their fault for. Getting involved in a mean coin in the first FO point. Yeah. And we're seeing that all of this, it's always bought since snipers and all these fancy words for using AI maliciously. Is there a way for AI to turn things around inside the blockchain to I don't know, add an external level of ethics or to stop all the nefarious. No, it's a very good point. And like you mentioned there, we've seen so many mean, I hate the mean coin thing. I really do. I've probably invested in two mean coins in my life and lost everything on both of them. But it is a, an aspect of popular culture right now that we just can't ignore. There was a I dunno whether you saw the one fart coin has a higher market cap than 38% of all US equities. It's absolutely insane. And these are literal jokes, literal ju but that's what people are putting money into The hawk to a girl brought out a meme coin and essentially rugged it within, an hour and then denied it and stuff like that. I don't know personally, I think anyone who's putting money into a coin like that. It's absolutely nothing but gambling. You really can't argue any way around it. You know what I mean? There's nothing more, you're probably familiar with Pomp Do Fun, which is the platform that allows anyone to launch a meme coin on Solana like very quickly. And it's quite literally a platform where if you prove that your main coin has. Some, a liquidity and some community and some sort of hype behind it, and it goes to a certain time. It rate it automatically. It gets launched on a decks and then, people can trade it and things like that. So thousands and thousands of them are being launched every day, but it's, it, its, it's nothing. On the other hand, you mentioned that everything gets branded scam and things like that in the world of crypto and Yeah. And you know what? They're not necessarily wrong 'cause there are so many scams in crypto. I get them all the time myself, people coming onto me pretending to be investors or anything like that. And it's ferocious and it's because of the unregulated nature of it for starters. And it's also because of the fact that a lot of this stuff is done very anonymously through telegram and things like that. So it's, it's really hard. To come to question, yes, I do think AI will play a better part in trying to clean this up. And the reason is because number one, AI is it's getting very good now. We've passed the touring test and it hasn't really seemed to make any big waves or anything like that, but AI video is spectacularly good. Someone did an AI clone of me, that you can talk to with pop talk back. I'd say it'd probably fool my mother, so it's actually gonna bring on a crazy amount of scams and stuff like that. So I believe that AI is actually going to be, have to be used to try and. Hold these things off now. One of the things that we do is we create AI agents with digital identities so they have an actual identity. So you know, you can actually trust it, it has a rating and a reputation, et cetera, and that's gonna have to be the norm going forward. We're gonna have to have proof of what is real and proof of what is not, because very soon it's just going to be next to impossible to tap. I'm sure you've seen projects like world Coin and they're trying to do proof of personhood. They're the guys with that weird orb thing that scans your eye, but they're actually moving away from that now, and they're just gonna do pretty much standard KYC with a passport or something like that. AI agents are going to be digital workforce, a digital sort of colleague where you're gonna give it a task and it's gonna go off and do that. And sometimes the task might be five minutes or maybe an hour, and sometimes the task will be days. So these things are gonna get extremely capable very quickly. It's gonna be practically impossible to be indistinguishable from whether they're human or not. So we need a solution to be able to prove without a shadow of a doubt that this one is an agent that is trustable, this is a human being, and it's Colin and this one over here, we're not too sure. So you need to exercise caution. So the idea is to tie each agent's identity to a position on the blockchain so that it can't pretend it's someone else. Exactly. Yeah. It can, that's where the magic of the blockchain comes in. We've got this immutable ledger where it's open but transparent and no one can change it. So it needs to be on the blockchain because that's the only thing that we can know, that once something is set in stone, it can't be changed. It's the clear and obvious solution to an awful lot of the problems in ai, and that's why I think, some of the problems in AI and some of the problems in blockchain will really come together. To be perfectly solved together, I worry, is that it requires a sophisticated end user. So let's say. I'm someone who's gonna talk to one of two agents. I have to know enough to be able to detect which one has the right blockchain code and which one doesn't. Because we've all seen where people have a website where they just change one letter or they use the same name, but they're on a different blockchain. So there's a lot of things that people can still do to trick you. I get. Emails all the time that are from like a fake PayPal at website. Yeah. So those things still happen. So it's very easy if you just switch one letter or you do the number one instead of the letter I for people to get misled. So how do we create a world where the end user is going through an interface or platform or has something on their system that's running this check to see which are authorizations, which are not because. I can tell you, like we still haven't figured out how to handle spam. Like how are we gonna handle something more sophisticated if we can't even do that with these huge companies and detection? It's a good point. It's a very good point. What I would say is that one of the things we're building as an AI agent, that is your security manager. Essentially we have a number of agents that do your crypto research like a research manager, a transaction manager, and a risk manager. So it will make sure that, when you're sending crypto, that it's not to a, an address known by a scammer. It'll make sure that you're not putting the wrong chain in there where it looks like it's okay, but your FI funds might get lost. And that has happened to me. And if it can happen to me, you can add to anyone. If you imagine an agent that will watch what you do all the time and be very wary of potential scams or anything like that and warn you ahead of time, that's where I see it going. Everyone's gonna have a digital personal assistant that is going to be amazing. I. It's gonna be like having a virtual assistant who's constantly reading all your emails, listening to all your calls, watching all your web rising, knows exactly what to do, tracking everything where you go. Updating tasks, lists, setting appointments, taking care of all the administration around your jobs. So when it comes to making transactions, et cetera. Like we have a product, it's called the transaction execution engine. And it's like chat PT for your wallet. So you can connect your wallet and you can say, send a hundred dollars of Ethereum to Jonathan or bridge, my USDT onto polygon and then send to my finance. It can understand the various different steps and it can do that. So by integrating that into wallets, we're gonna be able to add in a layer of protection for customers. So one of the challenges of agents in any form of AI is that it adds this ability to be socially engineered, which means if I can trick your agent into thinking that I'm you, I have a new vector into your wallet. So we actually add this new security vector. How can people approach this different angle when it makes things more convenient? But there's always the cha, the balance between convenience and security. Yeah you're absolutely right there. And one of the obvious ones is, do you log in with a username and password or do you log in with your wallet access? Okay. So obviously logging in with wallet access is an awful lot stronger because it really shows that that's you, unless you got your seat for a stolen, you know that you are never do anything about that. I mean there's a few companies working on some interesting ways around that, like face verification, et cetera, on your phone tho, those sort of things. Like you say, nothing is completely impenetrable. You can only just do what you can and then you don't want to do so much that it's just a complete turnoff with the amount of. Passwords and logins that you have to do. But that's the, instead of trade off. Some of the bigger companies are making it reasonably straightforward, but do you really want to trust your money with them after the FTX and Celsius, et cetera? I think that's the issue is that every single scenario comes with a great deal of risk, whether you centralize it or whether you decentralize it, there's. Massive amounts of inherent risk. And this is why there's just two categories of people. There's people that are dabbling in the world of crypto and people that are very much still against it, very on the outside because every store you hear is, you could do this, but then this can happen. You could do that, but then this could happen. And we've even seen in the in the finance space, a lot of these companies that said they were FTIC insured, it turns out. They weren't, and a lot of money has disappeared because they're all using synology, and they were all using this central company that was handling the transactions and then the ledger broke. And it's what you're all these finance companies, these online banks, suddenly they go we thought our money was stored there. And they go, we don't know where the money is. So it's not FDIC insured because it's been lost. We don't know whose money's in which account. So it, there's always this. Even with companies, as soon as you move away from it's definitely my bank, it's definitely FDIG and shared. As soon as you move away from that, you had these layers and layers of risk. And it still seems like even though we can do some things to defray the risk, we can't completely eliminate the risk. And that most, it really feels because there's no actual asset, there's no actual thing that anyone owns. It's all about. Getting there before someone else.'cause you wanna be the one left holding the back.'cause the last person there is the one who gets there. When the value drops out, when the rug gets pulled. And you just don't know. Like I understand that Bitcoin's on a big run right now, but that's, it's the people who bought Bitcoin five years ago that are enjoying that. Not the people who bought it two days ago. Yeah. So for people who are on the outside, it still seems extremely risky. And as someone who. Is in the AI space. I want to separate the two things because AI doesn't have, there's such negative reputation that comes with the crypto and blockchain elements that I almost would rather separate the two things. I understand the core idea. I like the idea of you can add a higher level of identification for agents and that part seems really cool, but it comes with so much negative pr. That almost seems impossible to overcome for the general user. So it's like there's such a, you're starting at such a negative perception. They, if it's a useful use case because people have so abused these different tools, even saying everything's tracked on the blockchain that people, I. Still seem to lose money all the time and things disappear and seem to disappear into the blockchain all the time. They end up going one wallet and they transfer to a million wallets in a matter of seconds and you can't follow it. So I'm not really sure. How do we overcome that massive amount of perception, or how do we eliminate fraud within the blockchain? We're still very early in this game. Okay. It's still very immature. I think when it comes to Bitcoin, yeah. Bitcoin's on a run right now, and it has been for some time because. It's got a level of institutional adoption now where everyone knows it's not going to zero anymore. Even last cycle, you could probably have argued that it does have a significant possibility of everyone just going, no, this isn't gonna work, and abandon it. But now you've got, Trump rumor to be issuing a Bitcoin strategic reserve. Literally today, the FASB accounting rule changed. You've got a MicroStrategy and a number of other companies operating a Bitcoin strategy, treasury strategy, and becoming the most successful stocks on the stock market. So it can't really be ignored. Now, what's next that I really expect here is the big banks and financial institutions to do custody. And so that means that you can have your Bitcoin, your bank will hold it. It'll be as simple as being part of your bank account, and you won't have to worry about any of your private keys and things like that. And then that's when the real sort of mainstream adoption will hop. So imagine locking in that with a sort of authentication layer into some of your applications. The big problem about Web3 is that everyone's too focused on the technology and they're not focused on providing a better user experience or solving problems for the end users. That's what software is about. But they're far too concentrated on the under tech 'cause they're basically allowed in nerds. And I think that is gonna mature over the next little while where people realize that, if I want really mass adoption here, I need to forget about showing off the inner workings of my app and focus on, what is this doing for the average person that would make me them want to use my, my, my app and what sort of problems am I solving or how am I making an existing process easier? Because, there's a million different. Various use cases for blockchain and there's tens of thousands of different coins all sitting out there trying to solve different problems. But, at the end of the day, remittance is the big one. Be it Bitcoin or be it stable coins, just the ability to almost in, instantly send value across the planet in a permissionless manner. Without, no one can stop you and you don't need an intermediary is a. A pretty massive deal. Now, us in the first world, we're used to PayPal and Zen and Venmo and things like that, if you live in Burkina Faso, you don't have that luxury. Plus your government might just, devalue your currency by 10 x overnight. So having this incredible technology that lets anyone with a mobile phone send money around the world in kind of seconds for pennies is unbelievable and really key. And I think we need to build from there. There's a lot of bitcoin DEFRA projects building on top of that, and then there's all sorts of other gaps. So my point is that when we add AI into this and make the usability significantly easier, where you have an agent that you can just talk to and it can talk back to you. You have a conversation with it. You don't know how to click this, go through there, figure out the workflow, just go, this is what I wanna do and this is my end result, and it'll happen. So the original concept behind Bitcoin was to have, an economy that wasn't a tie to any single government. And the idea was I'll buy things with Bitcoin. I'll go to the store and use Bitcoin instead of dollars or instead of pesos. So you can go to any country and have universal currency, but it's turned from a currency into an asset in the sense that people don't buy Bitcoin to use. They buy it to hold and hopefully it goes up in value in the same way that Tulips did in the Netherlands a couple hundred years ago, in that it's become a, it's rather, it's not to give the tulip, it's to hold it and hope it goes up in value. And we've now changed from this idea of a decentralized currency to, it's an investible asset, and that mindset shift is moved away from that original idea. Like I've heard this idea about remittance for a long time and yet we've been talking about it for 10 years. But has it happened? They tried it in El Salvador where they said, we're gonna put Bitcoin ATMs everywhere. We're gonna make it a national currency. We're gonna give everyone $10 in Bitcoin, which nail Salvador is a lot of money to take the app. Everyone used the app, took the money, transferred it to their currency, and then never used the app again. So like when they attempted to use it in a country that has this issue and. The issue is that Bitcoin's a super volatile currency. Imagine right? If all of your, you were paid in Bitcoin, right? And it's some days it's worth a little, it goes up and down in value so much.'cause it's such a speculative currency, it doesn't have stability. And when we try to launch stable coins, they fluctuate so much. Like we haven't ever achieved a coin or a digital currency that people would actually. Buy and sell with because it stays stable long enough, like as much as there's inflation and other currencies go up and down. And certainly there's countries where the currencies, 10,000 that goes crazy. But in most of the Western world, we don't have that high level of inflation or deflationary cycles. But how do we create a, like a currency that people would actually. Feel comfortable storing in their bank account. Like the issue with Bitcoin is it's gonna go up but not forever. Like eventually not in, it's not infinite, right? Eventually the value will drop out 'cause either everyone will own it or everyone will stop wanting or will stop being trendy. So is it possible to create a currency that. Has this kind of stability without it becoming centralized. Because it seems like now we're moving towards, we want regulation, we want centralization, we want the government involved, we want banking involved. And it's there are two opposite forces that are pulling against each other. I. Well, Bitcoin is the only thing that is really, truly decentralized because there is no Bitcoin CEO or marketing department or anything like that. It is, it was put out there into the wild it runs. No one can control it. Turn it off, take it over, anything like that. It's backed by energy. It's backed by something like 500 XA hash, which is more computing power than if you add up all the data centers behind Amazon. Facebook and AWS. Okay, so that is the most secure network. It hasn't had a second of downtime in more than 10 years. It is volatile because again, like anything, it's still early, but with volatility comes energy, and that's what it's energy. And to listen to Michael Saylor talk about this. What he does is he trades on the energy and gains yield from it. It is extremely volatile'cause it's had five, massive drawdowns because when the liquidity is low and a lot of people sell it absolutely dumps. But now when we've got nation states buying it and, massive funds and the ETFs and things like that, which the Bitcoin, ETF from BlackRock, ibit, and the others were. Orders of magnitude more successful than any other one. They, it got to the same as gold in less than a year, and gold took 13 years to get there. Okay? Yes, Bitcoin started off as, peer-to-peer cash, et cetera, but it very quickly became a store of value. And the reason is because. We all knew about inflation for years, but we haven't really massively experienced it up until the last few years where we see the incredible amount of money printing going on, and we realize that what's the point of a currency if it doesn't have any real value because they're just printing. 40% of all dollars were printed in the last couple of years. So when they can just make money up out of thin air for endless wars and bailing out the banks and things like that, something else was needed. And that is a harder currency. And when I say a harder currency means harder to create more because Bitcoin is literally the only asset out there where the supply, the issuance is fixed. So it gets it is set from here till a hundred years, and you cannot change that. It's done by a process of mining, as and if you double, triple, quadruple the mining, instantly it would speed it up for 10 minutes and then the difficulty adjustment comes in, it'll bring it back down so you can't create more of it. And that is why people then finally realized, hang on a second. This is actually going to be a far better store of value than gold or than fiat currency. So it became that you are right in the fact that no, you can't, go into Burger King in most places and buy with Bitcoin. But I think I have it here. There, I have one of these, it's credit card. I just got it the other day and I put my credit, I could put my Bitcoin on there and I go into any place that accepts MasterCard and I pay and it takes my Bitcoin and it's done. So that sort of problem has been solved because do we really want to go and try and force, I don't know, tens of millions of vendors around the world to change and update their, pOS systems, et cetera, or do you just wanna create Bitcoin credit cards where everyone has one? You can put your balance on there and you can spend it any time, but you can also send it to each other, via your phone, via the Lightning Network in seconds or via the normal network. The whole point of. Bitcoin is that it enables extremely large amounts of money to be sent around the world. You wanna send a hundred million dollars worth of gold around the place, you'll need a police escort in a massive van. And with Bitcoin it's as easy as sending $10. Yeah, it makes sense. It's just, I wonder about, the original core concept was decentralization, which is like no government involvement, which is, no one's watching what you do with your money, but actually because it's on a ledger, everyone can see where the money's going. And just these two opposite forces, like the idea of a Bitcoin credit card to me, seems the opposite of the original thesis, which was a currency where the government can't see what you're up to, where you have total freedom. It's like a form of digital freedom, but obviously I don't think it was that they can't see what they're up to. It's that they, it's permissionless. It's that there's no person in between who can stop this happening. Okay. And there's been so many cases of this lately. In Canada they had the truckers and they shut down all their bank accounts. I dunno whether you saw mark Andreessen from A 16 Z recently said that there's been 30 major tech CEOs who've been Deb banked recently. They've just completely shut them down. And when you get debunked. There's no one you can really go to for help. You're completely screwed. And that's not a place, we believe in freedom of speech, but what about freedom of money? And Bitcoin is the freedom of money because you can then transact with anyone else and no one can actually stop you. Do we want it to be completely anonymous so no one can see any transaction? I don't know. I think that'd be worse because Bitcoin did get the bad reputation at the very beginning for a currency, for criminals and for transacting on the silk road and things like that. But, if you were to go and do that today, they could trace it back to you, if they found your phone and they found your seed phrase and then your wallet, and then they're gonna see where any of those transactions go. That wouldn't be very good. So it's probably not the greatest currency to be used for anyone. What is the biggest currency used in nefarious contact or by criminals? It's the US dollar. Yeah, I guess it's just there's a lot of moving parts where it's like moving from one reputation to another. First, you're right, it was the reputation of using it to buy naughty stuff, and now it has a reputation of using it to take advantage of other people. And it's like this reputational thing is like the big challenge because we get caught up in a lot of these hype cycles. Everyone thought NFTs are gonna be the greatest asset. And then it turned out to be not true. And so there's a lot. And then everyone thought NFT games or blockchain games or you can make a living playing a blockchain video game and it's if you, soon as you hear blockchain in front of a video game, you just know it's oh, not fun video game. It's like there's no fun like game in a casino, right? The money wasn't there. No one would play any of the slot machines. If they were fun, they wouldn't need that. You would pay to play it. A casino. So I do think this is a big issue and I think it's very interesting, the idea of using. The se finding usefulness in the security elements are just very challenging because there's constantly being launched, new coins and so much information. It's hard to separate the signal from the noise, but I think this has been really helpful for a lot of people who are really interested in AI and seeing how it's starting to touch on the border of blockchain. For people who wanna know more about you and are interested in the projects you're working on and wanna see what you're doing to add a new layer of security element to AI agents, where can people find out what you're doing and see what you're doing online? Cool. My main platform is LinkedIn, so if you wanna search for me, Colin Fitzpatrick I'm on LinkedIn. I post almost every day, got like 20 K followers post a lot of stuff about ai, blockchain bitcoin, all sorts of Web3 stuff. So yeah, follow me there. The company's called Griffin ai, so it's griffin ai.io and we're on all the social platforms as well. So yeah, please follow along and happy to take any questions. Awesome. I'll make sure to put all those links in the show notes and below the video on YouTube. Thank you so much for being here, Colin. This has been another amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Thanks. Thanks for listening to today's episode starting with ai. It can be Scary. ChatGPT Profits is not only a bestseller, but also the Missing Instruction Manual to make Mastering Chat, GBTA Breeze bypass the hard stuff and get straight to success with chat g profits. As always, I would love for you to support the show by paying full price on Amazon, but you can get it absolutely free for a limited time@artificialintelligencepod.com slash gift. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode. 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