Texas A&M professor establishes Bitcoin Lab

Korok Ray, a Bitcoin researcher and associate professor at Texas A&M University’s Mays School of Business, announced plans to establish a Bitcoin Lab to pursue academic research at the intersection of Bitcoin and artificial intelligence.

At the MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Enterprise 2024 event, Ray cited Bitcoin’s potential to enable secure multi-party computation (MPC), giving the example of a poker player agreeing to the state of a particular game as a fundamental form of computation. I did.

He expanded this example to include deep neural networks and agent-based reinforcement learning. This allows artificial intelligence agents to collectively perform computations in the context of the Bitcoin blockchain. Ray’s vision focused on new developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem, such as BITVM, which allows off-chain Turing complete computation to be verified on Bitcoin, as is the case with MPC.

Ray went on to propose his thesis, which combines Bitcoin and AI, describing it as an “undiscovered nation.”

“In 100, 200, 500 years, the ultimate use case for Bitcoin will be machines, not humans… As we are on (this) wave of tremendous technological advancement, I believe the biggest opportunity is “There will be tight integration between different levels of the machine and the entire Bitcoin network.”

“Bitcoin Labs is really about connecting these two areas of research and development and combining Bitcoin with many of the key advancements in AI,” Ray explained. “There are a lot of researchers and faculty out there, and we need to bring the best talent to Bitcoin to make this a reality.”

For further research areas, Ray noted the potential rise of Chaumin mints as a means of scaling Bitcoin payments, and the need for secure prediction markets through Bitcoin, an innovation that could lead to more efficient insurance and financial products.

Ray’s speech also acknowledged the legacy of academic work in computer science that led to the creation of Bitcoin and artificial intelligence, and signaled that the pair would build on the success of their research to drive innovation in all sectors of the economy.

Watch Korok Ray’s talk on the MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Enterprise ​Livestream hosted by Bitcoin Magazine on YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.