Texas A&M Professor to Launch Bitcoin Research Institute
Korok Ray, Bitcoin researcher and associate professor at Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School, announced plans to launch the Bitcoin Research Institute to boost academic research at the intersection of Bitcoin and artificial intelligence.
At the MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Corporations 2024 event, Ray highlighted Bitcoin’s potential to enable secure multiparty computation (MPC), offering the example of poker players agreeing on the state of a specific game as a basic form of computation.
He expanded this example to include deep neural networks and agent-based reinforcement learning, through which artificially intelligent agents could collectively perform calculations in the context of the Bitcoin blockchain. Ray’s vision took note of new developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem, such as BITVM, which allows Turing complete computation to be verified on Bitcoin off-chain, as in the case of MPC.
“The ultimate use case for Bitcoin, let’s say, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years from now, will not be humans, but machines… as we are in [this] wave of massive technological progress, I think the biggest opportunity exists. it will be an integration between machines and the entire Bitcoin network at different levels.”
“The Bitcoin Research Institute will really connect these two areas of research and development and bring together Bitcoin with many of the major advances in AI,” Ray explained. “There is an army of researchers and professors, and we need to [bring] the best minds to Bitcoin to make this a reality.”
For additional areas of research, Ray pointed to the potential rise of Chaumin mints as a means of scaling bitcoin payments, as well as the need for secure prediction markets enabled by Bitcoin, an innovation that could lead to insurance and financial products. more efficient.
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 both will leverage research success to drive innovation across all sectors of the economy.