Texas A&M Professor to Launch Bitcoin Research Institute

Korok Ray, Bitcoin researcher and Associate Professor at the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, announced plans to launch The Bitcoin Research Institute to drive academic research at the intersection of Bitcoin and artificial intelligence.

At the MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Corporations 2024 event, Ray made note of Bitcoin’s potential to enable secure multi-party computation (MPC), offering the example of poker players agreeing on the state of a particular game as a basic form of computation.

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

For more on BitVM read: "The Big Deal With BitVM: Arbitrary Computation Now Possible on Bitcoin WIthout a Fork" by Shinobi, Bitcoin Magazine Technical Editor

Ray went on to propose his thesis, describing Bitcoin and AI combined as "The Undiscovered Country":

"The ultimate use case of Bitcoin in say one-hundred, two-hundred or five-hundred years, will not be humans, but machines...  as we are at [this] wave of massive technological progress, I believe the biggest opportunity will be deep integration between machines and the entire Bitcoin network at different levels."

“The Bitcoin Research Institute is really to connect these two areas of research and development and bring Bitcoin together with a lot of the major advances in AI,” Ray explained. “There is an army of researchers and faculty out there, and we need [to bring] the best minds onto Bitcoin to make this a reality.”

For additional areas of research, Ray noted 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 may lead to more efficient insurance and financial products.

Ray’s speech also acknowledged the legacy of academic achievements in computer science that have led to both the creation of Bitcoin and artificial intelligence, suggesting that the two will build upon this success in research to drive innovation across all sectors of the economy.

Watch Korok Ray’s speech on the MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Corporations Livestream hosted on the Bitcoin Magazine YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn.