The Fight for Freedom and Crypto in the Age of AI | TOKEN2049 Day 1 Afternoon Session
Headlining the afternoon session of TOKEN2049 Singapore on Sep 18 was none other than celebrity whistleblower and privacy advocate Edward Snowden. Speaking remotely from an undisclosed location, Snowden broke the ice by sharing that he was last in Singapore in 2009 while working for the CIA at the US embassy.
In his talk titled “The Next Threat to Speech,” he observed that governments that used to champion citizen privacy and freedom are now reversing their stance by cracking down on individuals. They see people talking in ways they do not like and that they consider to be misinformation–this is dangerous.”
When asked by a member of the audience whether there was any “emerging protocol” that gave him hope, Snowden laughed and said, “I’m not going to endorse anything, but as you all know I am a huge fan of Bitcoin, even though it has a privacy problem that still has not been fixed.”
Another question from the floor came from someone who wanted to know how to design technology from first principles so that it can be safe. Snowden responded, “If you look at the Bitcoin whitepaper, it was designed via an adversarial approach, meaning it did not take the convenient path of centralizing any aspect. If you want to build something that will last, think about how it will be attacked, and design in response to survive this attack.”
He added that a lot of altcoin activity does not serve much purpose, and rallied the audience to be good stewards of the “extraordinary opportunity” they have been given. “We have to do better if we want to live better.”
Intersection of Crypto and AI
Besides crypto and blockchain, AI was a major theme throughout the conference, In his speech titled “Crypto Tokens in the Age of AGI,” Eric Wall, co-founder of Taproot Wizards raised the possibility of a global AGI arms race if there was an “intelligence explosion.” (For the uninitiated, Taproot Wizards is a collection of wizard-themed Ordinal NFTs inscribed directly onto the Bitcoin blockchain.)
Wall postulated that just as governments in the past printed money to fund the major wars of the last century, there will be massive fiat printing as nations compete for computer chip resources that go into training AI, resulting in trust between countries being broken. “Will Bitcoin become the only thing you can transact with in this world?” he asked rhetorically, following up with another hypothetical scenario, “How will bitcoin mining compete as AI superclusters dominate energy grids, consuming far more power than Bitcoin’s global mining?”
Earlier in the day, Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder of Polychain Capital raised the question that is already on the minds of most people–as AGI becomes more and more advanced, “How can I tell if anyone or anything I am interacting with online is real or AI?” It is within this somewhat dystopian backdrop that “blockchain will serve the purposes of identity verification and proof-of-humanity,” Carlson-Wee said, adding that staking and micropayments as spam prevention will also find a product-market-fit. “We will not see a Terminator-style takeover,” was his parting shot, drawing chuckles from the crowd.
The afternoon session of Day 1 at TOKEN2049 kicked off with a flurry of excitement as F1 drivers Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez took to the stage for a session titled “From Racetrack to Cryptosphere — The DNA of Champions.”
Besides the famous speed demons, there was another departure from the who’s who of crypto in the form of 47-year-old American entrepreneur and anti-aging practitioner Bryan Johnson. Johnson is famous for his extreme anti-aging efforts, which have yielded some impressive biological markers–according to his doctors, he has the heart health of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old and the lung capacity of an 18-year-old. Controversially, to achieve these results, he apparently spends $2 million per year on his health regimen.
Among his more practical anti-aging practices is to ensure an optimal window between one’s last meal of the day and sleeping. “The longer you can prolong this window, the better you will sleep,” he said. (If you’re wondering what an “anti-aging practitioner” is doing at a crypto conference, well, Johnson was addressing the startup founders and builders in the crowd who stereotypically sacrifice their health, sleep and diet for their hustle.)
Tune in tomorrow for our second-day report on TOKEN2049, where CoinW President Sonia Shaw will speak on the panel titled, “Exchanges at the Helm: Driving Crypto from Niche to Mainstream”
