Bitcoin may be the answer to combat cybersecurity threats driven by artificial intelligence, such as deepfake, said Michael Saylor, executive chairman of MicroStrategy, during a recent interview with Kitco News.
Saylor illustrated his views using social media accounts created by robots as an example. According to him, billions of fake accounts are behind a digital “civil war” in today’s society, stirring up hatred among real users of digital platforms.
“The risk in cyberspace is I can spin up a billion fake people, and I can create a civil war by having the fake Republicans hate on the fake Democrats, or the real Democrats. Having the fake Democrats hate on the real Republicans,” said the tech executive when discussing how artificial intelligence and other next-generation technologies will make deepfake cheaper and harder to detect.
According to Saylor, who has over 3 million Twitter followers, he receives nearly 2,000 fake followers every day. “I literally saw in a matter of one hour, 1500 bot accounts got scrubbed off my account, and they were bots. So, we can no longer live with that status quo,” he continued. The executive believes the solution for deepfake and other digital trust issues lies in decentralized identities (DIDs).
A decentralized identity is a self-owned, independent identity that enables trusted data exchange. In other words, it is a way to verify and control an online identity and personal information.
“If someone wants to launch a billion Twitter bots, that’s going to cost them a billion transactions […]. By combining the power of cryptography with the power of a decentralized crypto network like Bitcoin, we can bring cost and consequence into cyberspace,” he explained.
Saylor’s Microstrategy is one of the companies working on encrypted signatures for social users and corporate solutions. The CEO of Open AI, Sam Altman, is also developing technology for proof of personhood with his crypto project, Worldcoin. To build decentralized identification tools, the company closed a $115 million fund round last week.
Similarly, layer-2 protocol Polygon launched a decentralized identity solution in March. Powered by zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs), it uses cryptographic techniques to allow users to verify their identity online without having their sensitive information passed or potentially stored with a third party. The product came out nearly a year after announcing its development.
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