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Bitcoin could be the answer to combat AI cybersecurity threats such as deepfakes, said Michael Saylor, executive chairman of MicroStrategy, during a recent interview with Kitco News.
Sailor illustrated his views with social media accounts created by robots. According to him, billions of fake accounts are behind the digital “civil war” in modern society, fueling hatred among real users of digital platforms.
“The risk in cyberspace is that I could spin a billion fake people and start a civil war if the fake Republicans hate the fake Democrats or the real Democrats. If fake Democrats hate real Republicans,” he said, the tech lead, discussing how artificial intelligence and other next-generation technologies will make deepfakes cheaper and harder to detect.
Saylor, who has over 3 million followers on Twitter, says he gets about 2,000 fake followers every day. “I literally saw 1,500 bot accounts removed from my account within an hour and they were bots. So we can no longer live with that status quo,” he continued. The executive believes that the solution to deepfakes and other digital trust issues lies in decentralized identifiers (DIDs).
A decentralized identity is a proprietary, independent identity that enables secure data exchange. In other words, it is a way to verify and control online identification and personal information.
“If someone wants to run a billion Twitter bots, it will cost them a billion transactions.” […]. By combining the power of cryptocurrencies with the power of a decentralized cryptocurrency network like bitcoin, we can bring costs and consequences into cyberspace,” he explained.
Saylor’s Microstrategy is one of the companies working on encrypted signatures for social media users and enterprise solutions. Open AI CEO Sam Altman is also developing identity verification technology in his Worldcoin cryptocurrency project. To build decentralized identity tools, the company closed a $115 million funding round last week.
Similarly, the layer 2 protocol Polygon launched a decentralized identity solution in March. Based on zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs), it uses cryptographic techniques to allow users to verify their identity online without sharing or potentially storing their sensitive information with a third party. The product was released almost a year after the announcement of its development.