Matt Corallo, Elizabeth Spark and Callebtc were speakers at the Oslo Freedom Forum event.
AI put mass control within the reach of regimes that previously couldn’t afford it, according to Corallo.
Matt Corallo, developer of Bitcoin Core, and Elizabeth Stark, CEO and founder of Lightning Labs, focused on how artificial intelligence is restricting people’s freedom and privacy, as well as making mass surveillance cheaper, making it available to regimes that previously could not finance it. Given this scenario, both consider that Bitcoin represents the only infrastructure available to counteract this process.
“Where before some governments could not afford the kind of population-level monitoring that China has, now with AI they can. And China is also selling it cheaper thanks to the same AI,” Corallo stated. during his presentation at the Oslo Freedom Forum event this June 2.
Corallo indicated that artificial intelligence does not benefit only one side of the equation between repression and freedom, since the same drop in costs that allows a regime to build surveillance infrastructure at scale also allows small teams of developers to build freedom tools that previously required resources they did not have.
Therefore, the Core developer raises a problem of timingthat is, who manages to reach the end users first. The solution to this scenario that Corallo emphasizes is that Bitcoin, an open and auditable technology, is integrated into the AI ecosystem. before centralized platforms (like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) set the standard in private and closed conditions.
In a changing world, the winners are those who get to the right place first, not those with the best technology. There is no reason why Bitcoin and freedom cannot become the new established incumbents, making freedom and control difficult to displace.
Matt Corallo, Bitcoin Core developer.
If the payments and communications infrastructure of the AI ecosystem is left in the hands of centralized platforms before the so-called «freedom tech» (the set of technologies designed to preserve privacy and individual autonomy) manages to integrate, centralized control would remain standard by default. Bitcoin, from now on, tops the list of technologies «freedom tech».
If freedom tech wins, the next generation of dissidents will have it much easier. Otherwise, centralized control will remain the standard for the next century.
Matt Corallo, Bitcoin Core developer.
Surveillance is made worse by how people use AI
Conversation logs from AI systems are another risk vector that Matt Corallo highlighted. As people delegate more and more personal decisions, including financial ones, to artificial intelligence assistants, Those records become a window into your relationships, beliefs, and behaviors..
“Chat logs are quickly becoming a window into someone’s most personal feelings and relationships,” he said, noting that large AI vendors have not shown a willingness to implement encryption on those records even though the technology to do so exists.
An example of the lack of willingness pointed out by Corallo is what Sam Altman himself, CEO of OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, said in July of last year, when he confirmed that at the request of a judge, OpenAI would be required to disclose private conversationsas reported by CriptoNoticias.
Why Bitcoin can come first?
Elizabeth Stark cited during her presentation a report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) published last March in which it is claimed to have processed nearly 9,000 queries between 36 AI models and found that agents prefer Bitcoin as a payment mechanism.
The reason that Stark identified as an explanation for this preference is not technical but structural: «Bitcoin is free, it gives them agency and autonomyno corporation or individual controls it. And also an agent cannot have a bank account.
Those three properties, freedom, autonomy and absence of intermediaryare exactly the same ones that make Bitcoin indispensable to confront state control. “Bitcoin brings greater freedom because of its inherent decentralization,” Stark noted.
Stark added that “if it’s going to be centralized from the top down, with big tech, you’re going to use legacy (payment) rails. “If you’re going to have everyone involved, developers around the world, you need a decentralized mechanism, which is Bitcoin, to enable those payments.”
According to the perspective of the CEO of Lightning Labsan AI world with centralized payment infrastructure is a world where the same actors who today can freeze the bank account, They will be able to decide which agents operate and under what conditions. A world where Bitcoin came first is one where that decision does not exist.
Bitchat: proof that it is already happening
While Corallo and Stark described the threat and opportunity, Callebtc, Bitcoin developer and creator of the Bitchat messaging app with Jack Dorsey, presented evidence at the same event that the freedom tech based on Bitcoin already competes in real time with the control infrastructure.
Bitchat, as CriptoNoticias already explained, is a decentralized messaging application that works without the internet through which you can also send bitcoin (BTC). Operates as a mesh networkwhere each device acts as a node and relays messages to the next, without a central server or internet connection, which allows communication between these devices such as mobile phones.
In the last twelve months, Bitchat saw massive spikes in downloads in Nepal, Indonesia, Madagascar, Kigali and Iran, in all cases preceding political protestsassured Callebtc.
I would wake up and see download numbers skyrocketing in a random country, go to Google News, and see there were protests in that country. Leading up to the protest, people were downloading Bitchat en masse just to be prepared in case the internet was cut off. That pattern repeated itself over and over again.
Callebtc, Bitcoin developer.
Bitcoin and the tools that are built on its infrastructure (from offline messaging applications to payment systems between autonomous devices) make up what Corallo and Stark call freedom tech: technologies designed to preserve privacy and individual autonomy in an environment where mass surveillance becomes increasingly cheaper and accessible.