Bitcoin May Help Reduce Cybersecurity Threats, Expert Says

Bitcoin may be the solution to combatting cybersecurity threats triggered by artificial intelligence, says Michael Saylor, the co-founder and executive chairman of business intelligence company MicroStrategy.

“By combining the power of cryptography with the power of a decentralized crypto network like Bitcoin, we can bring cost and consequence into cyberspace,” Saylor said in an interview with Kitco News.

Saylor further explained his view by using social media as an example. He said social media bots, billions of them, are behind a digital “civil war” that spreads hatred across different platforms.

Saylor reportedly gets nearly 2,000 fake followers daily on Twitter, where he has over three million followers. “I literally saw in a matter of one hour, 1,500 bot accounts got scrubbed off my account, and they were bots. So we can no longer live with that status quo,” he said.

He further explained that the rise of artificial intelligence will make it harder to detect deepfake content.

For Saylor, defeating deepfakes powered by AI and other cybersecurity threats such as fake accounts lie in decentralized identities (DIDs), which are self-owned independent identities that allow for safe data exchange.

To “create integrity in cyberspace,” Saylor said there should be an “immutable identity,” which will be created through a public-private key “inscribed on a Bitcoin base layer with a transaction.” Saylor believes this mechanism can help reduce the spread of bot accounts.

When the Bitcoin-inscribed immutable identity is paired with a Twitter profile, someone who wants to “launch a billion Twitter bots” will be charged a billion dollars since the public-private key’s original owner can sanction bots.

“It’s inevitable that we’re going to actually introduce this idea of cryptographic verification,” he said.

Though it would be costlier, Saylor insisted the mechanism could help reduce real-life conflicts posed by AI-driven cybersecurity threats.

Saylor isn’t the first to float the idea of using Bitcoin as a cybersecurity tool.

In February, U.S. Space Force astronautical engineer Maj. Jason Lowery suggested Bitcoin could become an asset in the Pentagon’s cybersecurity efforts.

In an academic thesis, he said Bitcoin can be used to thwart some cyberattacks by designing programs that only work while responding to external signals paired with Bitcoin network transactions.

“Major Lowery concludes that Bitcoin represents a national strategic imperative that the US should support and adopt as quickly as possible,” according to the summary of the thesis on Amazon.