I recently watched Emad Mostaque's fascinating interview on "The Plan to Save Humanity From AI" and felt compelled to respond. While Mostaque's vision is brilliant, I believe he's attempting to reinvent a wheel that has been spinning reliably for 16 years: the original Bitcoin protocol.
Mostaque proposes what he calls "proof of benefit" - a modified version of Bitcoin where computational resources would be directed toward beneficial AI tasks like healthcare or education. As he puts it: "What if you had a version of Bitcoin whereby every single coin sold went towards giving AI to cure cancer or to give people free AI to teach their kids?"
It's a noble goal and potentially world-changing. But after analyzing both Mostaque's "Intelligent Internet" white paper and the original Bitcoin white paper using Perplexity AI, I noticed something striking: while Bitcoin's BTC implementation certainly couldn't handle these requirements, a scalable implementation of the original protocol potentially could.
The confusion appears to stem from what many in the community call the "civil attack" on Bitcoin - where the name "Bitcoin" became associated exclusively with the BTC implementation, which intentionally limited scaling through small block sizes. This created the widespread perception that Bitcoin itself is incapable of handling high-volume, low-fee transactions needed for AI governance.
However, Bitcoin SV (BSV), which removed these artificial limitations, enables:
- Unlimited block sizes
- Original scripting capabilities
- High throughput (potentially billions of transactions per second)
- Microfees (fractions of a cent per transaction)
- Smart contract functionality
These are precisely the features Mostaque seeks to build for AI governance to save humanity. The scalable Bitcoin protocol could:
- Keep AI honest: By logging all AI actions on an immutable ledger, we prevent systems from "erasing" past mistakes or misrepresentations
- Enable microtransactions: As Mostaque notes, incentives matter for AI systems - the original Bitcoin design was built for exactly this
- Scale to AI needs: When "AIs are doing millions of transactions a second," they need a system that can handle this volume without congestion or high fees
Rather than starting from scratch with "99% of Bitcoin's code" but needing to modify it for scaling, why not use the already-scaled original protocol with its 16-year security track record?
The irony is that much of what innovators like Mostaque are trying to build to save humanity from AI already exists, but has been obscured by years of narrative confusion around what "Bitcoin" actually is. As we race to develop governance systems for increasingly powerful AI, leveraging battle-tested technology seems preferable to reinventing the wheel.
I'd encourage Mostaque and others working on plans to save humanity from AI to explore whether the original Bitcoin protocol might already provide the foundation they're seeking to build.