Artificial Currencies | Merging AI & Crypto

Okay. No. No. We're not doing any of that today. I'm actually gonna be explaining why I don't think any of those coins or tokens are a good idea. Instead, we're going to try and predict the future of AI payments of currencies of this kind of merging intersection between AI and crypto. So some general thoughts on that, whether the more token is a currency or not a currency, and also just figuring out some,

funding for builders and why I think the Morpheus ecosystem is the right place for doing that. So let's jump into the first little section here.

And I wanted to get into my introduction of the intersection between these two, which was via question on a podcast I heard probably years ago now, and it was what currency will AI agents use? And this is the first time I'd really thought about this kind of intersection between the two. And I was like, oh, yeah. Okay. What would it be? Now in that podcast, it was they had BTC Maxey there or it was a BTC Max podcast. I can't remember. And the answer was lightning Bitcoin.

The AI agents are smart. They're gonna use the hardest currency, the hardest money to do their payments, and therefore, they're gonna be using, Lightning Network. And I was learning about Lightning at the time, and I'm like, oh, yeah. You know what? Sure. Take that for granted. That that seems like a good idea. Went along with their their arguments.

But after some reflection, I've come to, I guess, like, a a slightly altered position on this, which is, first of all, the qualm is assuming that the AI agents will be smart. And I'm not necessarily sure that's gonna exactly play out as, as we think, at least in the short term, because I feel like they're gonna have a lot of the same inherent biases or the stupidity slash risk taking profiles that they're built upon, aka all the human activity.

And so that's one thing where I'm like, okay. I'm not sure they're that smart to to realize of, if if we can't agree as humans that the BTC is a good currency, I'm not really sure that AI agents will necessarily be able to do that. And the second was just actually using the Lightning Network, which for myself at least has been absolutely, like, wonderful magic at times where it's just like you press a button and instantly things happen. Holy shit. That was instantaneous. Awesome.

And then you start getting into channels. And if you look at trying to do run one your own, oh, God, that I almost fell into that trap myself. And, being frustrated with things not going through and stuff like that. I'm, yeah, technology wise, I'm I'm not sure. So this is all very short term. I'm thinking that, you know, the next year or or two.

And I think they'll probably agents, if they are up and running and making payments within the next year or two, they're probably just gonna be doing what humans do, which is using all the options available, making the same trade offs we do in terms of interoperability, of fees, of acceptance, of transfer time between whatever currency they're using. And

they'll be interacting with kind of humans and businesses in this sort of context. In the medium term, so, you know, like, two, three years plus to maybe ten years or something, would they use a special custom built currency for use just between themselves? There was this kind of viral video a while ago of these two agents and or two AI's. I don't know if you'd call them agents, who were interacting with each other,

via, like, a laptop and a phone, and they both had kind of voice mode. And it's like, oh, I'm an AIJ agent. Oh, you are too. Why don't we, switch to a language which is more convenient for us, which they called Gible Ink mode? And then they you just hear this, like, and the reason that they had that in this video was kind of viral was like, oh, okay. It's like, it's cool. They're communicating with themselves. Like, what are they saying?

But it was also that, oh, this is a protocol directly designed for this kind of voice to voice scenario where you do have an agent that is using voice. Now why wouldn't they just be connecting via the Internet and doing things in some other, you know, just straight up code? Who knows? But it did get me thinking like, oh, yeah. Would there perhaps be a protocol built which is specifically for AI, and which would use, like, a currency which is designed directly for them and things like this?

Personally, I think gaining adoption of that would be pretty hard. Pretty tough sell, but, you know, potentially that's something. And then if we're talking really long term, you know, the conscious, super intelligent AI's that are very much independent of of humans, all bets are off then. Like, who the hell knows?

You know, probably if they're smart enough, they're not want to be dependent on something that is human created and human controlled. And so perhaps they'd create their own currency that is, somehow, you know, decentralized in their own world, or maybe they're all just a swarm and they all agree, like, yeah, like, we'll we'll join into the swarm thing, and so they've got essentially a control one. Who knows? That's fun to think of.

That would actually be not an artificial currency, like the the title I've got here, but a non artificial currency, funnily enough, because artificial is actually describing something that is human created. And so if it began naturally outside of human control that wasn't produced by a human, Funnily enough, it would be a non artificial currency. Yeah. It was kind of weird if you think about it because we talk about AI, artificial intelligence.

So that that's kind of like the the payment aspect of of things. Getting into the second question of this merging of AI and crypto,

my second introduction was, can an AI get a bank account? And the obvious answer is no. Because if we're using the idea of a traditional bank, and an agent making purchases or dealing with chargebacks, using fiat, sending money overseas via a wire transfer, negotiating a mortgage, buying a house, all of these sorts of things, you know, you need to sign pieces of paper. You need to prove that you have,

you know, a certain amount of income coming into via another banker account that's attached to your name. And you know what? Funny enough, crypto doesn't count for that. Hence why I am doomed and never basically gonna be able to get a mortgage, if I tried to because I really don't think the banks are gonna be too happy with my activities and my main sources of income.

But the, you know, the problem with all of this is current banks are just way too closely linked to governments in terms of the regulations of the rules of the anti, you know, AML, anti money laundering, KYC, know your customer. All of these sorts of things are very much rooted in a human interaction and human based thing, and it would require a complete overhaul of that system.

And, you know, Fiat in itself is human controlled. So I'm really thinking like if we can't have autonomous drones and cars and having things like that, like the chances of a AI getting a bank account with Commonwealth Bank, which is, I still think, restricting things for Australia, and in terms of sending money to a crypto exchange. I know the, The UK has a whole bunch of stuff coming out recently about them, their banks also having

new regulations being passed where you can't send money to a crypto account. So, like, you know, if if that if humans can't do it, like, AI certainly don't. So, you know, debunking AI, debanking, well, you can't even be debanked because they haven't even been banked in the first place. But if we're changing the definition of a bank, which I think is actually happening somewhat nowadays, to something like Tether or Circle, where you're actually seeing, okay, they're

they do print money. You know, Tether is creating, you know, stable coins and things like this, and they're kind of printing that out of nowhere, out of out of, air. You know? It's backed by other things, but this is the kind of process creation. At least, my think of, my thought of with a bank is something where it holds money and, and you can access money from there, then sure, Tether and Circle sort of fall under that.

And then we're getting somewhere closer to where, okay, this is how AI and and crypto could intersect, where they're actually getting access to places like Tether and Circle and then being able to use stable coins and things like this. They'll have their own crypto wallets for sure. And, you know, it's kind of like being your own bank account rather than being your own bank. This is the the idea that I've heard for a long time. You know,

it's about crypto, you know, be your own bank account or be your own bank. Sorry. I'm not sure that's really that makes sense to me. Being your own bank account, sure, makes sense. But banks to me are are an idea of a large entity printing money, and I this is not what I see AI agents being used for. So those were two just kind of introductions for myself into this question of of, AI and and crypto in this intersection.

Now okay, nice tangent, Kyron, but what the hell does how how does that relate to Morpheus and the the more token and anything?

And it doesn't. It has absolutely nothing to do with this. And this is because I don't view the Morpheus token, and to be honest, anything other than, Bitcoin and stablecoins as currencies. So maybe I should have said the merging of AI and currency or AI and money rather than crypto. And this is because in my own mind, I view them as digital assets. I very much take the kind of Wikipedia definition of money, which is the store of value of

a unit of accounts. And I think there was something about transferability and maybe, like, another fourth definition, which which was, attached to that. And I don't think most well, all of crypto falls under that definition. I view them more as digital assets of a of a sort, which sure can view, can accrue value over time, but not great as actual currencies.

The there's usually only one currency at any given time as the kind of big the big kahuna, the the world currency, I guess, the digital and not digital, the reserve asset. For the last kind of centuries or century, it's been USD. If you go before that, it was, I think the Great British pound. If you go before that, it was probably like the Spanish peso or the Dutch mark or,

things like that. French libre maybe was in there for a certain period of time. Usually, they last for kinda like seventy to a hundred years, and then they get replaced by another thing. And Bitcoin's probably gonna be the one that, replaces, the US dollar. We'll see about that because the stablecoins are an interesting mix. But in particular, for the Morpheus token, how do I view that then? What is what does this actually have to do with AI and and, and AI agents?

And I like this kind of analogy of the morph Morpheus token is food. And so when agents are birthed from humans, it it will kind of be a necessity, food. And, it's the thing that fed their mom, a k a a builder, and helped her to survive in the real world or him. And this is where you would say, like, the cash flow from the Morpheus token via builder rewards to, you know, eat actual food in the real world to pay real life expenses.

As the agent grows up, it'll continue to eat this this food, the Morpheus token, and this would be, you know, gaining access to compute, via the the second bucket. The the food will feed the farmers in their weird little recycling game, much like happens now. You know, it's kinda weird that you think, like, farmers create food to get money to pay for food so that they can then work to create more food. Yeah. It's just complete complete, cycle.

And I very much view that the same as coders earning from their own code with the Morpheus token. You know, if you're coding, you create code to get the Morpheus token to then be able to create more code. And then all of this is originating from mother earth, you know, much like the food from mother earth we gain from the ground, from the soil, from the nutrients.

The capital bootstrapping is the kind of mother earth of the the Morpheus token. So if necessity is the mother of invention, then more is the mother of agents. And that is certainly an intersection that I I see happening between the two.

But perhaps we should get onto the intersection and where you would maybe wanna break away from that and have the agents independent of of crypto. And at the moment, there's a very obvious narrative, I guess, which would be let's combine AI and crypto, like the two most hyped up things in probably the last five years. Let's let's combine them. And you might ask why because it's the future man.

And there's no there's, you know, not a whole lot of coherence, I think, when when you think about it. It's just like, oh, okay. Yeah. Sure. There there's two hype things. We should combine them together. And I wanted to give a little thought on the current substantiation of of how this has emerged or expressed itself in the last year, which is the

the every agent having its own token. And you can look at the, you know, top of the the leaderboards for the moment of of that if you want, which is, you know, Zeribro, which is one where you can use its token for kinda access to it or get, you know, early drops of its music on things like this. Truth terminal, which is kind of related to the goats and the fart coin sort of things going on

where it doesn't really use it, but it's associated with it. So it's kind of like it's it's, I guess, fan token if you want, although they've largely taken away from that and have nothing to do with it. The virtual ecosystem, which is kind of allowing people to create their own token related to their token as well. So you can have a Billy Bets gambling thing, which has its own token, but it's related to the virtuals.

The AI 16 z DAO, which its token is used for voting in terms of this agent being able to make purchases and act like a VC. All of this sort of stuff, like, you know, let's give the benefit of the doubt and say that they aren't just, AI. Sorry, chat g p t rappers and,

doing something like that. You know, let's give a benefit of the doubt to the the creators of this that they're actually trying to create an agent that is autonomous, that can act for your behalf and do things and isn't just, you know, completely reliant on chat g p t and, LLM, things like this. Why are they doing all this? Why are they getting involved with crypto? What's the point of this? Well, it would be funding mostly,

would be my answer to that. And, you know, the funding mechanism that expressed itself over the last year was, AI game kind of like meme coin, AI gambling via the likes of Thread Guy, who was, you know, hyping up these things, pumping it with his kind of LA vape cabal and shit like that. And, you know, they're having fun. They're doing that. That's awesome. Good good on them. Everyone can do what they want.

You could simply say this is a way of capital raising for these people, albeit in a very chaotic manner for sure with, with a lot of pumps and dumps along the way, and that you can have fair launch AI coins that have the kind of facade of fairness.

Anyone I that, you know, anyone can get in upon creation and that if someone is creating an AI agent and you want to express belief that this person is working on something that's valuable and interesting and will be more valuable in the future, you could buy it. Sure. But what you see is that a lot of that gets ruined by sniping, short term trading, all of the shenanigans that go on with

hyper gambling. And what I think you really need for fair launches and if, you know, capital raising is a very deep question. I listened to a recent podcast with, Mark Andreessen and, Horowitz Ben Horowitz, I think, is his partner's name, for a 16 z. And you know, that creation of of VCs and the funding and things like that, it's incredibly deep. It's a whole industry and has its value and purpose.

And there's many, many different ways that people can raise money, some of them good, some of them bad. And I certainly put the, meme coin token AI related thing much more on the gambling and less productive side of of, raising money.

And so this current current intersection is something where I'd be like, you know what? You probably wanna separate AI and crypto, in this case, because I'm not really sure that's the the best way of of creating a long term sustainable funding for yourself and for your agents so that you can continue to work on these things, which gets on to like, well, then won't somebody please think of the builders?

And, you know, my my kind of opinion is that you don't want builders getting caught up in money games, essentially. And this seems to be the the thing with most, VC funding and stuff like that. You know, the most tedious portion of it for, an a person creating a product would be the whole capital funding, and raising of having to work out legal contracts of making sure they're not getting too diluted by the people giving them capital.

You know, the focus should be on the product and not having to deal with the tokenomics and keeping your community, aka the funders, happy. This is why the App Store became popular. Devs didn't have to do the taxes, the accounting, the backhand work of, like, all of the stupid shit that they didn't want to do. And they could just work on creating a really interesting app. And the marketing, the promotion of that, you know, the discoverability

would all be done within the Google or the, you know, Apple Play stores and things like this. They could just work on the code. I think Morpheus for the builders works very simply and very similarly. You know, if you can garner the stake, you'll get builder reward emissions and you'll get paid to therefore work more on on your thing. You know, there's still an element of, I guess, marketing necessary. I'm not sure you can escape that ever.

But I definitely see it a better use of time instead of wasting it, dealing with random tokenomics crap, which are associated with your agent and that, you know, you're now tied to it. And, you know, if there's pumping and dumping behind the scenes and things like this, you know, all all of that sort of crap, I think, takes away from the ability for

an AI agent to be created because the person creating it is dealing with a lot of shit. That isn't the actual AI agent itself, which gets, I guess, onto the the final point, which is tokenizing all the things.

Tokenize everything is another catch cry that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

For example, if every agent is to have a token, you know, I guess you could then say, like, if my agent is the one who's dealing with all of that so I don't have to, you know, deal with anything related to AI tokens and, you know, if I need access to something, it can just buy the token and get access and then, you know, sell it on later and maybe for a profit or maybe for a loss and, you know, it can do deal with all of that. Sure. Maybe.

But that seems like a lot of abstraction and a lot of, complexity. You know, not everything can be tokenized. And the reason I say this is because I think a lot of people get something wrong about value, which is that value is all monetary, is all it can be viewed as monetary. And we have a lot of things, phrases in the English language which argue against this, you know, other, one man's trash is another man's treasure, that sort of thing.

And the I think separating, the AI agent from a token or an expression of value in itself, I think it's probably a good idea in the kind of long run. Much like separating content creators from their content, I think is also a good idea. The Zuora idea of coining everything, of every post being a coin, of every piece of individual work that you put out having a value attached to it. I don't I just don't think that makes a lot of sense because a lot of this is non monetary

in in nature. Every time that you, you know, say a a nice thing about the Me and Morpheus podcast to someone else, a word-of-mouth, I don't think that should be monetized. For example, I don't think that every post that I make here should be an NFT and monetized or have a coin attached to it.

Right when we started the mere mortals, myself and my co host, Juan, you know, we went through the the 2021 phase of, like, really discovering and especially for myself discovering why Bitcoin's important and the monetary value that can be used for exchanging of value. And I really saw this in terms of using podcasting two point o apps of being able to send people money.

And it wasn't for because I was buying their content. It was because I was voluntarily sending it to them because they were creating good stuff. A lot of I think the problems with Web two, for example, really just derived from the advertising model, which was you have to pay. There is there is, the only way to value things, I guess, are through getting paid for it and gaining attention.

And therefore, with that attention, you could advertise. And with that advertising, you know, you earn money that way. I personally see the world shifting gradually away from that. I at the very least, I really hope so. And so this idea of having a token for everything, I think is kind of a reflection of that type of world as well. And yeah. So the kind of summing it all up, the my thoughts on on AI and crypto, they're certainly going to go together,

but not in the way that has currently been expressed. I don't think it's gonna be every agent having its own token, and I don't think agents are going to, be restricted to one sort of currency. I I think in the short term, they'll they'll use the other types of cryptocurrencies and the and the not. I I painted a very black and white picture of BTC and stable coins being the only ones. You know, there's various varying

levels of this because, you know, pearls were once used as currency and limestone rocks and things like that. So obviously, things which aren't the best currency can be used as currencies. But certainly over the long term, I very much view agents making payments via a currency. What kind of currency they'll use, you know, who who knows? But I certainly see this world, these two worlds intersecting,

but just not in the way that we've seen a lot. And, I think the Morpheus vision of this, of abstracting a lot of it away into a token which won't itself be used as a currency, but is used for the creation of the agents makes a whole lot of sense to me. So that was my call whole kind of spiel there of, of all of these things.

The reason I feel so strongly about value is, I follow the value for value model, which is I provide all of this upfront to you. There's never going to be any advertising on this podcast. There's never going to be any sponsorships. There's never gonna be anyone telling me what I can or can't say behind the scenes. And I do all of this to make it available anywhere, anytime for anyone.

The only request that I make is that if you've gotten any value from this, you just return it back to me in some shape or form. And this is once again where, you know, you can do it in many different ways. It doesn't have to be in a currency, can be in a digital asset like the Morpheus token. But I certainly prefer it in either Morpheus or Bitcoin.

And you can do this via a whole lot of ways if you want to give monetary support. There's wallet link down below where you can do a a referral link. You could stake to my builder subnet, which is on Arbitrum. You can also use a podcasting two point o app and, stream quite portions of Bitcoin or send a boost in via that way. And then there's all the non monetary ways of helping out, telling a friend about the Miomorphius podcast of suggesting topics to me.

Now this is actually the second last episode of season one. I've got one more Monday available to myself here in Brisbane before I start heading off to travel Europe. So I will be doing kind of like a sum up episode there of just a bunch of topics that I couldn't fit in to all of the, rest of these episodes. And, yeah, then we'll probably, hopefully, be back sometimes towards the end of the year, if not in 2026

at some point. So I'm I'm gonna leave it there for today. Thank you very much for joining in, and I do hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world. Ciao for now. Cara now. Bye.