If you've been reading this rag over the last few weeks you can probably tell that your Uncle Marty is pretty excited about the convergence of AI and bitcoin. Particularly in the context of the lightning network enabling AI companies and autonomous digital beings to provide instant final settlement of payments, solving a myriad of problems for the AI industry. Mainly, risks revolving around charge backs, accessibility, profit margin, privacy and being able to give AI agents allowances from which they can spend.

With the emergence of things like Aperture, "a HTTP 402 reverse proxy that supports proxying requests for gRPC (HTTP/2) and REST (HTTP/1 and HTTP/2) backends using the L402 Protocol Standard", and the bitcoin-focused tools being added to Langchain it seems like the conditions have never been more ripe for an industry to adopt bitcoin en masse. The combination of the fact that AI is an industry that has hit it's tipping point, it is computationally expensive, and, at scale and maturity, will require machines to autonomously exchange money between each other if they are to be as performant and efficient as possible makes bitcoin over the lightning network very obvious. It could be the accelerant that really takes things to the next level of usability and futuristic feel.

One thing that needs to be done to make this happen is to help those building out AI products to realize the massive benefit incorporating lightning into their APIs can have on their businesses. That is the goal of the #Ai4ALL hackathon that is currently going on and will run until July 31st. The hackathon is a collaboration between Fedi and Stakwork in collaboration with Replit and Hivemind Ventures, Spirit of Satoshi, and Zebedee sponsoring the event. The goal is to show off what can be built by combining lightning and AI to those in the AI industry who may not yet be convinced that there is a product-market fit. If you're someone like me who thinks this convergence is an unbelievable unlock for both AI and lightning and you are working on a project that highlights this, throw your hat in the ring and get involved. It's time to accelerate this convergence.

Final thought...

Feel very fortunate that my children are able to spend their Summers the way I did as a kid.