TL; DR
Full story
If there are two things we know to be true, they are:
-
Everyone has pain sometimes. (Thanks REM)
-
Any cool new technology will eventually betray its users
To that last point:
Blockchain tricked us by making all our transactions public, smartphones tricked us by sharing our data with Google and Facebook…
And now, right on cue:
AI is betraying us.
Why is this in our ‘This is Cool’ section?
Because in this very specific use case, AI is used to stop bad actors from transacting on the Bitcoin network.
(That said, the content of this article could also fit under the title ‘This is concerning’).
This is what happens:
Crypto forensics company Elliptic uses AI to detect Bitcoin money laundering.
How does it work? According to elliptical:
“A deep learning model is used to successfully identify proceeds of crime deposited on a crypto exchange, identifying new transaction patterns for money laundering and previously unknown illicit wallets.”
Translation:
“It’s property. All you need to know is that it uses AI to catch bad guys.”
This is what it is about:
Using AI to detect/deter money laundering is one thing, but considering all major blockchains have years of transaction history open to anyone to see/train a complex machine learning model on…
There is a good chance that this kind of AI model could be used to identify and mine the data of everyday crypto users, eroding their financial anonymity/privacy.
Not good.