Texas A&M Professor Announces Launch of Bitcoin Research InstituteTexas A&M Professor Korok Ray to Establish Bitcoin Research InstituteKorok Ray, an Associate Professor at the Mays Business School of Texas A&M University and a prominent Bitcoin researcher, has unveiled plans to establish The Bitcoin Research Institute. The institute aims to foster academic exploration at the nexus of Bitcoin and artificial intelligence (AI).During his presentation at the MicroStrategy World: Bitcoin for Corporations 2024 event, Ray highlighted Bitcoin's potential to facilitate secure multi-party computation (MPC). He illustrated this concept using examples such as poker players reaching consensus on the state of a game, underscoring it as a fundamental form of computation.Expanding on this notion, Ray envisioned scenarios involving deep neural networks and agent-based reinforcement learning, where AI agents collectively engage in computations within the Bitcoin blockchain framework. He referenced recent advancements in the Bitcoin ecosystem, such as BITVM, which enables off-chain Turing complete computation like MPC to be validated on Bitcoin.Ray articulated his thesis, characterizing the fusion of Bitcoin and AI as "The Undiscovered Country":"The ultimate use case of Bitcoin in say one-hundred, two-hundred or five-hundred years, will not be humans, but machines... as we are at [this] wave of massive technological progress, I believe the biggest opportunity will be deep integration between machines and the entire Bitcoin network at different levels."He further elucidated on the mission of The Bitcoin Research Institute, emphasizing the imperative to bridge Bitcoin and AI research domains, drawing upon the expertise of top researchers and faculty to advance these frontiers of knowledge.Ray also delved into potential research avenues, including the emergence of Chaumin mints for scaling Bitcoin payments and the exploration of secure prediction markets empowered by Bitcoin, which could revolutionize insurance and financial product landscapes.Acknowledging the profound academic contributions in computer science that paved the way for Bitcoin and AI, Ray underscored the prospect of leveraging these legacies to propel innovation across diverse sectors of the global economy.