The silent war of surveillance, brought into sharper focus by AI, stands at our doorstep, sparking crucial discussions about privacy in the age of emerging technologies like Bitcoin. This topic is a frequent subject in my conversations in and around Austin. We've seen a surge in surveillance states, reflecting a troubling trend beyond currency debasement to comprehensive monitoring.

All Surveillance Runs Upstream - Sunday Orange Flow
It’s been a week! The silent war of surveillance is at our doorstep, and it’s being gathered whether you like it or not. The discourse around surveillance, privacy, and emerging technologies like Bitcoin and AI is relevant and timely crucial. It’s also been on the top of my mind in conversations I h…
Thriller "A Bitcoin Zine"ThrillerX_

The recent withdrawal of Wallet of Satoshi (WoS) from the U.S. Apple and Google Play stores is a significant development, compelling Bitcoin developers to reassess their transaction methods on the lightning network, particularly emphasizing self-custody solutions. This shift highlights a critical reality: in the U.S. if you manage user funds without adhering to Know Your Customer (KYC) & ML regulations, the outcomes are stark at the very least.  

Is there Another way?

CASCDR is a tool designed to offer more privacy-conscious AI services. CASCDR enables anonymous consumption of AI services, paid for via Bitcoin, allowing users to maintain privacy and control over their data. It is built around the NIP-105 based spec.

What are Data Buffets?

Data Buffets are based on the NIP-105 based spec that makes it simple and straightforward to discover, consume and review L402 (paid lightning) API endpoints. We designed NIP-105 to be maximally scalable, modular, decentralized, transparent and efficient. Below is a simple graphic that demonstrates the elegance and simplicity of a typical Data Buffet workflow:

Benefits of Data Buffets

Data Buffets unlock the potential and promises offered by an open, uncensorable, decentralized network like nostr & the power of instant, high resolution, private micropayments with lightning:

  • Scalability: horizontal scaling - anyone can build on or deploy on this standard and offer standard building blocks or new fangled, innovative APIs. Buyers can find reliable building blocks at the best possible price thanks to competition
  • Inclusivity: bring services to people that are not possible without a US credit card. Marketplace is totally open & resistant to rent seeking.
  • Privacy: significant upgrades for buyers laundering requests through a “VPN” + non-KYC sats for service providers
  • Opportunity:
    • For sellers to earn sats, publish custom & even proprietary models
    • For buyers to reap the vast benefits of machine learning APIs & mixing and matching them at scale on an open decentralized network that we optimized for efficiency

This week, I talked with UncleJim21, the creator of CASCDR. Check out the pod if you're looking for a glimpse into how Bitcoin developers are looking at AI Privacy.

Summary of Available Services

CASCDR has been actively developing tools to maximize the benefits of utilizing Nostr as the marketplace and Bitcoin as the payment rails while adhering to Bitcoin's privacy values and freedom from surveillance.

The current offerings include:

  • 🧠 General Purpose LLM (GPT)
  • 👁️ AI Vision Capabilities
  • 🖼Text to Image Generation
  • 🗣️ AI Voice-to-Text Transcriptions
  • 🎥 Youtube Video Extraction

These services are packaged into user-friendly examples to inspire community creativity in building powerful applications. This approach mirrors the innovations of huggingface in the fiat domain but with enhanced opsec.

The future focus will be creating a flexible application that allows users to develop arbitrary workflow apps. This involves an overhaul of the NIP105 spec, enabling service searches based on input/output schemas compressed into a simple SHA256 hash. This development aims to empower users to construct custom workflows in CASCDR, catering to their unique objectives.

Peep the full write-up on their Bolt.Fun page. 

The swarm of AI, privacy, and Bitcoin requires innovative, collaborative solutions, especially as AI's data analysis capabilities present personalized advantages and privacy risks. More and more Bitcoin projects will have to start pioneering a balanced AI development approach, emphasizing privacy and self-sovereignty amidst data ethics concerns. This complex landscape is beginning to be navigated by Bitcoin developers right now, whose efforts are crucial in ensuring AI's progress respects individual privacy.

Image created with CASCDR, during the last Thriller pod.

🤙 Thank God for those based Bitcoin developers.