What's With the Similarities Between Rootstock Smart Contracts and Artificial Intelligence

I recently Googled

And IBM.com gave the top result.

As it explains, smart contracts automate coded actions on a cryptocurrency platform (blockchain). So I’m thinking trader bots and escrow agreements.

The result also says they can automate a workflow. So hourly, weekly, or monthly (cryptocurrency) payments to a payroll.

OK. I guess there is something smart about smart contracts. Coz people usually handle the aforementioned tasks.

Then I got to thinking, can smart contracts be as smart as artificial intelligence algorithms?

Yes, I Googled. It’s not a thing. Every site talks of a smart contract combined with AI. I want it to become AI.

I know, we all want things. If wishes were horses.

Nonetheless, I have a few quirky similarities to share.

Starting with the cover image.

Notice how the Rootstock logo looks a lot like an Artificial Neural Network?

I did.

Bitcoin’s supply mechanics and the Boltzmann distribution

Rootstock is a Bitcoin side chain which means at its heart, it is Bitcoin’s supply mechanics that govern the halving and the difficulty adjustment and more. The true engine of all its smart contracting.

While Rootstock was chugging along its Bitcoin rails, on the other side of town, the Nobel Prize in Physics was being awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”- https://www.nobelprize.org/.

Their work in machine learning led to GPTs (Generative Pre-trained Transformers), a now famous architecture in major AI systems today.

What’s interesting is that foundational to all Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), as mentioned in the Advanced information section of NobelPrize.org, is something called the Boltzmann Distribution.

Below is its mathematical equation to capture the energy E of an ANN;

Notice the similarity to the Bitcoin supply equation below (with 3 parameters too! Replace W_ij above with 210,000, S_j with 50, and S_i with 1/2^i) ;

What can I say, there is something Bitcoin-like to AI.

Both the Boltzmann distribution and the Bitcoin supply equation model an exponential decay/reduction. The former is generalized for the energy of a closed system with n particles, while the latter models the number of bitcoins available to be mined. This too is a closed system with n = number of halvings.

The particles can be as many as they want to be (so whether Bitcoin is a planet-sized computational network or a modest network of a dozen PCs, doesn’t matter). But they will all decay in 32 halvings to mine all the bitcoins that can possibly be mined. Approximately 21 million.

Now bitcoins are mined in a system that unlike standard computer systems, where linguistic logic coded by a programmer dictates the state of 0s and 1s, this machine changes when it is fed energy... - Sydney Bright, BitcoinMagazine.

How smart are Rootstock smart contracts?

We have seen that both Rootstock smart contracts and AI algorithms consume energy. So the question is, how well do they consume the energy?

Well, both consume it pretty well to make some good money.

They are both smart money algorithms in that regard.

To see an instance of this, let’s put Rootstock next to ChatGPT in a certain way.

Look at the below statistics.

Of course, ChatGPT has more users, more money flowing in, and more employees worldwide.

It is smart. We all know this.

But pound for computational pound, Rootstock does hold its own.

Let’s make some assumptions like a Physicist.

For example, we can see that Rootstock.io has 261,406 monthly transactions.

Assume they are from 261,406 different people.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT has 800 million monthly users, generating billions of prompts (similar to transactions) every month.

Let’s take their number of monthly users as equivalent to their monthly transactions.

Now let’s divide market cap by these monthly figures (this is a made-up metric, but a good one):

Rootstock’s “Market cap per monthly user” = $380,000,000 / 261,406 = $1453

ChatGPT’s “Market cap per monthly user” = $157,000,000,000 / 800,000,000 = $196

As you can see, ChatGPT is not doing better than Rootstock in this calculation!

And if those 2740 RBTC pegged to BTC soon climb to $100k+ per RBTC (courtesy of the Trump Administration), you bet, ChatGPT will learn all about it. And OpenAI just might consider allying with a newly-unicorn Rootstock to provide paid ChatGPT services in RBTC.

Bottom line similarity: Both Rootstock smart contracts and ChatGPT are smart money algorithms with good performance metrics.

The former caters to a smaller clientele (Bitcoiners) with deep pockets, while the latter caters to a larger clientele (the world’s literate population) with relatively modest pockets.

Speedsters

In the Rootstock white paper, while the average confirmation time of BTC transactions is 10 minutes, Rootstock’s RBTC, which holds a 1:1 on-chain peg to BTC, takes only 30 seconds in average confirmation time.

This implies that RBTC transactions are almost as fast as Bitcoin Lightning Network transactions, which are the fastest transactions in the world.

Just as well, ChatGPT prompts are so fast that users can get replies in a few seconds for straightforward queries.

So while superhuman digital intelligence zips across the world in seconds to make our minds smarter, digital capital zips across the world in seconds to quench wealth asymmetries and provide opportunity to us all.

Fast money and Fast intelligence. My kind of speed.

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Miscellaneous: Two whales to inspire smarter smart contracts

Given what is happening in the AI and Cryptocurrency/Bitcoin space, future Rootstock smart contracts would do well to peg to a fast-growing Bitcoin whale like MicroStrategy, or a technology whale like Nvidia.

Why?

Here’s Nvidia’s stock graph in October.

And here’s MicroStrategy’s stock graph.

MSTR did better than NVDA last month, but they are both going to the moon in the long run.

Just like the Bitcoin and AI markets whose CAGR is looking at double digits all the way to 2030 (>20% for both as per Statista.com).

For their sake, Rootstock smart contracts will be on these rocket rides. Then they just might become really smart smart contracts.