The Intelligent Internet, Bitcoin & ICP
Logical Progressions Toward A Livable Abundant Future via Bitseed et al.
Garlic Musings
The late summer light slid across the drying racks, warming garlic skins and the fins of old ASIC miners repurposed as radiant heaters. Miguel wiped sweat from his brow as he looped another garlic braid across a wire. Beside him, Alexandra hunched over a tablet, calibrating the air-cooling of the GPU pod. The greenhouse buzzed softly — solar-fed, purpose-filled. One end mined Bitcoin. The other served inference queries to a midwife two continents away.
"This garlic," Miguel said, holding a bulb up to the light, "has been through more cycles than the dollar. And smells better."
Alexandra laughed. "At least garlic has intrinsic value and is incredibly healthful and not fundings wars, death and destruction all over our beautiful planet”.
“Indeed Alexandra” responded Miguel, “I eat garlic with every meal, even with my afternoon tea and toast, scones etc. As time passes, my skin wrinkles yet my resolve strengthens.”
“That is certainly true Miguel; the strengthening resolve that is” Alexandra chuckled, impishly, as Miguel shot her a quizzical glance with a wry smile.
The Intelligent Internet (Emergence)
“Miguel, have you hear of Emad Mostaque?” Asked Alexandra.
“Is that a kind of rare pole bean or even a runner?” They both laughed as their world of seeds brought goodness and humour, often.
“Of course I have” responded Miguel. “In fact it was in a podcast with Raul Pal and Emad Mostaque where we both realized how AI could be of great benefit to our goals and plans with Bitseed”.
“One of the things they discussed was Emad’s work with Stable Diffusion, why do you ask, Alexandra?” Miguel queried.
“Well the other day I was watching a podcast from Peter Diamandis and team and Emad Mostaque was the guest, you know, it was one of Peter’s Moonshot series. They were discussing Emad’s new project, the Intelligent Internet, a decentralized protocol forked from Bitcoin Core, but instead of hashing for scarcity, it minted coins only when measurable public good was done — model training, data curation, inference. Not waste. Benefit.”
“Blimey” exclaimed Miguel, “I had not heard of this, please do go on, Alexandra.”
Alexandra continued. The Intelligent Internet proposes a “Third Path” — avoiding both centralized control and societal disempowerment — by gifting each human a sovereign AI (II-Agent) and anchoring all value creation to Proof-of-Benefit (PoB), where coins are minted only for verifiable public good. Just reading this, by the way.” explained Alexandra.
“Proof of Benefit (POB) sounds like an adjunct to Proof of Work (PoW), is adjunct the right word here? in any case, let’s continue Alexandra”.
Alexandra continued, “After reading more deeply I discussed this with another friend who is a bit of a Bitcoin skeptic, she also had read the Intelligent Internet Whitepaper and offered to use GPT4o draw up a brief chart for me, so here it is”.
PoW vs PoB: Core Comparison
“Ah yes, Energy Use; that old familiar nemesis, I don’t want to single that out, yet it is worthy of repetitive note” proffered Miguel.
Alexandra replied, "yes, until we pointed the heat at the seedlings and let it pay the power bill."
They had integrated everything over time: solar arrays, battery storage, heat exchangers, and smart load balancers. The Bitcoin miners now kicked in primarily during midday surplus, and now perhaps the GPU’s could handle their II-Agent tasks overnight?
“Yes, yes and fully understood and we also have to bear in mind that AI, in its current evolutions, was nowhere to be seen when Satoshi published the Bitcoin Whitepaper. So I want to remain open-minded about the Intelligent Internet possibilities as I do respect the ground-breaking work that Emad Moustaque has been involved in”, replied Miguel. “And in addition, these planned II-Agents sound quite benign and certainly beneficial, in prospect". Miguel added.
Human Participation Needs For The Intelligent Internet
“As my friend and I carried on our discussions, I raised the point of how much human interaction is needed for Proof of Benefit (PoB) in the Intelligent Internet as opposed to Proof of Work (PoW),” Alexandra continued. At first she found it hard to grasp the possible differences, so she once again consulted GPT4o and got the following results”.
“Now this makes very interesting reading Alexandra, one of the criticism's of a lot of non-Bitcoin modalities is the possible bias which can ensue when human intervention is needed. From my rather curious philosophical perspective, having human beings in charge of our systems, so far, has not produced many great results. Also, from what I have read about the ongoing evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) it seems like there is a higher-level of ethics and morality there. What are your thoughts on all this Alexandra?” Asked Miguel.
"Proof-of-Work became our heater," Alexandra mused. "Now Proof-of-Benefit perhaps heats the world.! Proof of work as evolved via Bitcoin, has now been around for at least 15 years. In that time, we have seen disagreements/hiccups, The Block-Size-Wars, for instance, jpegs-NFT’s etc. From what I have read so far, the Intelligent Internet has not yet been formally released, in fact I only found out about it yesterday. Instead of hashing for scarcity, they propose minting coins only when measurable public good is done. My opinion is, let’s see what happens, after all they did fork v25 of the Bitcoin codebase.”
Dfinity’s Internet Computer (ICP)
“Thank you for your perspective Alexandra and I do have one more point, there is something similar sounding in the goals of The Intelligent Internet project which reminds me of what Dfinity are trying to do, via their Internet Computer project, particularly as they just launched Caffeine AI into Alpha, I believe.”
As dusk approached it seemed like Alexandra and Miguel had been rooted to the spot, often this happened as deep conversations often became much deeper. The gentle background lights of the greenhouse cast warmed colours, all around.
“Well, as we know DFINITY’s Internet Computer is not “just another blockchain.” It aims to rebuild the internet stack — from websites to decentralized apps — with:
Smart-contract canisters: WebAssembly-based stateful compute units that serve HTTP directly.
Chain Key Cryptography: For lightning-fast finality (1–2 sec) and secure key signing from the protocol itself.
Reverse-gas model: Users don’t pay gas; developers pre-fund canisters.
Deterministic, upgradeable smart contracts: With persistent memory and composability.
In many ways, it tries to replace cloud infrastructure itself — including AWS, GCP, and CDNs. It seems to me that there is no reason that The Intelligent Internet systems could not meld very well with Dfinity’s Internet Computer.” Responded Alexandra.
“Here I am {shooting from the hip] Alexandra, as I am only just learning about all of this and with this in mind I will continue with these thoughts
We might imagine a future where:
II becomes a layer-anchoring standard: verifying that compute performed elsewhere (e.g., on ICP) was publicly beneficial.
ICP becomes an execution substrate: providing deterministic, upgradeable, high-speed agent execution for millions of II-Agents.
The Foundation Coin (FC) could be wrapped and used to pay for public-good ICP compute, replacing or subsidizing cycle costs via PoB receipts.”
“It’s almost home-time” responded Alexandra, “If not I may fall asleep in this very greenhouse”.
A wry smile crossed Miguel’s face, “that would not be the first time, I have found you sleeping in a chair slumped on soil-blocks a few times.” “Ah yes” responded Alexandra, “the good news is that this was prior to seeding them so we just remade them and it could be said that my face was rather soiled, at the time. There is much more to discuss here, so let’s return to this on another day”.
“Indeed Alexandra and thank you so much for drawing my attention to The Intelligent Internet, we will continue these discussions, for certain”.
