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Guest lecture · QAIRU, Astana
The history of cryptocurrencies
and what it means for AI
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Guest lecture · QAIRU · Astana · 29 October 2026

The history of cryptocurrencies
and what it means for AI

About me

Researching crypto since 2012. MSc in Digital Currencies. I build, advise, write and teach across the space.

  • ◇ Founder — Blockchain Slovakia · Co-founder — Paralelná Polis
  • ◇ ex-CTO @ Fumbi · Advisor @ Vacuumlabs & NBS
  • ◇ Lecturer @ STU FIIT · Author of Coinstory
  • ◇ Co-founder — Cork.tech · Founder — Amagi Labs, Polystate.io

david@amagilabs.io · davidstancel.com

31 October 2008 → 31 October 2026
18

On Saturday, the Bitcoin whitepaper turns 18.

The original whitepaper, published 31 October 2008
The original whitepaper, published 31 October 2008
Hands up

Two quick questions

🪙
Who has ever owned any crypto?
🤖
Who used an AI model this week?

The gap between the two counts is this talk.

01

Before Bitcoin: the dream of digital cash

1976 to 1998. Twenty years of brilliant attempts that never quite worked, and every piece Bitcoin was later built from.

Bitcoin prehistory, 1973 to 2009. Timeline by Ansel Lindner (@btcmrkts)
Bitcoin prehistory, 1973 to 2009. Timeline by Ansel Lindner (@btcmrkts)
The foundation

It all starts with cryptography

Three ideas from the 1970s make digital money even thinkable: Diffie & Hellman (1976, public-key exchange), Merkle (hash trees), and the math that lets you prove who you are without revealing your secret.

The building blocks
  • ◇ Hash functions — turn any data into a unique fixed-length fingerprint
  • ◇ Digital signatures — prove a message is really from you
  • ◇ Public / private keys — share one, keep one secret
Ralph Merkle, Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie, pioneers of public-key cryptography
Ralph Merkle, Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie, pioneers of public-key cryptography
Encryption · 1 of 2

Symmetric encryption

In plain words

One shared secret key locks and unlocks the message. Fast — but how do two strangers agree on the key without meeting?

Message
→
🔒 encrypt
same key
→
·xQ9f·
→
🔓 decrypt
same key
→
Message

The "key distribution problem" is exactly what the next idea solves.

Encryption · 2 of 2

Asymmetric (public-key) encryption

In plain words

Two keys that are mathematically paired. Anyone can lock with your public key; only your private key opens it. No shared secret needed — the breakthrough that makes crypto possible.

Message
→
🔒 encrypt
public key
→
·xQ9f·
→
🔓 decrypt
private key
→
Message
The core problem

The Byzantine Generals problem

In plain words

How do strangers who don't trust each other — where some are outright liars — still agree on one single version of the truth?

Generals win only if they all attack together, but some of them are traitors. Remember this one: it comes back when the generals are AI agents.

Four generals, one traitor: the honest ones still agree. Loops by itself
First attempts

David Chaum & DigiCash (1990)

The first real digital cash — with genuine cryptographic privacy ("blind signatures"). Microsoft reportedly offered close to $100M for it. But a company ran it: when DigiCash went bankrupt in 1998, the money died with it.

The lesson

Great cryptography isn't enough. If one company can be shut down, so can the money. We needed to remove the company.

The DigiCash team. Photo: chaum.com
The DigiCash team. Photo: chaum.com
The movement

The Cypherpunks

A 1990s mailing list of cryptographers and activists with a creed: "Cypherpunks write code." Don't lobby for privacy — build tools that make it real. Satoshi posted the Bitcoin whitepaper to their descendants.

  • ◇ Eric Hughes — "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto"
  • ◇ Tim May — "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto"
  • ◇ Hal Finney, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Adam Back — the direct ancestors of Bitcoin

The full story: my book CoinStory, chapter 3.

WIRED magazine cover, May/June 1993: three people in white masks holding a US flag, headline Rebels with a Cause (Your Privacy)
WIRED cover, May/June 1993 (photo: Larry Dyer). Inside: "Crypto Rebels" by Steven Levy.
1997 · Adam Back · HashCash

Proof of work was invented to stop bots

In plain words

Make every email cost a little computer work. For you: nothing. For someone sending a million spam emails: ruinous. A postage stamp paid for in electricity.

1997 · HashCash
Adam Back. Proof of work as an anti-spam stamp.
1998 · b-money
Wei Dai. Money created by solving computational puzzles.
1998 · Bit Gold
Nick Szabo. Proof of work chained into scarce "digital gold".

Good ideas that never shipped. Remember the first one: a tool against bots. It comes back.

The big arc

A 40-year march to decentralization

1976
Diffie–Hellman: public-key crypto
1990
Chaum's DigiCash — centralized
1990s
Cypherpunks · HashCash · b-money
2008
Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper
2015
Ethereum — programmable money
Today
NFTs · DeFi · stablecoins
02

Bitcoin

The first system to remove the company, and still keep everyone honest.

The Economist, October 2015
The Economist, October 2015
31 October 2008 · Satoshi Nakamoto

Nine pages. Eight references.

0
pages
0
references
0
companies, CEOs or banks
It cites
  • ◇ Wei Dai, b-money (1998)
  • ◇ Adam Back, HashCash
  • ◇ Haber & Stornetta, timestamping digital documents (1991), the first "chain of blocks"

Bitcoin is a remix of 20 years of failed attempts.

Where Bitcoin's ideas came from. Narayanan & Clark, ACM Queue, 2017
Where Bitcoin's ideas came from. Narayanan & Clark, ACM Queue, 2017
Nothing in Bitcoin was new, except the combination

Bitcoin is a remix

The one problem to solve

The double-spend problem

In plain words

Digital files copy perfectly. Great for music. Terrible for money. If I can send you a coin and keep it, it isn't money.

Ctrl + C on a banknote.
Alice copies her coin and pays twice. The network accepts only the first.
One idea, three eras

The evolution of the ledger

The leap isn't "copies everywhere". It's agreeing on which copy is true without a referee.

Interactive · type something

The magic ingredient: hashing

A hash is a one-way fingerprint of any text. Change one letter and almost the whole fingerprint changes. That is what makes tampering obvious.

0 of 64 characters changed
 
Type anything
Fingerprint before
 
↓ SHA-256 fingerprint now
 
Interactive · a lottery paid for in electricity

Mine a block: proof-of-work

Type a transaction, hit Mine. Your browser hashes the block over and over — changing a number (the nonce) — until the hash starts with enough zeros. That hunt is proof-of-work. Real SHA-256, running locally.

Ready. Nonce starts at 0.
Interactive · break the chain

Immutability by chaining

In plain words

Each block carries the previous block's fingerprint. Tamper with an old block and every fingerprint after it breaks — instantly, visibly, for everyone.

Click to edit an old block — watch the whole chain after it turn invalid.

3 January 2009 · block 0

A newspaper headline, written into the first block

"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"
Why a newspaper?

A headline proves a date. This block can't have been made before that morning's paper, so nobody mined coins in secret beforehand.

3 Jan 2009
Genesis block
10 Jan 2009
Hal Finney tweets "Running bitcoin"
12 Jan 2009
First transaction: Satoshi → Finney
Block 0 as raw bytes. The headline is readable on the right
Block 0 as raw bytes. The headline is readable on the right
22 May 2010 · Pizza Day
10,000 BTC

for two pizzas.

The first time bitcoin bought something real. Crypto people still celebrate it every 22 May as Bitcoin Pizza Day.

Poll · hands up

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

It means different things to different people

Bitcoin's changing narratives

The "story" of Bitcoin evolved as it grew — and all of them are still alive at once.

2009
Cypherpunk experiment
2011
Peer-to-peer e-cash
2013
Censorship-resistant money
2017
Digital gold / store of value
2020+
Institutional macro asset
2018 · Lightning Network

Lightning: Bitcoin's express lane

Like a bar tab

Writing every coffee into Bitcoin's ledger is slow (a new page about every 10 minutes). Lightning opens a tab instead: lock some bitcoin once, then pay instantly, as often as you like. Only opening and closing the tab is written to Bitcoin.

Payments hop across tabs like messages across the internet: about a second, a fee of a few sats. This is what I will use to send you sats at the end.

Many payments hop across open tabs. Bitcoin's ledger sees only two entries.
Hardware walks the same road

From general chips to custom chips

In plain words

A general chip is a Swiss army knife: it does everything, slowly. A custom chip does one job thousands of times faster. Once a job is worth billions, someone builds the custom chip.

Bitcoin mining
2009
CPU
2010
GPU
2011
FPGA
2013
ASIC
AI training
before 2012
CPU
2012
GPU (gaming cards)
2016
TPU
today
Custom AI chips

AI is on the same road today: from gaming cards to data-centre GPUs to custom chips like Google's TPU. Bitcoin miners finished that road in four years. AI is still on it.

03

Money you can program

What if the rules of a deal ran as code, with no lawyer, no bank and no judge?

Nick Szabo's 1990s example

What is a smart contract?

In plain words

A vending machine, as code. The rule is built in: pay enough and it delivers. No shopkeeper, nobody to trust.

Szabo called the vending machine "the primitive ancestor of smart contracts."

The blockchain becomes a computer

Interactive · tap a line

A real (tiny) smart contract

In plain words

This is real Solidity — a "tip jar" anyone can send money to, and only the owner can empty. Tap each line to see what it does. It's just code with rules.

👆 Tap a highlighted line to read it in plain English.

      

    

  





  

    
The catch

    
Immutable cuts both ways

    

      In plain words
      
A smart contract can't be stopped — which is the whole point, and also the danger. If there's a bug, it's public, permanent, and attackers can drain it before anyone fixes it.

    

    

      
Public code
Anyone can read it — including people hunting for flaws.

      
Can't patch it
Deployed = frozen. No "push a hotfix" like normal apps.

      
Real money
The DAO (2016) lost ~$60M to one bug. Audits exist for a reason.

    

    
This is exactly why security & auditing is one of the best-paid careers in crypto — and why the IT fundamentals you're learning matter here.

  






  

    
2016 · The DAO

    
The DAO hack was reward hacking

    

      
$150M
raised, May 2016

      
~$60M
drained, June 2016, using the code exactly as written

      
1 fork
Ethereum rewound history; Ethereum Classic is the chain that refused

    

    

      You know this from AI
      
The contract did what it said, not what its authors meant. The agent finds the loophole in your objective.

    

    
Making machines follow the rule you meant is the alignment problem. Crypto hit it first, with real money.

  






  

    
Since 2014 · the dollar gets an API

    
What is a stablecoin?

    

      In plain words
      
Crypto dollars: the speed and openness of a blockchain, but a price that stays put at $1.

    

    

      
Fiat-backed
$1 in a bank per coin — USDT, USDC

      
Crypto-backed
Over-collateralized with crypto — DAI

      
Commodity-backed
Redeemable for gold etc. — PAXG

      
Algorithmic
Held by code & incentives — risky

    

  







  

    
04

    
Privacy and Zcash

    
How do you prove something is true without revealing anything else?

  






  

    

      

        
Bitcoin is not anonymous · look one up

        
Everything is public

        

          In plain words
          
Every transaction is on a public ledger anyone can read with a block explorer (like Etherscan). No login. Click a transaction to inspect it — this is a superpower for checking that something really happened.

        

      

      

        

          
🔍 explorer.example / tx

          

          
Click a transaction above to expand its details ↑

        

      

    

  






  

   

    
Zero-knowledge, step by step

    
Prove you know the secret word, without saying it

    
The setupA ring-shaped cave with two paths, A and B. At the back, a magic door. It opens only with the secret word.

    
A faker’s chance to pass every round—

   

   
From “How to Explain Zero-Knowledge Protocols to Your Children”, Quisquater et al., CRYPTO ’89

   

  







  

    
Yesterday, Zcash turned 10

    
From research paper to private money

    

      
2013
Zerocoin (Johns Hopkins)

      
2014
Zerocash paper

      
28 Oct 2016
Zcash launches

      
today
Zero-knowledge proofs everywhere

    

    

      
      

        Public
        Obscured
        Private
        Based on Multicoin Capital
      

    

  









  

    
1 October 2025

    
"Bitcoin is insurance against fiat.
Zcash is insurance against Bitcoin."Naval Ravikant · ZEC rose about 63% that day

    

      In plain words
      
Bitcoin protects you from governments printing money. But every Bitcoin payment is public forever. If that openness ever becomes the danger, a coin that keeps payments private is the hedge.

    

  






  

    
Poll · hands up

    
To prove you're over 18 online, would you rather…

    

      
      
    

    
Zero-knowledge proofs now run Ethereum's scaling layers and digital ID. Proving without revealing will be one of the most valuable skills in AI.

  







  

    
05

    
Now the strangers are machines

    
This time the strangers are AI agents.

  






  

    
Machines already outnumber us online

    
82 : 1

    
machine identities for every human

    
CyberArk survey of 2,600 security leaders, 2025. Bots, scripts, services, and now AI agents.

  






  

    
December 2024

    
"AI makes everything easy to fake,
and crypto makes it hard again."Balaji Srinivasan

  







  



    
In a gold rush, sell shovels

    
Same chips, same power, new customer

    

      
2017
CoreWeave starts as an Ethereum mining operation. Today it is one of the big AI clouds, listed in March 2025.

      
$65B+
AI and cloud contracts announced by listed Bitcoin miners by October 2025 (CoinShares).

    

    

      In plain words
      
Mining and AI are both electricity businesses: buy power cheaply, turn it into something valuable, get rid of the heat. Whoever owns cheap power and cooling can sell to either.

    

  
A Bitcoin mining farm in Russia, built next to an aluminium plant
A Bitcoin mining farm in Russia, built next to an aluminium plant








  



    
Right here

    
Kazakhstan's share of global Bitcoin mining

    

      
April 20218.2%

      
August 2021, after China's ban18.1%

    

    
    
      
  • ◇ January 2022: an internet shutdown here knocked out more than a tenth of global Bitcoin mining power.
    • 
      
  • ◇ Today Alem.Cloud, Kazakhstan's national supercomputer, runs on NVIDIA GPUs built for AI.
    • 
    

    Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance · miners can hide their location behind VPNs, so country shares are estimates
  
Before China's 2021 ban: a mining farm beside a hydropower plant in Sichuan
Before China's 2021 ban: a mining farm beside a hydropower plant in Sichuan








  

    
Why this matters to you — right now

    
The AI you already use is about to need crypto

    

      In plain words
      
You use ChatGPT and Copilot to get answers. The next step is AI that does things for you — books the trip, buys the tool, pays the invoice. And to pay, an AI agent can't pull out a credit card. It needs money built for software.

    

    

      
Cards don't fit
Card networks need a human, a bank, signups, fees. An agent making hundreds of tiny payments breaks that model.

      
Crypto does
A wallet is just a key. An agent can hold one, pay instantly, 24/7, in cents — no human in the loop.

      
The rails are new
x402 moved to the Linux Foundation and Stripe launched MPP, both in 2026. Real volume is still tiny, but the plumbing is being laid now.

    

    
So the crypto we just covered isn't just "internet money for traders." It's quietly becoming the payment layer for the AI economy — the world many of you are moving into.

  





  

    
Push vs pull

    
Why a card is riskier than a crypto payment

    
In plain words
A card number is a reusable secret: every shop gets it and stores it, and one leak lets thieves spend again (Target lost 40 million card numbers in 2013). A crypto payment is signed once and pushed: the shop gets the money, never your key. Give an AI agent your card and it can spend anything. Give it a wallet with $20, and $20 is the most it can lose.

    

      

        
Bitcoin — value is pushed

        

          Con-
sumer
          →
          Mer-
chant
        

        
One direct step. The consumer sends; the merchant receives. Done.

      

      

        
Cards — value is pulled

        

          Con-
sumer→
          Issuer→
          Switch→
          Acqui-
rer→
          Mer-
chant
        

        
The consumer thinks they're paying — really they authorize others to pull funds, each taking a cut.

      

    

  






  

    
RFC 2068 · January 1997

    
The web was born with a coin slot

    
402 Payment Required
This code is reserved for future use.

    

      Remember Szabo's vending machine?
      
The web had the slot from the start. For almost 30 years nobody installed the coin mechanism, because there was no money that software could hold.

    

  






  

    

      

        
Interactive · watch an agent pay

        
One request, one payment, no account

        

          In plain words
          
The agent asks. The server names a price. The agent pays a cent from its own wallet and asks again. No sign-up, no card, no human.

        

        
      

      

        

        Simplified x402 exchange
      

    

  






  

    
Crypto × AI · how it actually works

    
How one AI agent pays another

    

      
Your AI assistant needs data / a service
→
      
It hits a paywall: "402 — pay first"
→
      
It pays in a stablecoin from its own wallet
→
      
Service unlocks — in one second, no human

    

    

      
the standard
x402
An open standard, run since April 2026 by the x402 Foundation: Coinbase, Cloudflare, Google, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard and others. A service charges an agent a tiny fee per request.

      
the money
Stablecoins (USDC)
$1-pegged crypto. The currency agents actually settle in — fast, global, programmable.

      
the wallet
Agent wallets
Coinbase's agentic wallets and Lightning wallets like Alby give an agent its own wallet, with limits a human sets.

    

  






  

    
The agent stack · 2024 to 2026

    
Each protocol answers one question

    

      

        
JobProtocolThink of it asQuestion

        
          
Use toolsMCPAnthropic · Nov 2024A USB-C port for AIplumbing

          
Pay per requestx402Coinbase 2025 · Linux Foundation since Apr 2026A coin slot on every web page03 · value

          
Pay in bitcoinL402Lightning Labs · paid in satsSame slot, different coin03 · value

          
Run a tabMPPStripe + Tempo · Mar 2026A bar tab with a spending limit03 · value

          
Shop for a humanAP2 · ACPGoogle · OpenAI + Stripe · 2025A signed permission slip from the human02 · proof

          
Know which agentERC-8004 · KYAEthereum · Jan 2026Reviews nobody can delete01 · agreement

        
      

    

  






  

    
Be honest about the size

    
The rails are built. The traffic isn't, yet.

    

      
~50%
of x402 transactions were wallets paying themselves to look busy (Artemis)

      
~$28k
real x402 volume per day, early 2026

      
~$0.20
average payment

    

    
Even the agent economy has a Byzantine Generals problem: fake activity. The gap between the rails and the traffic is your opportunity.

  






  

    
Two stories

    
When AI and crypto meet

    

      
2024 · TRUTH TERMINAL
An AI bot asked for money on X.
Marc Andreessen sent it $50,000 in bitcoin.

      
NEAR
Co-founded by Illia Polosukhin,
one of the eight authors of "Attention Is All You Need", the transformer paper. In 2017 NEAR was an AI startup paying students around the world to label data. To pay them, it built a blockchain.

    

  






  

    
Poll · hands up

    
Should an AI agent be allowed to own money?

    

      
      
      
    

  






  

    
When anything can be faked, you need proofs

    
Three questions AI makes hard. Crypto already has the tools.

    

      
IS THIS A REAL PERSON?
Bots now write and talk like people, and CAPTCHAs fail.
Crypto tool: "proof of personhood", one anonymous ID per human (e.g. World). Controversial, but it is the answer to bots.

      
IS THIS PHOTO REAL?
AI can make a photo of anything that never happened.
Crypto tool: a digital signature made inside the camera when the photo is taken. Any edit breaks it, just like the hash.

      
DID YOU REALLY SAY THIS?
AI can copy your voice and your writing.
Crypto tool: sign your messages with your private key. A deepfake can copy your voice, not your key.

    

    
Full circle: proof of work was invented in 1997 to stop spam bots. The bots are back, and crypto's tools are the defence.

  






  

    
Interactive · prove without showing, for your prompts

    
Who can read your prompt?

    
Anyone who decrypts your connection or holds the GPU memory can read it. A "no logs" policy limits what they keep, not what they see.

    

      

        
      

      
    

    

    
What you can check yourself

  






  

    
Bitcoin's motto, coming to AI: don't trust, verify

    
A policy is a promise.
Hardware is a lock.
Cryptography is a proof.Most AI privacy today is still a promise. Your generation gets to build the proofs.

  






  

    

      
Remember the generals? Now with AI

      
Don't trust one AI.
Ask three.

      

        Like asking friends for directions
        
One friend is a prankster. Ask three: two say left, one says right. You go left.

      

      
Just like the generals: go with the majority, and one wrong answer can't fool you.

      
Bitcoin does the same: “one-CPU-one-vote”, and the majority decides which chain is true (Satoshi, 2008).

    
It only works if the models make different mistakes

  







  

    
AI and blockchain: where they meet

    
Left: AI. Right: blockchain. Middle: what they can do together.

    

      
        
          
          
          
          
            Artificial
            intelligence
            Centralized
            Little transparency
            Energy consumptive
            Monetization limited
            Monopolistic
          
          
            Blockchain
            Decentralized
            Transparent
            Energy-efficient solutions
            User monetization
            Accessible
          
          
            Synergies
            Data ownership
            Transparency
            Monetization
            Cost cutting
            Competition
            Innovation
            Inclusive
          
        
      
    

  








  

    
Your turn

    
Five projects a first-year can start

    

      
from HashCash + HTTP 402
Agent with an allowance
An LLM agent with a wallet and a hard spending cap that pays per API call over x402 or L402.

      
from the Byzantine Generals
Byzantine jury
Ask several models the same question. Accept an answer only with a supermajority. Measure whether hallucinations drop.

      
from Chaum's digital cash
Pay-per-query dataset
Put your dataset or model behind a 402 paywall and charge a few cents per request. No card processor, no minimum fee.

      
from Haber & Stornetta, 1991
Agent black box
Log every action an agent takes as hashed, timestamped entries anyone can audit.

      
from Zcash
Human, over 18, nothing else
A sign-in that checks age or humanness without ever storing a passport.

    

  







  

    

      

        
Interactive · create one

        
What a wallet actually is

        

          In plain words
          
A "wallet" doesn't hold coins — it holds keys. A public address you share to receive money, and a private key you guard to spend it. Click create — watch one appear.

        

        
      

      

        

          
Public address — share to receive ✅

          
— click create —

          
Private key — NEVER share 🔒

          
— click create —

          
Illustrative only — generated in your browser, not a real wallet.

        

      

    

  








  

    
Go deeper

    
Want the whole story?

    
I wrote Coinstory — the full arc of cryptocurrency, from 1970s cryptography and the cypherpunks to Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs and DeFi. Everything in this talk, with the history and the people.

    

      Read Coinstory →
      davidstancel.com
    

  





  

    
Go further

    
Tools to try

    

      

        
Wallets

        RabbyEthereum wallet for many chainsrabby.io
        ZodlPrivate Zcash wallet, formerly Zashizodl.com
        AlbyLightning wallet, you hold the keysgetalby.com
      

      

        
Private AI

        RoutstrPay per AI request, in bitcoinroutstr.com
        zkAPIPay for AI from a private balancezkapi.openanonymity.ai
        VeniceAI chat, private and encrypted modesvenice.ai
      

      

        
Explore & build

        mempool.spaceSee Bitcoin transactions livemempool.space
        x402Payment standard built on HTTP 402x402.org
        Remix IDEWrite a smart contract in your browserremix.ethereum.org
      

    

    
Checked 28 Oct 2026 · Most are new and experimental: try with pocket money only.

  






  

    
The end

    
Thank you

    
Questions, ideas, collaborations — always welcome.

    

      david@amagilabs.io
      davidstancel.com
    

    
David Stancel · QAIRU · 29 October 2026