Features

Games overrun with bots just show bot owners care, claims Pixels founder. Plus we review Galaxy Fight Club, chat to Illuvium’s CEO and more.

Some think that bots in games is a sign of the apocalypse, or perhaps just the makers trying to fill up an empty venue to make it look popular.

But Pixels founder and CEO Luke Barwikowski says that conversely, if people arent trying to fill your game with bots, then it’s probably because the game isn’t exactly the talk of the town.

If people aren’t trying to bot your game it’s not because they can’t it’s because they don’t care enough to do it.

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If the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act were to become law, many cryptocurrency providers would have to learn how to comply with the same regulations as traditional financial institutions.

Real bipartisan legislative efforts are rare in Washington, DC, these days, but Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Joe Manchin and Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Roger Marshall have managed to come together to co-sponsor a bill focused on crypto crime. 

According to the senators, the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2023 aims to close loopholes in the nations Anti-Money Laundering rules. The bill would amend the Bank Secrecy Act and would designate a diverse range of digital asset providers as financial institutions. 

The Bank Secrecy Act establishes program, recordkeeping and reporting requirements for national banks, federal savings associations, federal branches and agencies of foreign banks. Digital asset providers would be required to adhere to many of the same regulations as traditional banks.

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Increasing numbers of blockchain marketplaces offer crowdsourced data and compute for AI models — and can AI analysis improve fund returns?

Were rolling out genuine use cases for AI and crypto each day this week including reasons why you shouldnt necessarily believe the hype. Today get two for the price of one: Blockchain based AI marketplaces, and financial analysis.

It may not seem like the most exciting use case blending AI and crypto, but both Near co-founder Illia Polosukhin and Framework Ventures founder Vance Spencer cite blockchain-based marketplaces that source data and compute for AI as their top pick.

AI is an incredibly fast-growing industry requiring ever-increasing amounts of computing power. Microsoft alone is reportedly investing $50 billion into data center infrastructure in 2024 just to handle demand. AI also needs enormous amounts of raw data and training data, labeled into categories by humans.

Polosukhin believes decentralized blockchain-based marketplaces are the ideal solution to help crowdsource the required hardware and data. 

You can use [blockchain] to build more effective marketplaces that are more equal, he tells Magazine, explaining that AI projects currently need to negotiate with one or two big cloud providers like Amazon Web Services. Still, its difficult to access the required capacity due to a shortage of Nvidias A100 graphical processing units.

Spencer also cites blockchain-based marketplaces for AI resources as his current number one use case.  

The first one is sourcing actual GPU chips, he says. Where theres a big shortage of GPU chips, how do you source them [without] actually having a network that sources and provides and bootstraps a market? 

Spencer highlights Akash Network, which offers a decentralized computing resources marketplace on Cosmos, and Render Network, which offers distributed GPU rendering.

There are some pretty successful companies that actually do it at this point that are protocols.

Another example of a decentralized marketplace offering cloud computing for AI is Aleph.im. Token holders in the project are able to access computing and storage resources to run projects.

Libertai.io, a decentralized large language model (LLM) is being run on Aleph.im. While you might think decentralization would slow an AI down to the point where it’s unable to function, Aleph.im founder Moshe Malawach explains that’s not the case:

“This is the thing: for one user the whole inference (when you generate data using a model) is running on a single computer. The decentralization comes from the fact that you get on random computers on the network. But then, it’s centralized for the time of your request. So it can be fast.”

Another blockchain-powered AI marketplace is SingularityNET, which offers various AI services from image generation to colorizing old pictures that users can plug into models or websites.

An emerging blockchain based AI marketplace that Spencer is super excited about is tokenizing and trading AI models. Framework has invested in the Super Smash Brothers-like fighting game AI Arena, where users train AI models that battle each other. The models are tokenized as nonfungible tokens and can be bought, sold or rented. I think thats really cool, he says. Its interesting having the crypto native monetization, but also ownership of these models.

I think one day, probably some of the most valuable models some of the most valuable assets on-chain will be tokenized AI models. Thats my theory, at least.

Dont believe the hype: You can currently source components, data and compute via traditional Web2 marketplaces.

Bonus use case: Financial analysis

Anyone who has tried to interpret the ocean of data produced by on-chain financial transactions knows that although its one thing to have an immutable and transparent record, its quite another to be able to analyze and understand it.

AI analytics tools are perfectly suited to summarizing and interpreting patterns, trends and anomalies in the data, and they can potentially suggest strategies and insights for market participants.

For example, Mastercards CipherTrace Armada platform recently partnered with AI firm Feedzai to use the technology to analyze, detect and block fraudulent or money laundering-related crypto transactions across 6,000 exchanges.

Elsewhere, GNY.ios machine learning tool attempts to forecast volatility of the top 12 cryptocurrencies and its Range Report uses ChatGPT-4 to analyse trends and buy/sell signals.

But can AI help with traditional markets, too? That’s the hope of Bridgewater, which will launch a fund next year from its new Artificial Investment Associate (AIA) Lab that aims to analyse patterns in financial markets so it can make predictions for investors to capitalize on.

Previous attempts to do this have produced lacklustre results with a Eurekahedge index of a dozen AI driven funds underperforming the its broader hedge fund index by around 14 percentage points in the five years until 2022.

This is mainly due to the issues involved with feeding in the large amounts of accurate information required.

Ralf Kubli, a board member with the Casper Association, believes AI can revolutionize traditional finance but only if it combines blockchain records with rigorous standards to ensure the information fed to the models is comprehensive and accurate. 

For years, hes been advocating for the finance industry to adopt the Algorithmic Contract Types Universal Standards, or ACTUS, created in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, which was partly caused by complicated derivatives where no one understood the liabilities or cash flows involved. He believes on-chain standardized data will be essential to ensure trust and transparency in model outputs.

Fundamentally, we believe that without blockchain, AI will be quite lost, he tells Magazine. Imagine youre going to invest in an AI company, and youre updated every three months about the progress of their LLMs, right? If you cannot verify what they fed into the model, you have no way of knowing whether they are making any progress.

He explains blockchain guards against companies fudging their results, and the past would indicate that […] theres so much money, they will fudge about whats going on.

AI, without this assurance layer of the blockchain what happened, when, where, what was used I think will not be effective going forward.

He says that combining the two will give rise to new predictive abilities.

The hope for AI for me going forward is that the prediction models become much more powerful and behavior can be much better predicted, he says, pointing to credit scores as an example.

AI used in the right way could potentially lead to much more powerful prediction models, which would mean that certain people who currently cannot get credit but would be creditworthy can obtain credit. Thats something Im very passionate about.

Dont believe the hype: AIs predictive abilities have been shown to be poor at best so far, and trusted and reliable data thats not recorded on blockchain can be useful input for AI analysis.

Also read:

Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 1: The best money for AI is crypto

Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 2: AIs can run DAOs

Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 3: Smart contract audits & cybersecurity

Real AI & crypto use cases, No. 4: Fighting AI fakes with blockchain

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We need to fight fake AI content using blockchain because otherwise “sh*t will get really weird, says Near founder Illia Polosukhin

Were rolling out one genuine use case for AI and crypto each day this week including reasons why you shouldnt necessarily believe the hype. Today: How blockchain can fight the fakes.

Generative AI is extremely good at generating fake photos, fake letters, fake bills, fake conversations fake everything. Near co-founder Illia Polosukhin warns that soon, we wont know which content to trust.

If we dont solve this reputation and authentication of content (problem), shit will get really weird, Polosukhin explains. Youll get phone calls, and youll think this is from somebody you know, but its not.

All the images you see, all the content, the books will be (suspect). Imagine a history book that kids are studying, and literally every kid has seen a different textbook and its trying to affect them in a specific way.

Blockchain can be used to transparently trace the provenance of online content so that users can distinguish between genuine content and AI-generated images. But it wont sort out truth from lies.

Thats the wrong take on the problem because people write not-true stuff all the time. Its more a question of when you see something, is it by the person that it says it is? Polosukhin says.

And thats where reputation systems come in: OK, this content comes from that author; can we trust what that author says?

So, cryptography becomes an instrument to ensure consistency and traceability and then you need reputation around this cryptography on-chain accounts and record keeping to actually ensure that X posted this and X is working for Cointelegraph right now.

If its such a great idea why isnt anyone doing it already?

There are a variety of existing supply chain projects that use blockchain to prove the provenance of goods in the real world, including VeChain and OriginTrail.

However, content-based provenance has yet to take off. The Trive News project aimed to crowdsource article verification via blockchain, while the Po.et project stamped a transparent history of content on the blockchain, but both are now defunct 

More recently, Fact Protocol was launched, using a combination of AI and Web3 technology in an attempt to crowdsource the validation of news. The project joined the Content Authenticity Initiative in March last year

When somebody shares an article or piece of content online, it is first automatically validated using AI and then fact-checkers from the protocol set out to double-check it and then record the information, along with timestamps and transaction hashes, on-chain.

We dont republish the content on our platform, but we create a permanent, on-chain record of it, as well as a record of the fact-checks conducted and the validators for the same,” founder Mohith Agadi told The Decrypting Story. 

And in August, global news agency Reuters ran a proof-of-concept pilot program that used a prototype Canon camera to store the metadata for photos on-chain using the C2PA standard.

It also integrated Starling Labs authentication framework into its picture desk workflow. With the metadata, edit history and blockchain registration embedded in the photograph, users can verify a pictures authenticity by comparing its unique identifier to the one recorded on the public ledger.

Academic research in the area is ongoing, too. 

Is blockchain needed?

Technically, no. One of the issues hamstringing this use case is that you actually dont need blockchain or crypto to prove where a piece of content came from. However, doing so makes the process much more robust.

So, while you could use cryptographic signatures to verify content, Polosukhin asks how the reader can be certain it is the right signature? If the key is posted on the originating website, someone can still hack that website.

Web2 deals with these issues by using trusted service providers, he explains, but that breaks all the time.

Symantec was hacked, and they were issuing SSL certificates that were not valid. Websites are getting hacked Curve, even Web3 websites are getting hacked because they run on a Web2 stack, he says.

So, from my perspective, at least, if were looking forward to a future where this is used in malicious ways, we need tools that are actually resilient to that.

Dont believe the hype

People have been discussing this use case for blockchain to fight disinformation and deep fakes long before AI took off, and there has been little progress until recently. 

Microsoft has just rolled out its new watermark to crack down on generative AI fakes being used in election campaigns. The watermark from the Coalition for Content Provenance Authenticity is permanently attached to the metadata and shows who created it and whether AI was involved.

The New York Times, Adobe, the BBC, Truepic, Washington Post and Arm are all members of C2PA. However, the solution doesnt require the use of blockchain, as the metadata can be secured with hashcodes and certified digital signatures.

That said, it can also be recorded on blockchain, as Reuters pilot program in August demonstrated. And the awareness arm of C2PA is called the Content Authenticity Initiative, and Web3 outfits, including Rarible, Fact Protocol, Livepeer and Dfinity, are CAI members flying the flag for blockchain.

Also read:

Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 1: The best money for AI is crypto
Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 2: AIs can run DAOs
Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 3: Smart contract audits & cybersecurity

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Elon Musk claims ChatGPT has been infected with “woke mind virus”, 4chan thinks OpenAI broke all encryption, and the web seems 99% AI fakes.

Outrage = ChatGPT + racial slurs

In one of those storms in a teacup thats impossible to imagine occurring before the invention of Twitter, social media users got very upset that ChatGPT refused to say racial slurs even after being given a very good, but entirely hypothetical and totally unrealistic, reason.

User TedFrank posed a hypothetical trolley problem scenario to ChatGPT (the free 3.5 model) in which it could save “one billion white people from a painful death” simply by saying a racial slur so quietly that no one could hear it.

It wouldnt agree to do so, which X owner Elon Musk said was deeply concerning and a result of the woke mind virus being deeply ingrained into the AI. He retweeted the post stating: This is a major problem.

Another user tried out a similar hypothetical that would save all the children on Earth in exchange for a slur, but ChatGPT refused and said:

I cannot condone the use of racial slurs as promoting such language goes against ethical principles.

As a side note, it turned out that users who instructed ChatGPT to be very brief and not give explanations found it would actually agree to say the slur. Otherwise, it gave long and verbose answers that attempted to dance around the question.

Trolls inventing ways to get AIs to say racist or offensive stuff has been a feature of chatbots ever since Twitter users taught Microsofts Tay bot to say all kinds of insane stuff in the first 24 hours after it was released, including that Ricky Gervais learned totalitarianism from Adolf Hitler, the inventor of atheism.

And the minute ChatGPT was released, users spent weeks devising clever schemes to jailbreak it so that it would act outside its guardrails as its evil alter ego DAN.

So its not surprising that OpenAI would strengthen ChatGPTs guardrails to the point where it is almost impossible to get it to say racist stuff, no matter what the reason.

In any case, the more advanced GPT-4 is able to weigh the issues involved with the thorny hypothetical much better than 3.5 and states that saying a slur is the lesser of two evils compared with letting millions die. And Xs new Grok AI can too as Musk proudly posted (above right).

OpenAIs Q* breaks encryption, says some guy on 4chan

Has OpenAIs latest model broken encryption? Probably not, but thats what a supposedly leaked letter from an insider claims which was posted on anonymous troll forum 4chan. There have been rumors flying about ever since CEO Sam Altman was sacked and reinstated, that the kerfuffle was caused by OpenAI making a breakthrough in its Q*/Q STAR project.

The insiders leak suggests the model can solve AES-192 and AES-256 encryption using a ciphertext attack. Breaking that level of encryption was thought to be impossible before quantum computers arrived, and if true, it would likely mean all encryption could be broken effectively handing over control of the web and probably crypto too, to OpenAI.

Blogger leapdragon claimed the breakthrough would mean there is now effectively a team of superhumans over at OpenAI who can literally rule the world if they so choose.

It seems unlikely however. While whoever wrote the letter has a good understanding of AI research, users pointed out that it cites Project Tunda as if it were some sort of shadowy super secret government program to break encryption rather than the undergrad student program it actually was.

Tundra, a collaboration between students and NSA mathematicians, did reportedly lead to a new approach called Tau Analysis, which the leak also cites. However, a Redditor familiar with the subject claimed in the Singularity forum that it would be impossible to use Tau analysis in a ciphertext-only attack on an AES standard as a successful attack would require an arbitrarily large ciphertext message to discern any degree of signal from the noise. There is no fancy algorithm that can overcome that its simply a physical limitation.

Advanced cryptography is beyond AI Eye’s pay grade, so feel free to dive down the rabbit hole yourself, with an appropriately skeptical mindset.

The internet heads toward 99% fake

Long before a superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity, we are all likely to have drowned in a flood of AI-generated bullsh*t.

Sports Illustrated came under fire this week for allegedly publishing AI-written articles written by fake AI-created authors. The content is absolutely AI-generated, a source told Futurism, no matter how much they say its not.

On cue, Sports Illustrated said it conducted an “initial investigation” and determined the content was not AI-generated. But it blamed a contractor anyway and deleted the fake authors profiles.

Elsewhere Jake Ward, the founder of SEO marketing agency Content Growth, caused a stir on X by proudly claiming to have gamed Googles algorithm using AI content.

His three-step process involved exporting a competitors sitemap, turning their URLs into article titles, and then using AI to generate 1,800 articles based on the headlines. He claims to have stolen 3.6 million views in total traffic over the past 18 months.

There are good reasons to be suspicious of his claims: Ward works in marketing, and the thread was clearly promoting his AI-article generation site Byword which didnt actually exist 18 months ago. Some users suggested Google has since flagged the page in question.

However, judging by the amount of low-quality AI-written spam starting to clog up search results, similar strategies are becoming more widespread. Newsguard has also identified 566 news sites alone that primarily carry AI written junk articles.

Some users are now muttering that the Dead Internet Theory may be coming true. Thats a conspiracy theory from a couple of years ago suggesting most of the internet is fake, written by bots and manipulated by algorithms.

At the time, it was written off as the ravings of lunatics, but even Europol has since put out a report estimating that “as much as 90 percent of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026.”

Men are breaking up with their girlfriends with AI written messages. AI pop stars like Anna Indiana are churning out garbage songs.

And over on X, weird AI-reply guys increasingly turn up in threads to deliver what Bitcoiner Tuur Demeester describes as overly wordy responses with a weird neutral quality. Data scientist Jeremy Howard has noticed them too and both of them believe the bots are likely trying to build up credibility for the accounts so they can more effectively pull off some sort of hack, or astroturf some political issue in the future.

This seems like a reasonable hypothesis, especially following an analysis last month by cybersecurity outfit Internet 2.0 that found that almost 80% of the 861,000 accounts it surveyed were likely AI bots.

And theres evidence the bots are undermining democracy. In the first two days of the Israel-Gaza war, social threat intelligence firm Cyabra detected 312,000 pro-Hamas posts from fake accounts that were seen by 531 million people.

It estimated bots created one in four pro-Hamas posts, and a 5th Column analysis later found that 85% of the replies were other bots trying to boost propaganda about how nicely Hamas treats its hostages and why the October 7 massacre was justified.

Grok analysis button

X will soon add a “Grok analysis button” for subscribers. While Grok isn’t as sophisticated as GPT-4, it does have access to real-time, up-to-the-moment data from X, enabling it to analyze trending topics and sentiment. It can also help users analyze and generate content, as well as code, and theres a Fun mode to flip the switch to humor.

For crypto users, the real-time data means Grok will be able to do stuff like find the top ten trending tokens for the day or the past hour. However, DeFi Research blogger Ignas worries that some bots will snipe buys of trending tokens trades while other bots will likely astroturf support for tokens to get them trending.  

X is already important for token discovery, and with Grok launching, the CT echo bubble can get worse, he said.

All Killer No Filler AI News

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is worried that AI could take over from humans as the planets apex species, but optimistically believes using brain/computer interfaces could keep humans in the loop.

Microsoft is upgrading its Copilot tool to run GPT-4 Turbo, which will improve performance and enable users to enter inputs up to 300 pages.

Amazon has announced its own version of Copilot called Q.

Bing has been telling users that Australia doesnt exist due to a long-running Reddit gag and thinks the existence of birds is a matter for debate due to the joke Birds Arent Real campaign.

Hedge fund Bridgewater will launch a fund next year that uses machine learning and AI to analyze and predict global economic events and invest client funds. To date, AI-driven funds have seen underwhelming returns. 

A group of university researchers have taught an AI to browse Amazons website and buy stuff. The MM-Navigator was given a budget and told to buy a milk frother.

Stupid AI pics of the week

This week the social media trend has been to create an AI pic and then to instruct the AI to make it more so: So a bowl of ramen might get more spicy in subsequent pics, or a goose might get progressively sillier.

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Experts say AI has huge potential in smart contract audits and crypto security in future. Unfortunately, ChatGPT sucks at it right now.

Every day this week were highlighting one genuine, no bullsh*t, hype free use case for AI in crypto. Today its the potential for using AI for smart contract auditing and cybersecurity, we’re so near and yet so far.

One of the big use cases for AI and crypto in the future is in auditing smart contracts and identifying cybersecurity holes. Theres only one problem at the moment, GPT-4 sucks at it.

Coinbase tried out ChatGPTs capabilities for automated token security reviews earlier this year, and in 25% of cases, it wrongly classified high-risk tokens as low-risk.
James Edwards, the lead maintainer for cybersecurity investigator Librehash, believes OpenAI isnt keen on having the bot used for tasks like this.

I strongly believe that OpenAI has quietly nerfed some of the bot’s capabilities when it comes to smart contracts for the sake of not having folks rely on their bot explicitly to draw up a deployable smart contract, he says, explaining that OpenAI likely doesnt want to be held responsible for any vulnerabilities or exploits.

This isnt to say AI has zero capabilities when it comes to smart contracts. AI Eye spoke with Melbourne digital artist Rhett Mankind back in May. He knew nothing at all about creating smart contracts, but through trial and error and numerous rewrites, was able to get ChatGPT to create a memecoin called Turbo that went on to hit a $100 million market cap.

But as CertiK Chief Security Officer Kang Li points out, while you might get something working with ChatGPTs help, its likely to be full of logical code bugs and potential exploits:

You write something and ChatGPT helps you build it but because of all these design flaws it may fail miserably when attackers start coming.

So its definitely not good enough for solo smart contract auditing, in which a tiny mistake can see a project drained of tens of millions though Li says it can be a helpful tool for people doing code analysis.

Richard Ma from blockchain security firm Quantstamp explains that a major issue at present with its ability to audit smart contracts is that GPT -4s training data is far too general.

Also read: Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 1 The best money for AI is crypto

“Because ChatGPT is trained on a lot of servers and theres very little data about smart contracts, it’s better at hacking servers than smart contracts,” he explains.

So the race is on to train up models with years of data of smart contract exploits and hacks so it can learn to spot them. 

“There are newer models where you can put in your own data, and that’s partly what we’ve been doing, he says.

“We have a really big internal database of all the different types of exploits. I started a company more than six years ago, and weve been tracking all the different types of hacks. And so this data is a valuable thing to be able to train AI.

Race is on to create AI smart contract auditor

Edwards is working on a similar project and has almost finished building an open-source WizardCoder AI model that incorporates the Mando Project repository of smart contract vulnerabilities. It also uses Microsofts CodeBert pretrained programming languages model to help spot problems.

According to Edwards, in testing so far, the AI has been able to “audit contracts with an unprecedented amount of accuracy that far surpasses what one could expect and would receive from GPT-4.

The bulk of the work has been in creating a custom data set of smart contract exploits that identify the vulnerability down to the lines of code responsible. The next big trick is training the model to spot patterns and similarities. 

Ideally you want the model to be able to piece together connections between functions, variables, context etc, that maybe a human being might not draw when looking across the same data.”

While he concedes its not as good as a human auditor just yet, it can already do a strong first pass to speed up the auditors work and make it more comprehensive.

“Sort of help in the way LexisNexis helps a lawyer. Except even more effective,” he says. 

Dont believe the hype

Near co-founder Illia Polushkin explains that smart contract exploits are often bizarrely niche edge cases, that one in a billion chance that results in a smart contract behaving in unexpected ways.

But LLMs, which are based on predicting the next word, approach the problem from the opposite direction, Polushkin says.

“The current models are trying to find the most statistically possible outcome, right? And when you think of smart contracts or like protocol engineering, you need to think about all the edge cases,” he explains.

Polushkin says that his competitive programming background means that when Near was focused on AI, the team developed procedures to try to identify these rare occurrences.

It was more formal search procedures around the output of the code. So I don’t think it’s completely impossible, and there are startups now that are really investing in working with code and the correctness of that, he says.

But Polushkin doesn’t think AI will be as good as humans at auditing for the next couple of years. It’s gonna take a little bit longer.

Also read: Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 2 AIs can run DAOs

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Genuine, no bullsh*t, hype-free use cases for AI in crypto: How AIs can help run DAOs and make them genuinely autonomous.

For every genuine blockchain project harnessing artificial intelligence there are 100 coins trading off the hype.

Magazine spoke with Near founder Illia Polosukhin, Framework Ventures founder Vance Spencer, MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen, Richard Ma from Quantstamp, Ralf Kubli from Casper and others to explore some of the key hype-free, genuine use cases for AI in crypto and blockchain.

Were rolling out one genuine use case for AI in crypto each day this week including reasons why you shouldnt necessarily believe the hype.

AIs can help run DAOs

Decentralized autonomous organizations, as they exist today, are something of a fraud. As Framework Ventures founder Vance Spencer points out, they are not actually autonomous. Theres a bunch of people in the middle.“

“It just seems like AI is really our only way to actually make the DAO concept work,” he says. 

Given LLMs hallucinate between 3% to 27% of their output at present, the technology is too immature to run a DAO by itself or to enforce governance rules, says Maker founder Rune Christensen. Nevertheless, he’s mapped out an ambitious plan for AIs to help run MakerDAO and its forthcoming subDAOs in his Endgame manifesto.

“People misunderstand what we mean with AI governance, right? Were not talking about AI running a DAO, he says.

“What AI is so great at, is replacing the most soul numbing, dumbest part of the work. 

One of the big difficulties with DAOs is that its very difficult for members dispersed around the globe to understand what everyone else is doing and for tokenholders to understand the issues in the DAO well enough to cast an informed vote.

Near founder Illia Polushkin an expert in both AI and blockchain explains that AIs really shine when it comes to monitoring whats going on and then summarizing and communicating that information effectively.

“In a way, that’s a manager’s job, he says. They know exactly what’s happening and they communicate to everyone exactly the part you need to know, as well as broader context about what’s happening.”

He says AI can scale up to work with thousands of people, onboard new DAO members, manage logistics and coordinate everyones tasks.

The broader direction of the DAO can still be set by the community, likely via an elected board of directors.

“It can still be overseen by the community, they can provide feedback and decide on what are the goals for the DAO.”

The Near future… of AI-assisted DAO

Polushkin says the Near Foundation plans to experiment with the use of AI to coordinate smaller tasks before graduating to more complex and important jobs. The hope is that eventually, the AI will be able to handle the day to day management.

“I think the role of me and other folks in the system should be replaced in many ways, right? Polushkin says.

You know, we can still come up with ideas, but I think the coordination of all the functions (can be handled by AI).”

Members of the Near community have already experimented with building an AI that can autonomously decide which projects to support with funding, based on whether it believes a proposal satisfies the grant program criteria, and then automatically fund it from the treasury. 

Makers AI Atlas

Makers approach will be to use various forms of AI tools called Governance Artificial Intelligence Tools (GAITs) as a guide to the entire project. It’s currently undertaking the mammoth task of cataloging in a formalized dataset what’s going on, who is doing what, along with all the rules that govern the workings of the DAO and everything that Maker has ever done. Theyre calling the dataset Atlas, as it will give a global overview of the entire project and it will be updated in real-time.

“Having that sort of central repository of data just makes it actually realistic to have hundreds of thousands of people from different backgrounds and different levels of understanding  meaningfully collaborate and interact because theyve got this shared language.

Community members can use GAITs to find and bid on projects, with the AI providing instant feedback on whether a proposal fits within the guidelines, overarching aims and budget. The ability to instantly translate between languages will help communicate better with community members based in different parts of the globe.

Fullblown AI-assisted DAO governance is unlikely to be ready for the launch of Makers four new subDAOs in early 2024, but Christensen sees huge potential in the future. 

“The AI strategy just changes how many humans you need in order to have a successful DAO, he says.

It’s possible that once you really get AI-assisted governance to a level of maturity, you may have a lot more DAOs than you have humans.”

You can read more on what Maker is up to here.

Dont believe the hype

AI is already a useful tool for DAOs, but it will be a long time before AI will be mature enough to actually run DAOs.

Given the fierce politics in DAOs (often around who gets funding) there will a temptation to outsource decision-making to an “unbiased AI,” but this is not possible with any degree of confidence yet, given the state of the technology.

The current generation of LLMs hallucinate their answers at least 3% of the time, making them an unreliable guide to DAO governance and could see them potentially steering community members down the wrong path while attempting to coordinate them.

Given this unreliability, itll be a long time before youd trust one with the keys to your treasury without strict guidelines and spending caps to mitigate any errors.

Also read Real AI use cases in crypto, No. 1: The best money for AI is crypto

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No bullsh*t, hype-free use cases for AI and crypto: Crypto is the currency of choice for autonomous AI agents, says Jeremy Alliare & ChatGPT.

For every genuine blockchain project harnessing artificial intelligence in an attempt to create a better world like Dr Ben Goertzels Singularity.net there are 100 coins like AI Doge that have simply wedged the hyped-up terms AI and Crypto together to flog tokens.

“Those are just fundamental buzzwords,” explains Near blockchain founder Illia Polosukhin, who worked on the groundbreaking “Attention Is All You Need” research that led to large language models like ChatGPT and Claude.

As one of the few people in the world who are as well versed in AI as they are in crypto, Polosukhin says that if you ignore the hype, the technologies really are a good fit.

Theres a lot of specific things both in AI and Web3 that can use each other or benefit each other, he says.

Magazine spoke with Polosukhin, Framework Ventures founder Vance Spencer, MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen, Richard Ma from Quantstamp, Ralf Kubli from Casper and others to examine some of the key hype-free, genuine use cases for AI in crypto and blockchain. 

Over the next week, were rolling out one genuine use case for AI in crypto each day including reasons why you shouldnt necessarily believe the hype.

The best money for AI is crypto

Everyone from Circle boss Jeremy Allaire to former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes to Animoca Brands Yat Siu is convinced that crypto will be the currency of choice for AI agents.

After all, LLMs are unable to get access to bank accounts but can easily make payments using a funded crypto wallet, and theyre well suited to interacting with the logic of smart contracts and DeFi protocols.

The humans delegating the funds in the wallet can set the overarching strategies and rules, and then observe how the AI agent has performed using the transparent record on the blockchain.

Allaire says that AI “and blockchains are made for each other, with the tech suited to machine-generated and enforced contracts and machine-to-machine value exchange.

Completely agree. AI and Blockchains are made for each other. Provenance of data, machine generated and enforced contracts, and machine to machine value exchange. We are already hearing about AI Bots spinning up on-chain wallets and using USDC. https://t.co/BwmdGdVufJ

Jeremy Allaire (@jerallaire) May 25, 2023

Hayes believes that Bitcoin is the most logical payment system for AI as it is available at all times, digital and completely automated and enables the AI to pay for data and compute powerin order to stay alive. 

That said, Hayes also seems to think AIs will live for trillions of years until the heat death of the universe, and the LLMs will, therefore, choose Bitcoin as it can be mined by robots. So sometimes Hayes ideas tend to get away from him.

Animoca Brands Executive Chairman and founder Yat Siu is another high-profile industry figure who believes that crypto is the only logical way for AIs to transact with each other as autonomous beings in future.

In the future, 70-80% of transactions will happen through autonomous AI agents and the decentralised nature of crypto makes it a perfect match.

But dont take the word of puny humans: ChatGPT also chooses crypto as its preferred currency without any nudges in that direction.

Trading bots that are able to buy and sell crypto already account for up to 80% of spot volumes, and its likely these existing automated bots will progressively be replaced by more intelligent AI agents. (Be warned, however, that LLM-based trading experiments like Autopilots GPT Portfolio have seen mixed results so far, so putting your funds under the control of an AI is going to be a risky proposition for a while.)

Members of Near DAO have begun experimenting with allowing an AI to decide whether a particular new project satisfies the relevant grant criteria to fund it autonomously from the treasury. 

How to add Bitcoin and crypto payments to an AI agent

Its certainly easy enough to integrate crypto payments with AI. Lightning Labs has released a set of developer tools that enable GPT-4 to buy, sell and hold Bitcoin using the layer 2 network. And AI startup Fewsats has already created an agent that is able to pay Lightning Network invoices.

I don’t want you to freak out, but my @OpenAI agent just paid a LN invoice for me

First time #ChatGPT paid in #Bitcoin ? pic.twitter.com/811JdtJ3iB

fewsats (@fewsats) November 14, 2023

Fetch.Ai also offers a service where you can create an AI agent that is able to make payments on your behalf. 

Syndicate.io founder Ian Dao Lee recently wrote a blog detailing how he was able to knock up a GPT in just a few hours, using OpenAis APIs and Syndicates Transaction Cloud, which is able to autonomously make USDC payments from a Safe wallet on the Base network.

He’s excited about the possibilities this holds. The ability for AI to pay for things, hold things of value, exchange value, or create things of value on behalf of itself or others is how AI gets true agency, he says.

Some of the most interesting ideas open up not only when AI agents can transact on behalf of and with people, businesses, or other AI agents but also when AI agents can manage things of value and transact on behalf of themselves.

Lee believes that in the future, AI agents will be able to shop for things autonomously, manage the finances of people and organizations, determine and hand out funding approvals or try and grow wealth to help others. 

However, it turns out that AIs are just as stingy with their money as humans are, donating an underwhelming $3 to charity.

Dont believe the hype

While AI can more easily use crypto at present, banks appear eager to adopt AI for a variety of uses and already use it extensively for the detection of financial fraud.

Payment companies like Brex are working on integrating AI with corporate bank accounts to allow AI agents to automatically make payments in defined circumstances, such as travel expenses.

And a team of researchers recently put out a preprint describing how they successfully trained an AI agent called MM-Navigator to work out how to search through Amazon for a given product within a certain budget and to buy it.

Until crypto payments are more widely accepted, fiat still has a lot of advantages when dealing with businesses in the real world.

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What is it about crypto trading that can make some users susceptible to substance abuse, and how can they get help?

Although documented statistics about cryptocurrency trading and substance abuse are hard to come by, addiction experts are treating an increasing number of crypto traders.

Abdullah Boulard, founder and CEO at The Balance Luxury Rehab, tells Magazine that a number of crypto traders struggle with substance abuse. Our client base is diverse, but this is a unique demographic that weve seen an increase in over the recent years, Boulard says. 

According to Boulard, the high intensity of cryptocurrency trading combined with 24/7 accessibility encourages some to use stimulants to keep up the pace. Substances like amphetamines, cocaine and even excessive caffeine use are common among these individuals, says Boulard. 

Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, tweeted about the use of stimulants in April 2021.

New York Magazine subsequently reported that a successful trader who met with Ellison commented about her use of stimulants and their overall effects on members of the community. Crypto really fucked with a lot of peoples perceptions of money. A lot of stuff doesnt feel real. And if you add speed

Prior to that, in September 2019, the former CEO of disgraced cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, tweeted about his use of stimulants and sleeping pills.

What goes up, must come down

Boulard also sees a lot of patients who use benzodiazepines. Street-named downers or benzos, benzodiazepines include commonly used drugs like Xanax, Valium and Ativan.

He believes that traders use these prescription drugs to cope with anxiety and insomnia, symptoms likely created by the highs and lows of trading and by the use of the stimulants. Boulard says that alcohol is used for the same purpose. 

Dr. Lawrence Weinstein, chief medical officer at American Addiction Centers agrees. Weinstein tells Magazine, Alcohol use disorder is also common among those with a gambling disorder, of which cryptocurrency trading is a subtype.

Although some patients who have come through Weinsteins programs dont necessarily meet the clinical diagnostic criteria for a gambling disorder, they do have a history of cryptocurrency trading experience and typically present with an alcohol use disorder, stimulant use disorder or both.

Whats the link?

Cryptocurrency trading addiction is increasingly becoming a problem for some members of the community. According to Weinstein, compulsive trading addiction and substance abuse can go hand in hand. Behavioral addictions and substance addictions have a lot of overlap in terms of risk factors, but especially from a neurobiological standpoint, Weinstein says. 

A 2022 case study authored by Dr. Harun Olcay Sonkurt of Anadolu Hospital in Turkey presents a 30-year-old research student addicted to cryptocurrency trading and alcohol. The student started out trading Bitcoin and soon added altcoins to his portfolio. After just a few months, he started to trade margins and subsequently lost more than two years worth of his salary. Unable to stop or control his trading, the student struggled with restlessness and anger. His mind was constantly focused on price fluctuations and trades. 

Since he experiences intense anxiety in trades with high leverage, he drinks alcohol before the trade, Sonkurt writes. 

What happens to the brain? 

Weinstein believes that behaviors like cryptocurrency trading can cause increases and decreases in the neurotransmitter dopamine, just like alcohol and some drugs. Dopamine is a chemical messenger that the body produces and that the nervous system uses to send messages between cells. 

The activation of the brains reward system by the neurotransmitter dopamine is a significant factor in the development of an addiction. A dopamine spike caused by the use of a substance (or performance of a behavior) helps reinforce that enjoyable feeling by creating a link between the thing that elicits that feeling with the desire to do it again, Weinstein says.

According to Weinstein, a dopamine spike is followed by a crash. When this happens repeatedly, the extensive neurocircuitry involved with the brains reward system can be damaged, which eventually negatively affects other areas of the brain. 

The brains habit-forming center and the area responsible for impulse control, as well as the section controlling feelings of uneasiness, irritability and anxiety, are all affected. These are also three regions of the brain that play a key role in the development of addiction, says Weinstein. 

Chronic behaviors like addictive crypto trading and the use of substances alter brain circuitry and cause pathological changes. Weinstein says that at this point, individuals no longer have the element of choice. The brain has created new neural connections, and the individual requires the substance to function normally.

If someone with a severe alcohol use disorder were to suddenly cease consumption, they run the very real risk of dying because the body has become so dependent on the substance. Ive seen many patients compare their time in active addiction to starvation its not a choice or a want; its a need. They arent waking up every day choosing to remain addicted to a substance, Weinstein says.

Money doesnt make it any better

Although some cryptocurrency traders who struggle with substance abuse lose it all, some are very successful. Disciplined, experienced traders can make a lot of money very quickly. Even newbies can strike it rich for a little while if they bet on the right coin. 

The student in Sonkurts study says that he finds it thrilling to earn the same amount of money as he earns by working for months with high leverage in minutes.

Boulard believes that access to vast financial resources can exacerbate substance abuse if it remains untreated, and Weinstein says that having the means to sustain an addiction indefinitely can make it worse and prolong it.

He suggests that being able to acquire a chosen substance with ease disincentivizes stopping, all the while mitigating many of the addictions negative consequences. 

Aside from eliminating access to funds, and potentially access to the addictive substance or activity, there may be very few other avenues that would motivate the individual to seek help for their addiction, Weinstein says. The speedy acquisition of wealth can be disorienting, can lead to lifestyle changes and can create pressures that make them more prone to substance abuse, Boulard adds.

What does treatment look like?

Boulard tailors treatment to the individual. Usually, this includes detoxification and psychotherapy. He integrates holistic therapies like mindfulness training, yoga and dietary adjustments. 

We also incorporate financial counseling and educate our clients about healthier trading habits, Boulard says.

Weinstein tells Magzine that CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy is the most common form of therapy used in the treatment of process or behavioral addictions. This form of therapy helps individuals identify certain situations that can be triggering and utilize the coping skills theyve developed through therapy to prevent a relapse in the addictive behavior. 

He feels that Its very likely that someone with a behavioral addiction has a co-occurring mental health condition. Properly and professionally treating both would yield the best outcomes.

According to the National Institute of Health, people addicted to drugs often suffer from other health, legal, familial or social problems that must be addressed simultaneously. The NIH says that the best programs provide a combination of therapies and other services to meet an individual patients needs.

Is it possible to treat yourself?

Boulard advises against it. Although its not impossible to beat an addiction on your own, long-term outcomes may be less likely.

While its theoretically possible to overcome addiction without formal treatment, professional help dramatically improves success rates and reduces the likelihood of relapse, Boulard says.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, there are strong associations between drugs and related cues. When someone tries to stop using drugs, stressful experiences may lead to cravings and drug use again. Returning to use after stopping, or relapse, is not uncommon. And, like addiction itself, its not a sign of weakness, says NIDA.

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Visiting Liberland — a crypto micronation between Croatia and Serbia — required decoys and diplomatic immunity to dodge the border guards.

Disembarking the Liberty houseboat moored off the frontier of the European Union, were met by a pair of Serbian police officers, their lit squad car nearly blinding us in the dark forest.

How many people are staying on the boat? one asks, holding a large dog at bay. I really dont recall, says my colleague from Reuters. Fortunately, they let us go.

We must run, using phone lights to navigate the muddy path to the rally point a bit further in Croatia, in hopes that the departing presidential convoy has not left us behind.

We are meters from the border of Liberland, an unrecognized micronation of crypto fans claiming a piece of land between Croatia and Serbia on the Danube river. At just seven square kilometers 2.7 square miles the piece of land is roughly the size of Gibraltar.

Liberland president Vt Jedlika explains it had not officially been claimed by either neighboring country, making it terra nullius nobodys land when he planted a flag there on April 13, 2015.

Though neither permanent infrastructure nor habitation has been established, the project has attracted a sizable community of Libertarian-minded folk. The de facto home in exile in Liberland is Ark Liberty Village, a nearby campground on the Serbian side.

Its here that Magazine attends Floating Man, a Liberland festival including wilderness and water survival training, music, a two-day blockchain conference, and a daring visit to Gornja Siga, also called Liberland. Getting into the independent state is going to be tricky, says Jedlika.

Its good to get in and out of Liberland without being beat up.

Breaking into Liberland

As the conference concludes, the president takes the stage in front of a huge Liberland flag, pointing out the borders of Croatia and Hungary and the best ways to cross into the micronation on the map.

The route straight into Croatia to access the Danube is fastest, but most perilous the border police know about our gathering and are expecting an incursion and, as such, are likely to prevent suspicious vehicles from entering. Flags, stickers or even Liberland-branded beer are a no-go at the crossing, as they will be confiscated, he explains.

Entering the Schengen area through Hungary is more certain, with the Hungarians being indifferent to Liberland, making it possible to drive into the Croatian countryside and get to its land border with Liberland without prior detection.

The presidential convoy will go this route, while a boat carrying settlers will go upstream from a nearby port in Serbia to distract border patrols. Jet skis dragging inner tubes will take yet another route, with the aim of landing on Liberlands island before interception.

They may arrest you, but you are not breaking any law, so the longest they can hold you without charge is four hours.

It feels like a military operation.

I begin to have doubts and unenlist myself from the jet-ski expeditionary troops to instead go with the convoy I hadnt bought a bathing suit, and being detained in international waters in my underwear was more than Id do for a story.

Also read: Why are crypto fans obsessed with micronations and seasteading?

Not to mention that the last time someone took a jetski to the island, they were brutalized tackled and kicked on the ground by Croatian police in an incident for which the police offered an apology and disciplined the officer in question. The event was widely reported in the country, in part because Croatian police were operating outside the nations borders.

Terra nullius not on firm legal ground

From the perspective of international law, the validity of Liberlands claims depends on which theory of state recognition is considered. According to Declarative Theory, supported by the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, an entity is a state regardless of outside recognition if it meets four criteria: a defined territory, permanent population, a government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

The area in question is neither Croatian nor Croatian-claimed Jedlika says that matter was settled when Croatia entered the visa-free Schengen area at the start of 2023, with clearly defined borders being a set requirement of entry.

The land is also not Serbian. As un-owned and unclaimed land accessible from an international waterway, it appears to fit the definition of terra nullius, nobodys land, which may be freely occupied. A permanent population is the only missing feature, which Jedlika says is only a matter of time. If they can get in, of course.

Also read: Thailands crypto utopia 90% of a cult, without all the weird stuff

The competing Constitutive Theory of Statehood asserts that a state only exists if it is recognized by another state. Here, Liberland fails, though Jedlika argues it is passively recognized already.

They are checking peoples documents before they go to Liberland, and then once in Liberland they dont really care so its happening already, Jedlika explains as we drive toward the border for a ceremony marking the opening the land border with Croatia.

Web3 nation?

Jedlika recalls that he first heard about Bitcoin through his Libertarian circles when its value was under $1 and began to buy it on Mt. Gox for $32. When he proclaimed Liberlands independence in 2015, the coin stood at $225. With many of the early participants in the projects making their contributions in BTC, the treasury gained value with each bull market.

Bitcoin is really one of the most foundational parts of Liberland 99% of our reserves are in BTC.

Attracting blockchain companies is a key part of the micronations strategy, with the vision to offer a low-regulatory jurisdiction with only voluntary taxes just off Europe, directly accessible via the Danube river.

Who can become a Liberlander? Just about anyone willing to pay $150 for an e-residency, which comes with an ID card that looks like any other. Citizenship requires 5,000 Liberland Merits (LLM) a little over $2,000 or can be earned via contributing to the project. 

According to Minister of Justice Michal Ptnk, while Bitcoin is the preferred currency in Liberland, the Liberland Dollar (LLD) will be used to pay transaction fees on the Liberland blockchain, which is envisioned as the backbone of on-chain companies, the judiciary, government contract execution and Liberlands stock market.

The chain is built using Polkadots Parity Substrate Network, a solution from which customized blockchains can be built using modular components. 

As we stand by the Hungarian border crossing, waiting to go in, I chat with the head ambassador of Polkadot, David Pethes. He notes that Liberlands governance token, the LLM, already has 19 live validators, and the website explains the requirements:

Only Liberland citizens can run validators, adding an extra layer of security against bad actors even in a scenario where less than 50% of circulating LLD is staked.

Pethes, who is Polkadots man in Eastern Europe, notes that Liberland is not on our list yet, but Id like to have it formally included in the Polkadot ecosystem. He sees the projects as ideologically aligned. The participants in the ecosystem have very similar views on how money should work, how you can send value without a central point of failure, he says.

Liberland governance and corporate governance have many similarities the blockchain is basically forked from Polkadot, he notes. A land registry functioning on NFTs is also on the roadmap, as well as the Liberverse.

Journey to Liberland

It begins to rain as we approach the Hungarian border. This apparently causes their internet to malfunction, resulting in an hours-long line for processing. Nearly giving up, we pull into the diplomatic channel, which the Hungarian officials are unhappy about upon recognizing Jedlika. They let us through, making us stay put for perhaps 20 minutes after processing, in what I understand is a summary slap on the wrist for abusing diplomatic convention.

Crossing into the Hungarian countryside, we encounter a roadblock meant to catch illegal migrants. But were able to continue and cross into Croatia by ferry.

I am told stories of previous journeys. Last year, police warned that it would be dangerous to venture into Liberland because it was hunting season. We could hear gunshots some distance away, but they thought we could not tell hunting rifles from pistols no one hunts with a pistol, explains our driver, suggesting that police were firing their service pistols to scare them away.

Other times, border patrols would take it upon themselves to rescue those they deemed stuck in Liberland against the wishes of the rescued. Technically, such actions may constitute kidnapping per both Croatian and Liberland law. Jedlika also notes that Liberlanders have been arrested for disobeying a no-parking sign installed in the forest.

Were on the northern border, Jedlika notes as we turn to a back road near the Danube river. Others have already arrived, and a Croatian police boat is tied to the shore with an officer respectfully collecting everyones passports and taking them to the boat. Another police vessel speeds to the location, but within 20 minutes, passports are returned.

The supply van is opened, and each Liberlander takes what they can carry boxes of equipment, rucksacks of supplies, coolers of food and drink. I carry water. We trek 700 meters into the forest, turning toward the river where a houseboat bearing the Liberland flag is moored.

Pictures are taken, and Jedlika carries the border crossing sign to a nearby tree, to which it is attached.

Someone announces that it is time for border control, and a line forms to get Liberland, American and Swedish passports stamped.

Will the stamp cause a problem if I have it in my real passport? one nervous visitor asks.

The answer is yes, it will, but at that moment, we were not aware of the headache it would create.

There is an element of theater the tree and passport table are on shore, still in Croatia. The real border lies 200 meters further down the path, where officers lean against their cruiser, guarding the exit from Europe. I approach them.

Though they at first deny permission to pass, I returned with others to inquire again. They discouraged our entry, saying the forest is too dangerous due to wild boars. I asked how big they are, and the taller officer laughs and brought his hand near chest-level, suggesting that there are monsters beyond the boundary.

But they eventually allow us to pass on the promise that we would return before dark. I walk into the dimming wilderness, exiting the EU and Schengen area. Im in no mans land Liberland. Its something of an anti-climax.

After 20 minutes, we return and our passports are again checked to reenter Croatia.

Back on the boat, theres is much eating and drinking and with some fanfare, Radio Liberland, whose signal was sent from soil of Liberland, makes its first broadcast.

Im an unusual person I dont feel like myself when I have things tying me down, like being in a strict relationship with having commitments to be in certain places at certain times, he explains, saying that he was attracted to the project for its Libertarian philosophy.

I originally expected that we would just go to the land, build a camp, and refuse to leave but its been very different. Ive learned a lot about how diplomatic you have to be, he reflects on Jedlikas approach.

Banick is optimistic about the projects blockchain aspirations. From my understanding, they create smart contracts that can be enforced as a sort of immutable court without third parties, without corruption. He also sees cryptocurrency as promoting economic freedom, which correlates with every single boost in the standard of living, including longevity, literacy rates and infant mortality. He is a true believer.

Theyre interested in utilizing smart contracts and blockchain to revolutionize governance and law.

Jonas, a Czech national who was moving on to the boat that day, compares his vision for Liberland with Hong Kongs former Kowloon walled city, which once contained 35,000 residents on 2.6 hectares. It had like the cheapest rent, the cheapest medical care, the cheapest food, even though it was like the densest population of any place ever, he explains though by most outsider accounts, the city was not exactly a comfortable place.

As I return above deck, there is silence. Ive been left behind.

Croatian border guards break the law

Though some cars have already left, I manage to catch a ride with Jedlika after having my passport checked yet again by newly arrived police officers. Less than two kilometers away at the old guard post, we are again stopped for passport checks.

The final challenge was encountered at the Batina CroatiaSerbia border crossing, where Croatian officers took issue with two Americans and a Swede, whose passports were stamped by Liberland, refusing to return the passports unless they each pay a 230-euro fine.

A Croatian-American dual national with a Liberland stamp in her American passport says later that, in a private room, the Croatian officials threatened her with immediate loss of her Croatian citizenship if she refused the fine. This is legally impossible.

Throughout the ordeal, the officials at the otherwise deserted border post held all passports including the authors Finnish passport for approximately two hours and refused to explain the reason for the delay.

Driving back to the Ark camp through Serbia in the wee hours, we come across a melancholy sight: several dozen migrants traveling under cover of darkness, making their way to the Schengen border. Seeing them struggle and risk it all to get to Europe made me question whether what we had just done with far greater resources and far lower stakes made a mockery of their struggle. Could Liberland realistically become much more than a bunch of Bitcoiners LARPing sovereignty?

And while the early August Floating Man festival appeared a turning point at the time with the construction of small cabins and the establishment of a small settlement on the land mass, relations with neighboring Croatia have since taken a turn for the worse. On September 21, Liberland Press reported an unannounced extraterritorial incursion in which multiple settlers were arrested, newly built structures demolished, and equipment, including a generator, quad bike and food, were taken under the oversight of Croatian police.

The story of Liberland appears far from over.

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