059 - The Bitcoin-AI Revolution: Inside the Upcoming Bitcoin for AI Conference with Santos Hernandez

In this conversation, Santos Hernandez discusses the upcoming Bitcoin for AI 2025 conference, exploring the intersection of Bitcoin and AI technologies. He shares his background in financial services and technology, emphasizing the potential of Bitcoin as a payment technology and its convergence with AI. The discussion covers the conference format, speaker lineup, and the importance of community engagement in driving innovation in these fields.

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Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Bitcoin for AI Conference
03:46 Santos Hernandez: Background and Journey
07:08 Bitcoin as a Payment Technology
10:02 AI and Bitcoin: Convergence of Technologies
12:57 Conference Format and Themes
15:48 Speaker Lineup and Topics
19:03 Ticketing and Registration Details
21:54 Final Thoughts and Community Engagement

References
https://x.com/bitcoinforai

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❗ DISCLAIMER: This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions consult a professional.

Transcript

Santos: 0:00

It'll be an entire day of very interesting and innovative use cases. So if you're a business owner, you're a tech enthusiast, wondering, like, how you can apply this to your projects, whether it be apply Bitcoin to AI or use AI to make your business more productive and more efficient. We'll have all of those things covered for you. We're really trying to bring together all of these different topics so we can create brand new, innovative, you know, Bitcoin and AI companies, and then that's like, the last piece, right? Is like, how do I get funding, and what are, what are venture capitalists looking for in these businesses? And you'll get to get all of that at this conference. You foreign

Israel: 0:45

in today's episode, co host Lynne and Israel speak with Santos, the organizer of the Bitcoin for AI conference being held as a virtual event on June 21 it'll be a day full of keynotes, workshops and panel discussions with industry leaders on the intersection of Bitcoin and AI. If you are interested, be sure to sign up at Bitcoin, F, O, r.ai, and use b, w, B promo code upon checkout as a reminder, this podcast is for educational purposes only, and if you like the content, please remember to subscribe and share as This all helps us greatly. Welcome to build with Bitcoin. We're here today with Santos Hernandez covering an upcoming, very interesting conference, a virtual event happening on June 21 called Bitcoin for AI. So we want to get into who it's for, what will be covered, some of the speakers, all the good details Santos, but first of all, welcome, glad to have you on the podcast to do a little preview of of who might be interested in attending this virtual event. But before we get into the details of the conference, Santos, could you give us a little context regarding your background and what brought you to this convergence of these two incredibly interesting technologies, being AI and Bitcoin

Santos: 2:08

absolutely and thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Yeah, so I'm Santos Hernandez. I have about 15 years of professional experience. I started off in financial services and technology, so worked at insurance company to start. Then I moved on to discover financial services and their student loans department. After that, I went to Bank of America and preferred sales and retention. Around this time, this is 2014 I discovered Bitcoin and went down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. I stayed at Bank of America. I hit number one in the nation. Helped develop their retention playbook. The downside was I had read Andreas and tonopolis at that time, and he was talking about, like banking cartels. And I was like, Oh man, what am I a part of? So it gave me a whole existential crisis. And in 2016 I quit my job. And as as a teenager, I was always fascinated with open source projects, particularly like game servers. I set up my own Neo Online World of Warcraft and bunch of other games, and did some open source development there. And yeah, I never really continued down that path. I had moved into the financial services area. So at that time, in 2016 given what Satoshi had accomplished with, you know, software development and building this network, one, I was, like, fascinated by his ability to be multidisciplinary, mastering many complex subjects, and it inspired me to one Like go and complete every liberal arts course on Khan Academy and learn how to code. So I learned, like, Python, SQL, web application development. I started an agency, learned JavaScript, moved on to TypeScript, and never stopped learning, like, learning a bunch about databases. And then in 2019 I got married, and I ended up needing to get, like a w2 job for some of the immigration processes that we needed to go through. So I went and worked at American Express as a credit risk analyst, and I built a bunch of applications in my role in automations. I took, like these cases that we needed to work in financial crunch, like 30 minutes to like three minutes with automations that I built, and then I ended up getting promoted to a product department where I did, like bank integrations, oversaw data operations, risk and compliance and a bunch of other focus areas for all of their corporate data it was called the Global Data Repository team. So I stayed in that role for a couple of years. Then I found the opportunity for ZBD, which is a organization that I'm currently at. It's a lightning payments startup, so we're a payment service provider and for the games industry, yeah, I joined four years ago. Now, time is flying by as a first product manager. I was fascinated with ZBD because I played a lot of games growing up. I. And ZBD integrated lightning payments with Counter Strike, Global Offensive, which I thought was fascinating. So payments were happening in real time in the game. And I was like, man, okay, this is like payments, financial technology, Bitcoin and gaming all in one. So I really wanted a job. So fast forward. A month later, I saw a job posting opened up, and I talked to Andre Nevis our CTO, and we hit it off, and I ended up getting a job offer to be their first product manager. So I joined four years ago, and since then, helped build out the product suite in the payments platform, moved on to become the vice president of business intelligence and data now in my role at CBD, using machine learning is key one for like performance and understanding performance of the business. And two, it's always been a great interest of mine. So now, given like, where we're at with AI and all of the you know, consumer advancements that have been made. It's a perfect time for Bitcoin and AI initiatives to begin merging, at least that's the way that I see it. So that's kind of my background and what brought me here, and why I'm so interested in these two topics.

Lynne Bairstow: 6:14

Send us. You know, we reached out to you as soon as you made the announcement about this conference, because it's a topic that Israel and I spent a lot of time talking about, when we're thinking about innovation with Bitcoin companies and the Bitcoin protocol and how it might emerge. And one of the things that we think about, you know, especially as recently we've seen kind of a discussion around, should Bitcoin be store of value or medium of exchange? And, you know, there's so much discussion about it, but we have theorized that possibly people are thinking about medium of exchange in the wrong way, and that, you know, certainly we want to see it implemented and used, especially in economies where fluidity or the ease of the dollar isn't easily available. But we think about agents, AI agents using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, and we just feel as if it's an ideal settlement layer for transactions, the immediacy, the fact that it's machine based and math based. How are you thinking about the use of Bitcoin within the AI ecosystem, in

Santos: 7:20

terms of how Bitcoin can be used as

Israel: 7:23

Lynne and Israel are partners at Base Layer Advisors, where they employ their strong network of Venture Capital Partners and startups to connect investors with unique opportunities within the Bitcoin innovation space. Alongside this, they support founders with their strategic growth and fundraising goals. Visit our website's advisory section to learn more, like payments

Santos: 7:41

for medium exchange, and then I'll elaborate on the AI use cases. So one thing, I think, you know, Bitcoin is fantastic money one because of its property, like monetary properties, but I also think it's superior payments technology. So not only is it like a superior monetary technology for its properties, Bitcoin is also superior in terms of its payments technology. So one like enabling instant settlement, the ability to self custody, if you so chose to go down that route, the payment processing cost in terms of like moving money between like financial intermediaries and having that direct connection between banks without needing, like, another settlement layer, like something like Swift, for example. It's inherently global, but it also can be applied to me any of the regulatory frameworks that, like the financial institution would need to adhere to. For example, ZBD, like, got our micro license. So one we can one way we can adhere to, like, some of the most involved financial regulations. So thinking about like one as a financial institution, you can use this as a payment network, and then to the payment properties of being low cost, instant settlement between financial institutions enables many new use cases. At American Express, we did bank integrations. In fact, we did the first China merchant bank integration, which was the first American Chinese bank integration ever to happen. And the project took many years. It's very complex. With the Lightning Network, you still have data integrations that you need to manage and complete. However, there's a standard to move value between the two financial institutions and actually move the money, because most of it is all just a ledger and data at the end of the day. So one, it simplifies the integration process and brings down the cost of the bank integrations for a payment network. And then, two, you don't have to deal with any sort of chargebacks either, which is an enormous cost. So I think we'll see, like payment processing costs dramatically decrease and become a lot more efficient as a consequence, as we like, move to a greater adoption of Bitcoin as money. So I think it's inevitable one. It'll be used as a sort of value, but it also be used. Transmit value directly, and then there's other layers on top that can even make it more increasingly efficient. So I think those, those things will happen. So that's kind of like my case for Bitcoin as like payments technology, looking at like aI usage. It's inherently native internet money. So for one, I think it's perfectly suited for agentic payments and workflow payments. One, you can pay for access to data, for example, like what l 402 is doing. That's a great use case, and will enable the access for information using it, using a payment as a credential. So one, I think that will enable a bunch of new use cases. And then we've seen the emergence of MCP model context protocol become widely adopted throughout like the AI industry. So thinking about what is model context protocol in like its simplest form, it's like tooling, a standard for tooling for llms to interact with different services, whether that be like Google, GitLab, GitHub search, it enables all kinds of functionality for the LLM in addition to agents. So I think one payment from agent to agent will be the preferred method of payments, because one you don't have that chargeback risk, and you have the instant payment ability. And then as more anyone can also open up or create a channel with one another, so then they can drive the payment processing costs down, which makes it more efficient for the organization to be able to transact with one another if they so chose to. So you could choose, do I want to hold Bitcoin in cold storage and how much of a financial relationship do I want to open up based on the expected transaction volume between you and another company and complete those payments directly with one another? Or you could use a managed service to get access to their entire network of payments, so that you have options in that regard. So that's essentially how I think it could be used, one for like agent agentic systems, where you have agent to agent payments. Or two, you can use Bitcoin to pay for access to resources and use the payment as a credential. And we're seeing that use case emerge. And, yeah, I think that that that's one of the primary ways. The other thing that I've noticed, like in relation to Bitcoin, and the way that Bitcoin generates energy and interacting with the grid, I think we've seen use cases in Texas where during like off peak hours, we're using that excess energy to generate more Bitcoin, for example, or mine Bitcoin rather. So what I was thinking is meta is making a huge investment in the production of energy through nuclear energy, and it makes me think like during on peak hours of usage for AI, for example, when we have many users using it, and then in off peak hours when usage declines, then we can also use that same energy source to mine Bitcoin and secure Bitcoin and enable new sources of energy. For example, renewable sources of energy, similar to what SAS mining is doing. So I think there's a lot of interesting use cases it'll be, it won't become so much of an energy problem. It'll become more of like a chip problem in terms of, like, how much context and efficiency these models can ultimately gain and how much information they can store in a single conversation. So I think that's kind of like the interesting dynamic between, like Bitcoin and AI, plus, you know, in terms of, like, the speaker lineup, they have even more sort of insights, like they're all respective experts on this topic. So we'll be bringing in people to, like, concretely address these sort of things. And then the last case, I would say, you know, one interesting thing that Jesse from ambos is doing is using reinforcement learning to optimize lightning efficiency. So I'm really curious to hear how exactly he went about that, and for him to talk more in terms of like applying AI to Bitcoin operational use cases. So it's a really rich space for innovation and applications. And I think where we're going to see a lot of adoption of AI is not necessarily at the model level. We have, you know, open AI, we have we have maple AI. That's another marks from Maple AI is going to be speaking. It's a privacy focused LLM and then thinking about anthropic Google, they have the foundational models and the LMS and the interfaces built. I don't know if we need many more of those. Yeah, but what we need a lot more of is application integration and efficiency. So I think we'll end up seeing Bitcoin playing a key and pivotal role into that. So yeah, I hope that answers the question. I mean, you, you, you

Israel: 15:13

went through a lot of context there Santos. Um, so thank you. If you just take the complexity out out of it as well. Kind of take a step back and simplify it. It just makes so much sense that these two are going to converge. You. You have a digital economy, which is AI is going to be just powering and living in. And then you have internet native money, which is only growing and growing and from from a very kind of basics versus principles, line of thinking. It, it, it's kind of a no brainer that there's going to be a lot of interactions, right? I think we're just scratching the surface with a lot of what you said. And I'm sure 510, years down the line, everyone will be, everyone will be a bit surprised with with all the use cases. But that being said, Santos, can you take us a little bit through the format of the conference itself? So just to be very clear, it's a virtual event, so registrations are open, and anyone can can register. Is that correct? And then can you take us through some of the themes or workshops that will be covered? Yeah,

Santos: 16:18

absolutely. So to confirm it is a a virtual conference. And the software that we'll be using is gather town. It's a very cool software. You can move, move around in an open map, and you have the traditional video conferencing tools that you would expect, like in like a like this call, for example. You can share your screen, you can have your microphone, you can have your camera. We can see one another. However, you can also go to like a map view, where you can walk around the map and explore and interact with everyone. So for example, you have an open conference area, and you can actually check out, like, what is going on outside of the speaking room. And then you can actually enter the primary area where the talks are happening. So it's a very unique type of virtual conference experience that you know we don't really get through, like zoom calls or Google meets calls, for example. There's also areas where you can broadcast to the entire room, for example, so you can hear any speakers that are actually, you know, speaking. There's also networking lounges, where you can walk up to tables and have private conversations. You can also, like, have a vendor booth available. You can have private meeting rooms. So it's truly like an emulated conference experience. And it's all kind of like an old art style RPG game from like my era, for example. So you can have, like a custom avatar, a name, and all these sort of things you can chat. So it really kind of unifies, like the conference experience uniquely. And I haven't seen anyone you know in the space use this technology yet, and I'm hoping that what it'll do is enable like, new methods of meetups and conferences. So not only you know Bitcoin for AI, but other conferences can also adopt this one for folks that have financial constraints or privacy concerns, or perhaps they're just to have the inability to travel, maybe like some folks are like, have a fear of flying or driving for really long periods of time. You know, it could be anything, any one of those use cases. And the best part about enabling this virtual conference is the costs of goods sold, like the operational the entire operational expenses are very low, so it makes it available for more people to host and talk about more topics and have more engagement, which ultimately, if you get the right people in the room, can lead to tremendous amounts of innovation in the space. And that's one thing that I've always been fascinated about in the Bitcoin space. I also try to contribute innovations from time to time. That

Lynne Bairstow: 19:01

sounds great. And I have used that software before, and it really is cool, how you can network it. It's so now we're looking at AI, Bitcoin and VR, kind of all in one and in this, in this summit, can you walk us through a little bit about the format of it? So you you mentioned talks. We have talks, panel discussions or workshops. What can people expect from the content build with

Israel: 19:24

Bitcoin is a proud affiliate partner of river. River is a financial services company that allows you to purchase, sell and transfer your Bitcoin, all through a great suite of products, high security standards, and as of recent, even allowing you to earn a Bitcoin yield on your US dollar cash deposits for a personalized onboarding experience. Go to partner.river.com/build, with Bitcoin. Yeah,

Santos: 19:45

absolutely. So we'll have 25 minute sessions. I think we have about 18 speakers at the moment. It'll kick off around 8am Pacific Time, and we'll have 25 minute talk, workshop and panel. Details, and we'll have about five minutes to rotate speakers. So some of the topics that will include will have like an opening ceremony. We'll have talks on MCP. Invest in these venture capital between the intersection of Bitcoin and AI. We then cousins from antidote speaking there. We have Dr Armon speaking from timestamp BTC as well. So they'll be contributing some very interesting topics, you know, between like venture capital and what kind of use cases are looking to to emerge, or have already emerged, between the intersection of Bitcoin and AI. We have Christopher from open agents. He's going to be talking about his project, which he specializes in open protocols as well. So he's done a lot of work in Bitcoin. He's built this applied AI Lab, and then he's contributed to nostr. We have Jesse from ambos, like I mentioned, in terms of doing very interesting things with reinforcement learning and lightning. We also have some very practical use cases as well, in terms of like Bitcoin and AI applications and the way that they're exposing it to end users. So there's a lot of efficiency gains in AI, you know, in internal operations. But you know, Kaz from bubble is doing some very interesting things in terms of like podcast discovery and media consumption with AI. We also have some topics around, like marketing. And you know, AI Bitcoin generation from Calvin. He was the director of marketing at choice. We have Breno, who was, who's been an ML engineer for the last seven years and data scientist. He's done some very interesting hackathons at Bitcoin plus plus, and done quite well there. And then we'll have, you know, marks from open CEO and co founder of open secrets, makers of maple AI. So we'll see like Bitcoin ethos, like being projected onto the development of AI systems, but also very practical use cases for Bitcoin in AI. So the next, like set of interesting topics we'll have is around agentic payment infrastructure. So we have Jordy Montes, who will be talking about the L 402 protocol. He previously worked at lightning labs, and he's doing some very interesting things, like we talked about with L 402 and agentic use. So those are kind of some of the topics that we currently have, like, planned, and that's how it'll rotate. So it'll be an entire day of very interesting and innovative use cases. So if you're a business owner, you're a tech enthusiast, wondering, like, how you can apply this to your projects, whether it be apply Bitcoin to AI or use AI to make your business more productive and more efficient. We'll have all of those things covered for you. The last interesting one we'll have will be from our AI operations lead here at ZBD, where, where I work, he's going to do one on prompt smithing. So if you're just getting started with AI and you want to understand from like workshop perspective, you can get into prompt smithing and understand like, How can I write more effective prompts to get more done, like just using the chat interfaces available through like Claude or chat GPT or Gemini, for example. And then you can get more advanced and sophisticated with things like MCP, which our CTO and co founder at ZBD, Andre Nevis will be talking about he did one, an MCP server for ZBD, and then he was able to use the MCP server one to, like, make payments using Lightning, just through a chat interface, and then be able to even purchase, like, bit refill gift cards with it. So you can really start to think, Okay, if you have these one you can understand the use cases where this is very where this is applicable, and the technologies enabling these capabilities. How can I use these capabilities to streamline my operations, to create new, innovative Bitcoin applications? Yeah, so that's kind of like what the schedule is focused on. We're really trying to bring together all of these different topics so we can create brand new, innovative, you know, Bitcoin and AI companies, and then that's like, the last piece, right? Is like, how do I get funding? And what are, what are venture capitalists looking for in these businesses? And you'll get to get all of that at this conference and sent us,

Lynne Bairstow: 24:18

talk to us about tickets. So you've got a website available with the speaker lineup that people can dive into a little bit more, and we'll share that in the show notes, and you have a Twitter x feed that had that features different announcements and speakers. And then tell us about the ticketing process. Yeah,

Santos: 24:35

ticketing process is really easy. It's on Bitcoin for.ai which is our website, and you can just click on tickets, you can click on Purchase, and then fill out the registration information you just need, like your name and your email, so that way we know where to email the gather town link to for you to be able to join the conference. We'll email that a couple days before the conference, and yeah, you can enter your call. Card information. It's a stripe checkout flow, so you can make a purchase. And then I'm excited to announce that we've also, shortly after this recording goes live, we'll release the lightning payments capability through zap rate, so it'll be a very, you know, easy checkout flow. You can use stripe, which is safe and secure to use well established and then you could also use lightning, where you'll receive a $20 lower you only receive a lower price of $20 so the standard ticket price is, you know, 4999 and we'll decrease the price for lightning by 20 bucks.

Israel: 25:36

This is very exciting. That's why, you know, Lynne and I decided to get involved with, you know, helping you promote and get the word out there, because you're really breaking the ice on these two technologies that I think we'll begin to see a lot more investment, entrepreneurship and just general synergies with. So first of all, you know, congrats and thank you for putting this together. We're excited to see it through. And I guess you know, with those details being shared, any final comments on your end, Lynne or or on your end, Santos, I just

Lynne Bairstow: 26:12

wanted before I let Santos close us out. I just think it's so important that you know, Bitcoin innovation, I think, has been in a little bit of a silo, and it's been really revolved around exchange, on and off ramps for bitcoin and how to purchase it. But I, you know, you and I, it's what we devote our time to. It's just that there's so much innovation that's able to be, you know, implemented on the Bitcoin protocol. And I think Bitcoin should be implemented in all different technologies. And AI certainly is a natural first step, and it's such an important big technology that you know, just want to encourage anyone that's working in the field of AI that they should really start paying attention to how Bitcoin can can ease the whole financial foundation of it, and what the synergies could be in AI. So even though I think a lot of our audience are Bitcoiners, I think AI enthusiasts also should be paying attention to how Bitcoin can supplement, complement and enhance the progression of AI. So I just really applaud you're making the effort to put this really incredible forum together sent us, and with that, just what final words would you have for our audience?

Santos: 27:27

Yes, one, I would like to thank you. Lynne and Israel, I really appreciate you know, all that you've done for me and the conference. We're going to drive a lot of innovation together and a lot of exploratory use cases. I think it's going to be great. And, yeah, I love, you know, creating innovation, one of my passions. I don't get paid to do it or anything like that. It's just community development and organization. I felt I'm a part of a few different conferences, like tab conf and bit block, boom. I also love attending others, like, you know, Bitcoin plus plus, for example, it's just a really robust community of incredible developers. Like going to, like pub lab and seeing what everyone's building there. It's just amazing. And now, like thinking about creating the virtual community for all of us to gather and to continue to explore these use cases, you know, just makes me super happy. And I'd like to thank, you know, the entire community, because without the community, we would really have nothing. It would just be a bunch of us talking into, you know, this into a vacuum. So they, I think everyone that's a part of, like, all of these really great communities, for being engaged, involved, you know. Would like to thank all the speakers too, for willing to pledge their time and to share with us all the amazing things that they're building. So please do come and check out the conference, and we'd be honored to have you. Well, I think

Israel: 28:50

both Lynne and I share many of those thoughts Santos, and I'm sure we'll actually as well be getting a few startups that come from this conference. And you know, it'll be exciting to see all these all these use cases, develop. We are 100% with you there on the importance of the community building, on the innovation side of these two technologies. So happy to collaborate. For anyone out there interested in these topics, make sure to tune in on June 21 we'll have the link to the website where you can register and get more information on the in the show notes. And by the way, love that you're giving a discount for payment in lightning Parker

Lynne Bairstow: 29:34

Lewis, one of the co founders of zapride, always says it's not a discount for Bitcoin, it's a you have to pay a premium if you want to pay in

Santos: 29:42

Fiat. Yeah, yeah. Zaprite was so easy to set up. Kudos to their team. I was even able to use EBD as the PSP behind it, so it was really like your preference. I got to say thanks to those. Those guys, they built really great products, really impressed. So yeah, thank you. Well, with

Lynne Bairstow: 30:05

that, we'll wrap it, and thank you Santos for joining us, and we'll look forward to being a part of the conference on June 21

Santos: 30:12

Yes, thank you both for the time. I really appreciate it, and I'm honored. Have a great day everyone and see you all later. You speaker,

Lynne Bairstow: 30:26

thanks for listening to the build with Bitcoin podcast. If you found benefit in what you heard in this episode, we'd truly appreciate it if you would like share or leave a comment on whichever platform you're listening as this helps others find us, which is especially important for a new podcast, and as a reminder, our content is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only, and is not to be considered investment advice or recommendation to invest in any company or asset mentioned in the podcast. Build with Bitcoin is a proud affiliate partner of river, a full service 100% reserve custody Bitcoin only financial services company for your next Bitcoin purchase, use our exclusive link partner.river.com/build, with Bitcoin. Thank you sincerely for being a part of the build with Bitcoin community.