Apr 13
From Bitphone to Bots
I’ve been a “computer guy” my entire life, I studied AI in the early 2000s, I still have the old book from 2005. I was so excited to learn AI technology! I took a week off work and paid my own money to go to Florida for this training!
AI just wasn’t ready though. While it could do some rudimentary things, most of it was still rooted in academia and it was extremely tedious to do almost anything with AI because we didnt have GPUs and Tensor networks.
Bitphone — The Global Internet Payphone
When I developed Bitphone in 2015 I had visions of a perfect product, a Crypto based, Global Internet Payphone. Use it from any browser, you don’t even have to login, just connect your wallet and dial! Bitphone was to be an Anonymous, Pay On Demand, Convenient, Decentralized Phone System. Call anyone, anywhere with Crypto, and get your change!
It worked!! People used it! In many ways Bitphone was quite successful. It worked a little too well… Here I was in 2015, eager to take on the world with my shiny new bitcoin hosted phone system!
Bitphone almost lasted 2 years!
I HAD BEEN WARNED! Many people told me it wasn’t a good idea to build bitphone, they told me there would be credit card fraud, and abuse! But, I wasn’t scared, I wasn’t using credit cards! I was using magic internet money!
They are just “the Ney-Sayers”! You know the ones you hear stories about!
“Unfortunately we’ve had too many users abuse our phone service! Our underlying carrier service now requires we collect your identification when placing calls. We won’t do it. This is an unfortunate outcome, we had recently enhanced our service considerably! We don’t want to collect your identification, so we have no choice but to close the service.
THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS!”
Bitphone closed for good on March 10th 2017.
Quietly, CryptoAI.bot was born
I wanted to develop a bot, my love for Crypto hadn’t died. I experimented with a chatbot that would answer all your Crypto questions! Charts, News on demand, just ask the bot! I didn’t really advertise it much, It was a hobby bot.
I learned a lot building it, I developed some cool parts like real-time prices and charting. I had problems with some of the channel integrations though, and I had a fulltime job! So, it didn’t make it to product phase…
BITS.bot takes over.
I guess I found a better name, CryptoAIBot, became BITS.bot. Same bot, new name, new brand. The bot did more and more, but still not enough. It was a bit pricey to run the infrastructure to power BITs, I was paying several $$ hundred per month just to run the infrastructure to power the natural language processor, the search service, etc.
BITS last few tweets were in July 2018.
DEX.bot — My bots are keeping up with the times.
At the start of 2021, Decentralized exchanges were all the rage, Uniswap, Sushi-swap were both pretty new, a whole shift happened and enabled users more self-custody. Many moved tokens off Centralized exchanges onto personal hardware wallets and used DEXs to swap tokens if they wanted to trade. I was messing around, prototyping “DEX.bot” I wanted to build like a DEX trading bot to help people buy and sell on DEXs even do price alerts, etc.
I quickly learned that it becomes really hard technically to develop a product that can actually make trades for you. It would be easy to do it the bot had your private key or mnemonic, but I don’t want you to give those to anyone!
Who has Custody? who has the private key?
Your wallet keys should be stored on a hardware wallet and not accessible to some bot or ANY online service. In that context, how do you make a DEX bot? It could still do most the heavy lifting and simply trigger transactions that you have to sign to place trades or update contract state. It’s definitely possible, but not a fully automated process. Or, it could use a fresh wallet, with its own keys, one which you might not be so sensitive about quite yet.
In the world of blockchain, coins and tokens, the one who has the wallet’s private key is the owner of the wallet. Hot wallets, cold wallets, tokens never really “go anywhere”, they don’t physically exist. There is just a book keeping entry in a contract that says address 0xyyyy owns 9999 tokens. Whomever has the key to that address owns the tokens and has the right to exchange them with someone else.
So, these were my “DEX.bot” roadblocks and why it fizzled out a bit.
NFT.bot & DFI.bot — NFTs were becoming “a thing”
Long before Bored Apes or Azuki’s existed, (Last year, lol) NFTs like CryptoPunks, CryptoKitties has been around for awhile. Can someone tell me why CryptoPunks are 1.2M? But my 2 — Gen 0 Crypto Kitties are only $1000?
I got DFI.bot as well.. someone else had DEFI.bot, so I settled for DFI.bot I also bought the NFT.bot and thought maybe I’d work on another bot for NFTs.
Pitch IT — NFT.bot!
I wrote a whole Pitch Deck around the NFT.bot, I sent it to a couple crypto VCs looking for a bit of money to help build it. I didn’t get any bites, I was trying to raise a few million dollars to build it, yeah I know, thats a high bar.
Time is money, Money == Time. I have a fulltime job and just don’t have enough time or resources to build this on my own.
Bringing the boys back together — The CryptoBots
I love these bots, I so want to build them. They been an ongoing hobby for years. I wanted to bring all 4 of them back! Together as a team!
BITS! DEX! NFT! and DFI! — Together on stage! I hired an artist…
I don’t think I like where this was headed.. I cancelled this artist. I don’t really want to make a bunch of NFT.bot, NFTs with dynamic art superhero characters?! No, i really just don’t want to do that.. So, what can I do?
Is it a BOT in your NFT? or you just happy to see me?
The NFT Metadata Standard defines a rich NFT interface — https://docs.opensea.io/docs/metadata-standards
In addition to an image, your NFT can include what???
Instead of just being an image can be more, well like what? an animation? a game? YES!! and its just a pointer to something, and whatever it is…
IT DOESNT HAVE TO BE ON CHAIN!!!
That opens up a world of possibilities, like say an AI bot??? And you know what they say. So, why not turn the NFT into a BOT. Instead of just a picture and some metadata. The NFT can surface an interactive personality that can tell you about it’s features and it’s perks.
PATENT PENDING!
I don’t know if it’s enforceable or not yet, and I’m NOT trying to stifle innovation! but I’d love a government sponsored monopoly on NFT Conversational AI for while!
“ You can now use the phrase, “Patent Pending” or “Patent Applied For” in connection with your invention.”- LegalZoom.com
BUILDING IN THE OPEN
I’ve never really been a fan of OpenSource, I actually want to make money from the stuff I do. We all need to make money, right? Not just the “give it away” nature of things, but most open source projects don’t feel like they are “done” maybe it’s true, they weren’t finished, because nobody was paying ???
So, because of my failure to form a community multiple times in the past. This time is different, it’s all in public, part of a DAO. So, things aren’t always going to be working in the beginning, but they should get better over time.
So, NFT.BOT is live, but it’s NOT LIVING UP TO THE PATENT!! There is still a bit of work to do for that. But, Hey, that’s how this works right? Building in the open? It will just keep getting better, but I’d rather not hide it away..
https://nft.bot — Go talk to it. but be gentle.. ;)
Give it some time, there is an active EndiVerse Project to help enhance the bot and to make the underlying technology Power YOUR NFT! Stay Tuned!!
If you want to help, join the EndiVerse!
IT WILL GET SMARTER! AND MUCH BETTER AT NFTS!!
Powered By NFT.bot
The ultimate goal of the patent isn’t to develop a smart bot, it is to develop a technology layer that you can embed into YOUR NFTS! To make YOUR NFTs Intelligent, Conversational AIs! It’s all about YOUR PROJECT!
I am working with a couple ground breaking projects to implement this.
— powered by NFT.bot coming soon!
