With AI making content generation easy and verification hard, simply publishing your own message ("going direct") is insufficient. The new standard is to make claims mathematically verifiable ("prove correct") using on-chain data and cryptography to build trust in a low-trust environment.

As AI makes it impossible to distinguish real from fake, a decentralized system of trust becomes essential. Ben Horowitz argues that blockchain's cryptographic properties are necessary to verify human identity, sign content, and establish a source of truth not controlled by a government or tech giant.

Contrary to the popular belief that crypto is anonymous, CZ argues it is excessively transparent. The public nature of the blockchain, combined with KYC data from exchanges, makes it easy to track funds. This creates privacy vulnerabilities, such as exposing a company's entire payroll or an individual's physical location.

As AI-driven deepfakes render traditional biometrics (face, voice) unreliable, digital identity will split. The U.S. will likely move toward a centralized, more lucrative model where institutions verify identity. Europe may adopt a decentralized, self-sovereign model where individuals control cryptographic proof of their identity, verified by governments but not fully shared.

Traditional identity methods like government IDs, "web of trust" social graphs, and facial biometrics are inadequate for a global proof of human system. They fail on scalability, privacy, or vulnerability to sophisticated AI that can mimic human behavior and create fake trust networks.

The founder predicts that making identity verification easy and frictionless will dramatically increase its use cases, from daily social media interactions to voting. This expands the market far beyond its current scope of compliance, much like Airbnb grew the overall travel accommodation market.

The paradigm shift with crypto is not about trusting a new entity like a developer. Instead, it eliminates the need for interpersonal trust by allowing anyone—especially competing businesses—to verify the system's integrity through open-source code.

As AI makes digital content and transactions nearly free to create, trust evaporates. Crypto primitives like blockchains offer a solution by providing verifiable identity, provenance (chain of custody), and reliable on-chain data, which is crucial for both humans and AI agents to operate safely.

The blockchain's solution to the Byzantine Generals' Problem enables trusted authentication without a central party. Since most government functions are forms of authentication (permits, licenses, identity), decentralizing this role could dramatically shrink government bureaucracy, allowing it to focus purely on policy.