Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin broke down four ways that cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence may overlap, finding some potential use cases and noting some corresponding risks.

Buterin examined the use of AI as an actor, as an interface, as the rules themselves, and an end objective in itself in a blog post published Tuesday. He noted that the use of AI as an actor within a protocol had the highest viability, while the use of AI as an interface to a protocol has high potential but carries some risk.

"In general, use cases where the underlying mechanism continues to be designed roughly as before, but the individual players become AIs, allowing the mechanism to effectively operate at a much more micro scale, are the most immediately promising and the easiest to get right," he …