AI hoovers up our attention. And it’s not hard to see why: new technology, existential risk, regulatory capture, economic bubble or boom, science fiction turning fact — everyone’s got opinions, and the issues are more pressing than ever.
I now work at the Bitcoin Policy Institute. Our research and educational efforts branch increasingly into AI-related topics: data centers, open weights, open source software development, and so on. But bitcoin remains core to my mission, and ours. Why?
Common Ground
Attention is precious. But I do not see bitcoin and AI as competing for it.
Bitcoin and AI are both disruptive and rather strange technologies. They upend naive expectations and open new possibilities. They are poorly understood, and we need better research and education on both fronts. Bitcoin and AI are both dual-use technologies. I like to say that bitcoin is for criminals (good and bad). AI is for criminals too (good and bad). The safety concerns both technologies give rise to are not the same, but many are similar: how, for example, do we balance or properly think about public interest and individual freedom? Bitcoin and AI both require massive computational operations. We now call these data centers. Community and regulatory concerns about data centers touch on both bitcoin mining and AI: energy use, environmental consequences, noise pollution, grid impact, and so on. Bitcoin and AI are both sites for reflection on the central question of politics: who shall rule? We can think better about that question by applying it in tandem to money (bitcoin) and to intelligence.
Bitcoin Stands Apart
Despite these points of commonality, bitcoin is special, and it commands special attention.
1. Authoritarianism is on the rise. By the Human Rights Foundation’s count, three in four people on earth now live under authoritarian or hybrid rule. AI accelerates the trend. Surveillance was once expensive: cameras, informants, corporate or police oversight and intrusion, filing cabinets packed with information gathered on users. Machine intelligence makes all these operations cheaper. The machines can now read every message and spot every expression of dissent.
Monitoring the situation is only half the authoritarian’s job. The other half is blocking communication — and payments. And this is where bitcoin remains uniquely relevant. You can’t sustain dissent without money, and bitcoin is money that can’t be easily shut down. This is not theory; it is a fact. When crackdowns came for protestors in Nigeria, Belarus, Hong Kong, or Canada, bitcoin is what kept the opposition afloat (and only when used in its native form, as Canadian trucker protests illustrate). When Putin’s government shut down Alexei Navalny’s bank accounts, his campaign manager found that access to bitcoin was “insurance”. When corporate and state authorities in Europe debanked the Open Dialogue Foundation, bitcoin kept donations and payments alive.
Bitcoin is money for dissent because it does away with makers, managers, and mediators: it has no central issuer, you can hold it yourself without a custodian, and you can send it to someone else without permission of any intermediary. AI makes surveillance cheap, but bitcoin chugs along and enables payments to flow anyway.
2. Bitcoin is money for machines. AI agents are beginning to act on behalf of users, booking appointments, doing personal shopping, building websites, and so on. Legacy payment systems were built for people. Bitcoin is, by contrast, digitally native, and since it operates without personal identities, it can be natively used by digital machines. Agents need a digital bearer asset. That’s bitcoin.
Stablecoins, of course, are also available for machine use. But unlike bitcoin, they have central issuers, and balances or addresses for stablecoins can be frozen or blacklisted. Stablecoins are digital bank deposits. Bitcoin is digital cash. An agent economy likely needs both.
3. The canary in the cybersecurity mines. The bitcoin network houses over a trillion dollars in value. It’s protected by users who run nodes, miners who sustain its ledger of transactions, and the mathematics that holds it all together. There is no fraud department; there are no chargebacks. Bitcoin is thus the most significant bug bounty of which we know: uncollected for going on seventeen years, and a juicy target for hackers.
It is unsurprising, then, that bitcoin infrastructure — wallets, exchanges, bridges — has been subject to AI-fueled cyberattacks. AI buildout drives down the cost of attack. It also drives down the cost of defense. As I write, teams of bitcoin developers are probing, testing, and shoring up systems across the bitcoin stack. Want to know the future of cybersecurity? Monitor the bitcoin situation; support efforts to use defensive AI there.
4. Bitcoin is still king. Bitcoin is, by a wide margin, the most important, most widely adopted, and most valuable cryptocurrency. Where other cryptocurrencies have central issuers, trademarks, developer taxes, operating foundations, and so on, bitcoin is leaderless and feral. Once a designed system, it has now escaped into the wild. It is a model for how open source software can move from cage to frontier. Want to understand how governance, development, operation, and adoption work in software without leaders? Monitor the bitcoin situation. Bitcoin is the front line of the ongoing battle for free and open software. Protecting its users from corporate or state overreach is the first fight in the battle.
5. Open money, open intelligence, open society. Liberal values like freedom of speech and of the press need enforcement. They are constitutive of an open society where no small group of people dictates to others how we shall live. How do we enforce or enact these values? We could rely on the state. But bitcoin shows another way. We can build systems that route around rather than trust authorities, and thus empower individuals. The fight for open money that anyone can use — for bitcoin — is thus the same fight as the fight for open intelligence that anyone can use.
The Bitcoin Policy Institute has something like a monopoly. No one else in Washington is so focused on bitcoin. This is good. And it will not change. But there will be new opportunities to link arms with fellow travelers in the world of machine intelligence who wish to build open systems there. BPI will take up those opportunities, to the benefit of both bitcoin and the world.
