another blank calendar day, the second in a row this weekend. no calls, no back to back anything. the kind of day where you either scroll your phone for six hours or actually let a thought finish itself. i tried for the second option.
the thought i keep landing on, the one i've been circling for a couple of years now, is how naturally bitcoin, ai, and robotics fit together once you stop treating them as three separate trends. ai needs a way to transact that doesn't require a human to approve every payment. robotics needs the same thing, a machine that can pay another machine for compute, for data, for a service, without a person in the loop signing off on a wire transfer. bitcoin is the only monetary system built from the ground up for that kind of autonomous, permissionless settlement. it wasn't designed with robots in mind, but it turns out to be exactly the rail an autonomous economy actually needs.
most people still hear bitcoin and think speculation, price charts, a trade. i think that framing is going to look dated fast. the more interesting question isn't whether the price goes up, it's what happens to an economy once the agents doing most of the buying and selling aren't people anymore. somebody has to build the payment layer under that. sound money that no central party can freeze or dilute is a strange thing to call risky when you think about it as infrastructure instead of a bet.
none of this needed a meeting to arrive at. it needed an empty sunday and enough quiet to let one idea sit still long enough to actually look at it properly, instead of skimming past it between two calls.
if machines end up doing most of the economic activity in twenty years, what payment system would you want running underneath them, and does the one we have today actually qualify?