Intelligence is the Universal Transmuter

Bitcoin as the primary monetary asset of the post-AGI era

With sufficient intelligence, any element can be transmuted. This principle underlies why Bitcoin will surpass gold as a superior store of value.

While gold panning streams still exist around Denver, the yield is meager - far below minimum wage. But what if labor costs were eliminated? If all gold mines operated at zero labor cost, how much gold could be profitably extracted? Estimates suggest about 35 billion tonnes of gold lie within 4000 meters of Earth's surface, with an additional 87 billion tons under the oceans. The oceans themselves contain about 20 million tons of dissolved gold.

Contrast this with the mere 200,000 tonnes of above-ground gold, and only 54,000 tonnes of economically viable in-ground reserves. Depending on the calculation method, Earth contains roughly 300 times more gold than current reserves. Moreover, asteroids harbor magnitudes more gold and other precious metals.

Extracting this vast gold supply requires three key elements: energy, technology, and intelligence. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is on the cusp of unlocking all three:

Energy production via solar panels or nuclear reactors enables the construction of asteroid mining robots or electrolytic cells for seawater gold extraction. However, profitability would be less than expected: once cheap gold production becomes feasible, gold would be demonetized, with demand falling to non-monetary (industrial and decorative) levels. The very first profitable mining satellite or seawater extraction machine will trigger a permanent gold market collapse.

This principle extends beyond gold: AI-driven intelligence will soon enable cheap production of every rare commodity. The impending intelligence explosion will likely cause prices of all scarce non-land assets to plummet. In this new paradigm, only one asset maintains a supply completely independent of demand: Bitcoin. No amount of intelligence, energy, or capital can alter Bitcoin's supply schedule. The 21 million Bitcoin limit is immutable.

This fundamental property positions Bitcoin as the primary monetary asset of the post-AGI era.