Former Coinbase executive Balaji Srinivasan thinks crypto will serve as the money of an artificial intelligence (AI) age.
Srinivasan tells his 1 million followers on the social media platform X that crypto represents “digital scarcity” and AI represents “digital abundance.”
He notes that AI won’t make everything abundant, however.
“What is money after generative AI and robotics? This is essentially crypto. Money itself becomes cryptocurrency, just as much intelligence becomes electricity.
Here’s why:
1) First, cryptocurrency is what’s provably scarce in the age of AI abundance. That isn’t a bad thing. For example, you need scarce crypto assets to prove you’re a human when AI tools for faking humanity are abundant.
2) Second, money is a bridge across economically distinct actors. You don’t need to pay your hand to move, nor do you need to pay a robot you own to move. But a robot owned by another economic actor will still need money to rent. So, send the coin to unlock that drone.
3) Basically, scarcity at a high level doesn’t go away, so money doesn’t go away. But many forms of scarcity may go away. Washing machines are stationary household robots and may be replaced by walking machines that are mobile household robots.”
Srinivasan says that web3 backends like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have superior security to any web2 system. He argues that the most important form of scarcity in the AI age will be crypto private keys “to control the robots.”
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