Chart source, using 2022 electricity and income data: https://energyforgrowth.org/article/high-income-low-energy-countries-dont-exist-update-sep-2024/ ERCOT on flexible electricity users, including Bitcoin miners, reducing consumption during periods of high demand: https://www.ercot.com/news/release/2022-12-06-ercot-creates-voluntary IREN’s disclosure discussing its AI expansion and cash flow from Bitcoin mining: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1878848/000187884825000029/businessupdatevf.htm AI and electricity infrastructure: https://www.iea.org/reports/key-questions-on-energy-and-ai/executive-summary The AI policy proposals: https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier https://openai.com/index/ai-policy-window/

I don’t want the companies leading the AI race deciding how fast everyone else is allowed to run. People should be free to build, compete, and challenge the companies already at the top. I’m skeptical of government deliberately slowing innovation, especially when the companies leading that sector are helping shape the restrictions. If an AI company believes its next model is too dangerous to release, it can hold that model back. Requiring its competitors to slow down too deserves much more scrutiny. A company can spend heavily developing a model, then watch competitors deliver some of the same capabilities more cheaply. Distillation, where another model learns from its outputs, can make that lead harder to defend without reproducing every capability. As someone who embraces AI, I want better tools becoming accessible to more people. Completing useful work with less time and expense lets smaller teams take on projects they couldn’t previously afford. Competition gives businesses a reason to pass some of those gains on to customers. AI also needs electricity. Growing demand can strengthen the business case for generation, transmission, and upgrades to aging parts of the grid. Bitcoin mining can help support that buildout. A miner can bring machines online in stages and earn Bitcoin without first signing an AI customer. That revenue can help support a powered site while the operator develops other uses for it. We have seen this play out in the public markets already. Miners can act as buyers of last resort for otherwise low-value electricity when the economics work. They can also reduce consumption when the grid is strained. That makes mining a potential demand-response resource. The chart shows that higher-income countries generally consume more electricity per person. It doesn’t establish that extra consumption alone creates wealth. Reliable, affordable power supports productive businesses and industry. I’d rather make it easier to build that capacity than treat growing demand as a reason to stop advancing. Large new users should pay their share of the infrastructure they require. Expensive approval requirements could protect the largest AI companies from competition. A rule can apply equally on paper and still be much harder for a small team to afford. I support accountability for fraud, misuse, and harm. I also want America to stay ahead. We can’t assume competing countries will slow down because we do. What specific risk would a slowdown reduce, and could a new competitor still afford to enter the market?

Bitcoin is Digital Capital for the 21st Century.

AI agents are collapsing the time between an idea, a product, and a competitor with the same product. A discounted cash flow model is a tool that the traditional financial industry uses often. When AI compresses the timelines on these integral aspects of business, the terminal value sitting at the end of every one of those discounted cash flow models decays, because the growth being discounted can be taken before it ever arrives. That is a hard risk to underwrite. Bitcoin has no product to undercut, no margin to compete away, no board that can issue more of it, and no roadmap an agent can execute faster. 21m Bitcoin is not a business model. It cannot be outcompeted, only outlawed or abandoned.