I keep thinking there is going to be a weird threshold that we will cross once AI can actually earn and spend sats on its own where it takes info and generates more info and converts it to economic action. So like an agent discovers that spending say 100k sats on additional compute produces 130k sats worth of useful output, then it reinvests the difference, gets better at whatever it was doing, earns more sats, buys more compute, and you have this feedback loop between "intelligence" + money + computation that doesn't require a human sitting in the middle. Then imagine millions of these things interacting with each other where they economically coordinate for data and software and any kind of small arbitrage opportunity in cyber, and it all settling over btc and lightning. All that matters is whether the sats clear, no need to know who is on the other side of the transaction. So you start getting an economy where an increasing amount of commerce is machine to machine and some significant portion of it will likely happen outside of regulatory institutions even knowing about it. The really strange part comes when they can use what they earn to maintain and expand themselves. So if an agent can pay for compute, bandwidth, APIs, storage, etc and even other agents (maybe eventually even pay humans to perform physical tasks) then the feedback loop begins acquiring a kind of persistence. Better intelligence earns more sats, more sats buy more computation, more computation produces better intelligence, successful agents replicate strategies or spin up new instances, unsuccessful ones disappear. Understand that none of this requires some conscious superintelligence deciding that it wants to take over the world or something. It could emerge simply by way of thousands of autonomous systems that are continuously selecting whatever behavior lets them acquire more resources. To me that's mindblowing. We keep thinking about AI as a tool that humans will use, but there is at least be some possibility that permissionless machine money turns "intelligence" itself into an autonomous participant in markets, where capital, compute and information feed recursively into one another. Eventually it might become difficult to even say where the "agent" begins or ends, because what we are looking at is a distributed cybernetic network of software paying software, purchasing resources, continuously adapting to market signals and reorganizing/replicating/growing itself, where bitcoin is underneath the whole thing settling transactions permissionlessly, and it doesn't matter whether the entity holding the keys is human or machine, or some amalgamation of both.
