What if AI agents are Bitcoin's next users -- more than people? Our latest episode digs into The Singularity Stack, a new research project on the AI economy from @Lnelson_21 of @Early_Riders. His take: payments "too small for credit cards to pay" need internet-native money. 🎧 Full episode links below.

BLOCK JOINS x402 FOUNDATION, BRINGS BITCOIN LIGHTNING TO AI AGENT PAYMENTS Block has joined the x402 Foundation and contributed Bitcoin Lightning support to the open payment standard for AI agents. x402 embeds payments directly into HTTP, allowing AI agents to autonomously pay for goods, services and other agentic tools. Block says Lightning is suited for the billions of instant, low-cost, small payments expected to emerge from the agentic economy.

🔴 LIVE @MitaTechTalks WEBINAR - 11 AM ET TODAY Jeff Booth: Investing in the AI Age Join us for an exclusive conversation with investor, entrepreneur, and author of The Price of Tomorrow. Reserve your seat 👇 streamyard.com/watch/3FBWmPV…

Jeff Booth! Tomorrow. Webinar on AI and Bitcoin, a preview of @JeffBooth at @MitaTechTalks. Don’t miss it -

The full conversation on Build With Bitcoin, The Singularity Stack: Energy, AI Agents & Bitcoin Settlement: YouTube: buff.ly/5wZG7bF The Singularity Stack report: buff.ly/66A54gU

ONLY 2 DAYS AWAY: INVESTING IN THE AI AGE WITH JEFF BOOTH AI is changing the rules of investing in real time. This Friday at 11 AM ET, I’m sitting down with @JeffBooth for a live one-hour conversation on how investors should think about what comes next. We’ll discuss: 🔸 Which businesses AI could make dramatically more valuable and which could disappear 🔸 How AI changes the way we think about investing and capital allocation 🔸 The convergence of AI and Bitcoin 🔸 Jeff’s latest venture, Orange Juice, and how he’s putting these ideas into practice Presented by @MitaTechTalks ahead of its 10th edition in Punta Mita, Mexico this October. Free to attend. Register now 👇 streamyard.com/watch/3FBWmPV…

After spending 2 fascinating days at Freedom Tech DC by @bitcoinpolicy — where the major theme was the convergence of AI and the Bitcoin protocol— I’m more excited than ever to listen to @JeffBooth talk about this tomorrow/Friday. If you haven’t already registered, do it now and join us!

This is your opportunity to hear how @JeffBooth sees the convergence of AI and Bitcoin; it's a taste of the types of talks we'll be having at the beachside of @PuntaMita, this Oct. 25-27.

We always learn when we listen to @JeffBooth -- join us this Friday for a special opportunity to participate in a live webinar talk about investing in the AI Age - details, below:

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field. I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so. First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world. The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability. Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended. I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent. Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.) Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration. Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building. [Original text (with links): deeplearning.ai/the-batch/is… ]

Back page of today’s WSJ.

Right now agents ride everyone else's pipes for free, @Cloudflare reported Agents surpassed human activity online for the first time in 2026 and Amazon is already gatekeeping bots. At some point a unit has to sit between the agent and the thing it's doing. This is where bitcoin goes mainstream, and it happens faster than anyone expects because AI is moving that fast. This is just one part of the @Early_Riders Singularity Stack; listen below to @Lnelson_21 breakdown the rest and also find all related research here: earlyriders.com/singularity-… Awesome rip @lynnerae and @isramunozp!

I had a great time on @BuildwBitcoin with @lynnerae and @isramunozp discussing the singularity Inside you'll find: - Why Intelligence Is About to Get as Cheap as Light - The Real Reason "AI Safety" Alarm Bells Are Ringing Right Now - Why the $200 Claude Subscription Actually Costs $9,000 a Month - What Happens When Money Gets Too Small for a Credit Card 1. Intelligence Is Repeating Electricity's Path to Zero Cost 200 years ago, an hour of light cost three hours of someone's labor. Today it costs a tenth of a second. Intelligence is on the same curve, from a craft good, to something metered by the second and nearly free at the margin. 2. Token Usage Is Up 25,000% in Two Years Growing Faster Than The Early Internet How a chart from OpenRouter showing token growth compares to Jeff Bezos watching internet traffic grow ~2,300% a year at D.E. Shaw before founding Amazon. This is a bigger and faster adoption curve than the internet was, and most people still haven't priced in the second- and third-order effects. 3. The "AI Safety" Panic Is Mostly IPO Marketing On Dario Amodei's "we must pace the frontier" letter: its largely a play for regulatory capture ahead of anticipated IPOs making the case that frontier models are too powerful to release, while steering friendly regulators into position. The actual attack-surface risk is low, since real damage requires massive concentrated compute, not someone running an open-source model on a laptop. 4. No Business Should Want to Solely Depend on the Consumer AI Subscription If you're maxing out a $200/month Claude subscription, it's actually costing the company $8,000-$9,000 a month to serve you, a deeply negative margin the labs eat because your usage data trains the next model. The real business is the 90%-margin API, not the consumer app. 5. Energy, Not Chips, Is the Real Bottleneck Chips keep getting 50-100x better per year, but the US grid has been roughly flat for two decades and is one of the most heavily regulated industries there is. Permitting is such a challenge that orbital data centers have gone from fringe idea to a potentially viable business model. 6. 80% of People View AI Unfavorably, and It's Becoming a Wedge Political Issue Data centers and AI will undeniably become a major flashpoint in the next election cycle, driven less by noise complaints than by a perception that AI is the physical face of a widening wealth gap. 7. Agents Will Need Their Own Identity Layer, and Nostr Is the Leading Candidate Today Just as a Bitcoin private key proves ownership of funds, Nostr key pairs demonstrate how individual agents get durable, verifiable identities and build reputations & webs of trust over time. Jack Dorsey/Block's Buzz is already using Nostr to give each of a team's agents, marketing, sales, engineering, a distinct identity, and to Hugging Face's new open-source robot "ducks" doing the same for physical robots. 8. Machines Won't Pay in Dollars, They'll Pay in Whatever's Fastest and Neutral As agent-to-agent payments get small enough that credit-card rails can't handle them, it's rational that stablecoins will bootstrap the transition (dollar network effects help onboarding). However, long term, the endgame should be Bitcoin, because it's neutral, can't be seized, and is inflation resistant. Plus more! Check out the full show in the comments below!

AI 🤝 BTC

If it was actually important to "pace the frontier", wouldn't the first step be to limit the amount of capital that AI companies can raise? Funny how he doesn't mention that at all. Nobody should trust these guys to influence policy.

Reason enough to be a part of this. The intimate beachfront setting is a bonus beyond quality speakers like @JeffBooth. Hope to see you there with us!

I have been thinking about this for years - could AI agents drive the next wave of Bitcoin adoption? This new research by @Lnelson_21 of @Early_Riders beautifully lays out the path of how this may occur. This thought-expanding episode is a great counter to emerging AI fears, highlighting the opportunities it brings.

Welcome, @samcallah -- I always read Sam's writings on the macro perspective of Bitcoin and find them insightful, clear, and accurate. I'm looking forward to what he'll bring to the beachside conversations in @puntamitaMx!

Becca is one of my favorite people. I will see you there!