The single biggest difference between humans and AI agents is the amount of actions they execute on a computer per unit of time. AI agents can look and act just like humans, but execute 10,000X more actions per unit time. that's the tell. so the key to defending cyberspace from AI slop or AI attacks is to target ACTION, not IDENTITY. trying to detect AI is a fool's errand; targeting its BEHAVIOR is the key. So if you want to deter AI from accessing your website/system, simply make it expensive in computational tokens to ACT on your website. Make every command or button cost a token, and suddenly it's 10,000X more costly for AI to act than a human. You can't stop AI, but you can make it extraordinarily expensive to use it. We already know this intuitively, because everybody who has ever run openclaw or their own personal AI agents knows that the single biggest LIMFAC is compute tokens. your AI is only as good as your compute token wallet. but AI compute is constantly getting cheaper and better, and some countries have far better AI compute than others, creating a major imbalance of power. so the key to long term success is to create some kind of universal, non-sovereign, geopolitically neutral compute token network. that is, we need some kind of network that accounts for a bunch of transferable tokens that are computationally expensive to produce. that no amount of AI compute can produce more of. we need a proof-of-compute token network. and we need it to be fully decentralized so that no single person or polity can gain permanent or centralized control over it. we need this network to be globally dispersed. and we need to figure out a way to distribute those compute tokens in a way that's fair, that gives no single person or polity an advantage over the others. perhaps in some kind of first-come first-served basis, where the users who provide the computational power are given the tokens and free to spread them out however they want. if we had this compute token network, the final step to saving ourselves against AI is to simply adopt the habit of making every online action cost some fraction of a compute token, so that it's orders of magnitude more expensive for AI agents to operate online than humans. the first nation to discover this compute token network and use it to its defensive advantage against the threat of agentic AI will win the 21st century. BTW that compute token network is Bitcoin.

You're right that they're not the equivalent but im not claiming they are. The difference between AI and compute tokens is actually the core insight of this post... any computationally expensive-to-produce token can serve as the per-action toll. The key insight i'm highlighting in this post is that it doesn't have to represent AI compute (matrix operations). It can represent hash compute (integer operations) instead. if the goal is to constrain/penalize AI agents, then you specifically DO NOT WANT the computional toll to be based on AI compute. If AI capability and token production are based on the same performance curve, every advance in AI chips makes the AI stronger AND the computational token/toll cheaper to produce/pay. This defeats the point of the toll. So the general public intuitively understands that compute tokens are AI's Achilles heal. what they don't understand is the type of compute tokens. quit trying to design algorithmic logic with the goal to outsmart or try to make the adversary burn a bunch of AI compute tokens. instead, just change what kind of compute token the AI has to spend A hash-rate-based computational token/toll creates a separate cost domain, where more/better AI compute does not automatically make the token/toll easier to produce/pay. it's an independent token produced on an independent network that no single entity owns/controls yet everyone can subscribe to and use as a toll to contrain/penalize AI actions and behaviors. so the achilles heal to AI is HASH compute tokens, not AI compute tokens. this will become abundantly more clear as the cost of AI compute collapses but the cost of bitcoin production skyrockets. ying and yang.