Author: Sevclub, Seven Research
Bitcoin recently fell below $60k, so I thought I'd offer some comforting words.
I'm increasingly feeling that AI and Bitcoin might be two sides of the same coin.
I first had this feeling recently. Now, when I see any article, video, or even a social media post, a thought immediately pops into my head: Was this made by AI?
I didn't used to. I used to assume it was real. Now my default is suspicion first. And this suspicion is getting harder and harder to shake.
The thing is, I use AI every day myself to write, make videos, generate images, so I understand something more clearly than many: the cost of fabrication with today's AI is already ridiculously low.
An article, in seconds. An image, in a minute. A video, increasingly close to a real person.
They are getting cheaper and more convincing.
So I started to realize something: what AI is truly changing isn't just productivity. It's changing something more fundamental: authenticity.
The internet era truly lowered the cost of disseminating information; the AI era is truly lowering the cost of producing information.
When the production cost approaches zero, information floods, content floods. More critically, the real and the fake are mixed together, increasingly hard to tell apart.
At this point, things reverse: easily accessible content becomes less and less valuable. What truly becomes precious is whether you can still confirm "this thing is real"—in other words, "verifiability."
Thinking of this, I suddenly understood Bitcoin anew. Bitcoin "wastes electricity"—one of its most criticized points for years.
AI burns electricity, everyone can understand that. It burns for stronger models, higher efficiency, lower costs. But Bitcoin? It consumes so much energy every year, seemingly just to maintain a ledger. It looks like a waste.
This criticism, honestly, I couldn't really counter before.
Until recently, I started looking at it from a different angle. It also burns computing power. AI is producing "capability." Bitcoin is producing something else: "verifiability."
Many misunderstand Bitcoin. It never relies on people believing in it. On the contrary, its reason for existence is so you don't have to trust anyone.
Don't trust banks. Don't trust platforms. Don't trust developers. Don't even trust Satoshi Nakamoto.
You only need to verify.
Where every bitcoin came from, where it's going, whether every transaction happened, whether the entire ledger has been tampered with—none of this relies on trust. It relies on math, on cryptography, on the collective maintenance by countless nodes worldwide.
AI can generate a fake image, a fake video, even forge a person's voice. But it cannot make the entire Bitcoin network acknowledge a transaction that never existed.
This has nothing to do with how smart AI is. Here, the contest isn't even the same kind of ability—one competes in generation, the other in verification.
All that burned electricity suddenly seems a little less wasteful.
Suddenly, I feel that all that electricity Bitcoin burns... seems a little less wasteful.
It burns electricity not to increase computing speed or to run models. It burns for the cost of something else: the cost of altering history. The more it burns, the more expensive it becomes to change that ledger.
In other words, it burns energy to obtain in return a ledger anyone can independently verify. Interestingly, this reminds me of five hundred years ago, the Renaissance—a topic I've written about before, and it fits perfectly today.
What truly changed the world back then wasn't just Gutenberg's printing press; it was also double-entry bookkeeping. One reduced the cost of copying knowledge to a minimum; the other lowered the cost of trust in the business world. One was responsible for creation, the other for verification. The commercial civilization of the next few centuries was built on these two things.
Today, AI is like the new printing press, once again pushing the cost of producing content to near zero.
So, what is the "double-entry bookkeeping" of this era? I don't know the answer.
But blockchain is, at least, the closest attempt we have so far.
It's not responsible for telling you which news is real, nor for proving which image isn't AI-generated. It's responsible for something more fundamental: letting the ownership of assets and the record of history in the digital world be self-verifiable, without relying on any centralized institution.
One is responsible for creation, the other for proof.
Perhaps this is why I've always felt that AI and blockchain are not in competition.
AI continuously lowers the cost of generation. Blockchain continuously lowers the cost of verification. One is responsible for creation, the other for proof.
As for whether Bitcoin will succeed? I don't know.
It could still be a bubble. Quantum computing, regulation, technological evolution—all could change its fate.
But at least today, I no longer understand it as a "machine that produces bitcoins." I prefer to understand it as a "machine that produces verifiability."
And in an era where AI can generate everything, what is truly scarce might no longer be "more content," but "more independently verifiable facts."
As for whether the market will reprice it accordingly, that's another matter.
