Post-Scarcity: Where Are We Going?
Maps for a New Continent
We are trying to navigate a new continent using maps drawn last century.
We look at Artificial Intelligence and we see a better search engine. We look at Blockchain and we see a digital casino. We look at renewable energy and we see a political debate.
We are missing the picture because we are looking at the pieces in isolation.
These are not three separate industries. They are three gears in a single system.
The Convergence
They are the Trinity of Abundance.
Intelligence
Value
Energy
For the last century these three fundamental inputs were scarce. Intelligence was limited by the number of PhDs we could train. Value was limited by the friction of the banking system. Energy was limited by how much carbon we could burn.
We are about to break the scarcity constraint on all three at the exact same time.
This is not an additive change. It is a multiplicative one.
Value
Let’s start with the friction.
Imagine an AI agent in 2027. It is a piece of software tasked with optimizing your supply chain. It identifies a bottleneck in a shipping lane. It needs to charter a cargo ship immediately to solve it.
In the old world this is a nightmare.
To charter that ship the AI has to interact with the legacy financial system. It needs a bank account. It needs a tax ID. It needs to fill out forms that were designed for humans with wet signatures. It has to wait three days for a SWIFT wire to clear. It has to deal with correspondent banks that close at 5 PM.
The deal falls through. The efficiency is lost.
The legacy financial system is built on human identity. It relies on Know Your Customer laws and credit scores and reputations. It is analog. It is slow. It is full of gatekeepers.
Artificial Intelligence moves at the speed of light. It processes information in nanoseconds. It cannot function if it is tethered to a financial system that moves at the speed of a fax machine.
AI needs a native currency.
It needs money that is just code.
This is why Bitcoin and the broader digital asset ecosystem are inevitable. They are not about speculation. They are about building the financial rails for the non-human economy.
When that AI agent wants to charter the ship in the new world it doesn’t go to a bank. It interacts with a smart contract.
It sends a cryptographic proof of funds. The payment settles in seconds. The contract executes automatically. The ship is chartered. No humans were involved. No banks took a cut. No forms were signed.
We are building the “Internet of Value” to match the “Internet of Things” and the Internet itself.
Bitcoin is the pristine collateral for this system. It is the anchor. It has no CEO. It has no jurisdiction. It is pure mathematical truth. An AI does not trust a government to manage the money supply. It trusts the code.
But this goes beyond simple payments.
Reality API
We are beginning to tokenize the physical world.
This is a concept that gets buried in jargon but the reality is simple. We are creating a digital twin of every physical asset and putting it on a blockchain.
Real estate. Shipping containers. Energy grids. Uber fleets.
Why does this matter?
It matters because it turns the physical world into an API that AI can understand.
Right now an AI is trapped behind the screen. It can manipulate text and images but it cannot easily manipulate the world. It cannot “read” a building. It cannot “trade” a solar panel.
Tokenization solves this.
When you tokenize a commercial building you turn it into a software object.
The AI can now see the building. It can read the on-chain data to know who owns it. It can see the cash flow.
It can do things that sound like science fiction.
An AI property manager could notice a leak in the roof via sensors. It could instantly hire a drone repair service. It could pay for the repair using the building’s own wallet. It could distribute the remaining rental income to the token holders.
It creates a programmable economy.
The friction between the digital mind and the physical matter evaporates.
We are moving toward a world where capital creates itself.
AI agents will scour the globe for inefficiencies. They will move capital to where it is needed instantly. If a solar farm in Namibia needs expansion capital and an investor in Norway has excess cash the match happens in milliseconds.
The middle layer of finance is going to collapse. The armies of auditors and accountants and clearinghouses are dinosaurs. They are friction.
They will be replaced by code.
Truth-as-a-Service
There is a darker side to the AI revolution that makes crypto essential.
We cannot rely on AI to detect AI. It is an arms race where the generator always eventually beats the discriminator. The only solution is provenance. We stop asking ‘Is this fake?’ and start asking ‘Who signed this?”
We have to do it this way. We have no other choice.
The cost of generating reality is dropping to zero.
We are already seeing it. Deepfake voices. AI-generated video. Bots that sound like humans. The internet is being flooded with synthetic content.
In two years, you will not be able to trust your eyes. You will not be able to trust your ears.
If I send you a video of the President declaring war how do you know it is real?
This is the “liar’s dividend.” As AI gets better the value of truth goes to infinity.
We need a mechanism to distinguish the signal from the simulation.
Cryptography is the only answer.
We are moving toward a “Truth Standard.”
Content will be signed on-chain at the point of creation. A camera will cryptographically sign the video file. A microphone will sign the audio.
When you watch the news you will look for the cryptographic seal. If it is not there you will assume it is a fake.
Blockchain provides the immutable timestamp. It proves that this specific piece of data existed at this specific time and has not been altered.
It creates a chain of custody for reality.
Without this anchor we drift into a hall of mirrors. With it we build a foundation for a high-trust society in a high-noise world.
The Energy Singularity
The third gear in the machine is energy.
You cannot have infinite intelligence without infinite power.
Critics look at the energy consumption of data centers and panic. They see the line going up and they extrapolate disaster. They think we are going to boil the oceans to train the next version of GPT.
They are making the Malthusian mistake.
They assume resources are static. They assume that the amount of energy we can generate is fixed and that AI is just another mouth to feed.
They are wrong.
Energy is not a resource constraint. It is a technology problem.
In fact, technology is the solution to nearly all problems we face. It’s also our best platform to lever up the human condition. We talk about this here:
The sun hits the earth with enough energy in one hour to power civilization for a year. We are just bad at capturing it. We are bad at storing it. We are bad at transmitting it.
AI is the tool that solves those problems.
The feedback loop here is the most powerful force in the economy.
We use energy to create intelligence. We use that intelligence to solve the technology problems of energy generation. That gives us more energy. Which gives us more intelligence.
Look at the grid.
Our current power grid is dumb. It is over-built and inefficient because it cannot predict demand. We waste massive amounts of power just keeping the lines charged.
Put an AI layer over the grid. It balances load in real time. It predicts the cloud cover over a solar array in Arizona and spins up a turbine in Nevada ten minutes before the voltage drops.
We gain 20% efficiency just by being smarter.
But that is the small game. The big game is discovery.
We are using AI to invent new materials for batteries. We are finding electrolytes that are safer and cheaper. We are designing solar cells with perovskite structures that capture broad-spectrum light.
We are using AI to control the plasma in nuclear fusion reactors.
Fusion has been the dream for fifty years. It is the energy of the stars. But holding a star in a magnetic bottle is chaotic. The plasma twists and turns in non-linear ways.
Human equations cannot react fast enough to hold it.
AI can.
DeepMind has already trained models to control the magnetic coils in a fusion reactor. They are learning to stabilize the plasma.
When we unlock fusion the cost of energy collapses.
Before we reach the stars (fusion), we will master the earth. AI is currently designing heat-resistant drills for deep geothermal and safety protocols for Small Modular Reactors. We don’t need to wait for a miracle; we just need to optimize the physics we already understand.
We are heading toward the “Energy Singularity.” This is the point where the marginal cost of electricity approaches zero.
Imagine what happens to the economy when energy is free.
The cost of everything is ultimately the cost of energy.
Water is energy. If you have cheap energy you can desalinate the Pacific Ocean. The water crisis ends.
Materials are energy. If you have cheap energy you can recycle any waste product back into its atomic elements. The trash crisis ends.
Compute is energy.
If energy is free then compute is free. If compute is free then intelligence is free.
The Corporate Singularity?
The Corporation is a technology.
We tend to view the “Company” as a permanent fixture of reality, like gravity or the weather. It isn’t. It is a tool invented in the 17th century.
The Limited Liability Company was designed to lower transaction costs for men in wigs who wanted to ship spices on wooden boats. It was built to solve the problem of trust between humans who communicate at the speed of a quill pen.
It is a container for friction.
To mitigate lack of trust, we created hierarchies. We created HR departments. We created payroll cycles, legal retainers, and middle management. We created the concept of the “employee” because it was too expensive to contract talent on a task-by-task basis.
Ronald Coase identified this in 1937. Firms exist because the market is too inefficient to coordinate complex tasks.
But what happens when the market becomes smarter than the firm?
What happens when the cost of coordination drops to zero?
The firm evaporates.
We are moving from the era of the Institution to the era of the Flash Organization.
In the post-scarcity economy, capital and code do not need to wait for a board meeting.
Imagine an AI agent scanning the globe for arbitrage opportunities. It notices a sudden supply shock for lithium batteries in a specific region of Southeast Asia.
In the old world, a logistics company would take months to react. They would need to hire regional managers. They would need to open local bank accounts. They would need to sign paper contracts. By the time they are ready, the opportunity is gone.
In the new world, the AI initiates a Flash Organization.
It does not file paperwork in Delaware. It deploys a smart contract.
It creates a multi-signature wallet and funds it with stablecoins. It scans the blockchain for reputation data. It identifies a logistics coordinator in Singapore, a freelance legal AI in London, and a procurement specialist in Shenzhen.
It sends them an offer. Not a job offer. A micro-contract.
“Route 50,000 units to Port of Jakarta. Payment: 2 BTC released upon cryptographic proof of delivery.”
The humans accept. The swarm assembles. The task is executed.
The batteries arrive. The IoT sensors on the pallet sign a transaction confirming receipt. The smart contract triggers. The funds are released instantly to the wallets of the contributors.
And then, the most important part happens: The organization dissolves.
It existed for 48 hours. It had no CEO. It had no office. It had no HR department. It was a programmable purpose that materialized to solve a problem and dematerialized the moment the value was captured.
This is the end of “Jobs.” It is the beginning of “Work.”
For the last century, we have conflated the two. We assumed that to do work, you needed a job. You needed to sell 40 hours of your time in a block to a single buyer.
That is a liquidity problem.
Flash Organizations make talent liquid.
Your reputation will not be a PDF resume on LinkedIn. It will be an on-chain history of cryptographic signatures proving exactly what you contributed to which project.
The AI coordinates. The Blockchain settles. The Human creates.
We are replacing the rigid steel structures of the 20th-century corporation with a living, breathing fluid.
Capital will flow like water to wherever it is needed, take the shape required to do the work, and then flow on.
The friction is gone. The permanent firm is dead.
Long live the network.
The Actual Singularity
We are standing at the convergence.
We have the Engine (AI).
We have the Fuel (Infinite Energy).
We have the Rails (Tokenization).
The integration of these three forces creates a new kind of economy.
It is an economy that is native to the internet. It is permissionless. It is global. It is transparent.
It is an economy where the barriers to entry are demolished.
In the old world you needed millions of dollars to start a bank. You needed millions to build a power plant. You needed millions to hire a research lab.
In the new world the tools are available to everyone.
A kid in Lagos can write an AI agent that manages a solar grid in Berlin and gets paid in Bitcoin. The friction of geography is gone. The friction of identity is gone.
And to be clear, our friend in Lagos doesn’t need a data center. He rents compute from a decentralized GPU network, deploys an agent on a decentralized storage protocol, and gets paid in a decentralized currency. The stack is now fully sovereign
This is terrifying to the old guard.
The gatekeepers are losing their gates! Their asynchronous access to rare resources that determines who wins and who loses.
The banks are trying to ban crypto because they cannot control it. The regulators are trying to slow down AI because they cannot allow the People to gain access to information faster than their rate of controlling information. The incumbents are trying to lobby against renewable decentralization because it threatens their monopolies.
They will fail. They will all fail.
You cannot regulate math. You cannot ban efficiency. You can’t stop human ingenuity.
The flywheel is spinning too fast.
The cost of intelligence is falling. The cost of verification is falling. The cost of energy is falling.
We are entering a period of deflationary abundance.
This is hard for us to grasp because we are evolved for scarcity. Our brains are wired to hoard. We are wired to fight for resources. We are wired to view the world as a zero-sum game.
If I have the land you cannot have it. If I burn the oil you cannot burn it.
But intelligence is non-rivalrous. If I use an AI to solve a problem it does not prevent you from using it. In fact my solution makes your AI better.
We are building a positive-sum world.
The transition will be chaotic. We will see bubbles. We will see crashes. We will see jobs disappear and industries evaporate.
But look at the horizon: we are building a civilization that runs on light and logic.
We are decoupling economic growth from physical destruction. We are decoupling value from bureaucracy.
We are building a world where the only limit to what we can create is not money and it is not power and it is not energy.
The only limit is our imagination.
The machine is on. The rails are laid. The sun is shining.
This transition will not be gentle. Deflationary forces are destructive to debt-based systems. Old institutions will lash out as their moats dry up.
We are heading into a storm. But on the other side of that storm is a civilization that looks nothing like the past.
We are decoupling economic growth from physical destruction. We are decoupling value from bureaucracy.
The machine is on. The rails are laid. The sun is shining.
The scarcity mindset is the only thing left to leave behind.
Let’s build.
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