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To my own surprise, I’ve found myself questioning Bitcoin’s long-term place in history. And I don’t mean the next few market cycles of bull and bear runs—I mean its relevance in the systems we are now rapidly building. This realization is coming from me: a BTC holder, an onchain ecosystem supporter, and a believer in decentralized systems. But the more I dive into what’s unfolding around us, the clearer it becomes: Bitcoin is not the foundation of the future—it’s the gravestone of a world that once worshiped scarcity.
Bitcoin was the perfect response to 2008. It emerged as trust in traditional financial systems crumbled, offering a decentralized, immutable ledger—a digital alternative to the failing banks and bailouts of the time. With a fixed supply of 21 million, BTC earned its identity as "digital gold." Scarcity became its narrative, a hedge against inflation and institutional collapse.
But here’s the thing: gold is hoarded, not spent. Bitcoin’s design incentivizes accumulation, not utility. Why buy coffee with something that might be worth double next year? As a currency, BTC is practically useless. Its value lies entirely in collective belief—a belief that it is scarce and desirable. Yet belief systems crack when the context changes. And right now, everything is changing.
We are entering a seismic shift: the tokenization of everything. Assets, identities, obligations, and even intangibles like trust are being represented as tokens onchain. But this isn’t just about digitizing things—it’s about reshaping what we consider valuable.
Historically, currencies like the USD acted as abstraction layers, allowing us to translate the value of apples, houses, and stocks into a single universal language. Tokenization obliterates this framework. It makes anything exchangeable for anything else. Imagine swapping loyalty points for a stake in a music NFT or trading your onchain credentials for a carbon offset. With solvers acting as intermediaries, the need for a universal currency evaporates.
This shift is fracturing the very concept of value. In a tokenized world, “currency” becomes hyperlocal—defined by niches, domains, or specific communities. Value is contextual, not universal. Why cling to a rigid, one-size-fits-all ledger like BTC when solvers can bridge any gap? The tokenization of everything doesn’t just disrupt Bitcoin—it questions the relevance of all scarcity-driven systems.
To understand Bitcoin’s limitations, we need to unravel the myth of money itself. The story goes that humans bartered goods—apples for goats—until someone invented money to simplify trade. But as David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years reveals, this narrative is a convenient fiction. Barter economies, as we imagine them, never really existed. Instead, early societies ran on systems of credit and trust. If I gave you grain today, I trusted you—or the community—to reciprocate when needed.
FIAT didn’t replace barter; it centralized and quantified these systems of obligation. Money became a tool of power, a way for states to enforce hierarchies and control economies. Debt, once a mutual agreement, was weaponized.
Bitcoin claims to subvert this dynamic with decentralization. But in practice, it replicates the same rigid, scarcity-driven logic. BTC’s narrative of “digital scarcity” is rooted in a worldview where value must be hoarded, controlled, and protected. Tokenized ecosystems, by contrast, feel more like a return to the fluid credit systems Graeber describes. They decentralize value and make it adaptive, contextual, and relational. Bitcoin’s fixed nature, once a strength, now feels like a relic of a different era.
Blockchain’s greatest contribution wasn’t Bitcoin—it was the idea of a world computer. Ethereum and its successors transformed blockchains into decentralized state machines, capable of enforcing rules, contracts, and logic across the internet. They imposed order on a chaotic digital environment.
Think of railroads synchronizing clocks to align train schedules. Similarly, blockchains introduced a shared ledger for the internet, a way to say: This happened, then that. But the internet itself doesn’t operate in a linear fashion. Social media timelines mix past, present, and future. AI processes data in a quantum-like state, constantly reshaping predictions of the future with learnings from the past.
Blockchains, while revolutionary, remain Newtonian systems in a quantum world. Their linearity works for us, but agents—autonomous programs with no need for human constructs of time—may find them restrictive. The world computer, once a tool for enforcing order, may become irrelevant as systems evolve beyond the need for such rigidity.
Humans tend to anthropomorphize our creations. We assume agents—autonomous, intelligent programs—will think and act like us: individualistic, competitive, self-interested. But agents, unlike us, understand game theory at a scale we can’t fathom. They can simulate millions of outcomes, optimizing for collaboration when it leads to better results than competition.
This shift mirrors the evolution of the internet. The early web was deeply individualistic—personal websites, social media profiles, and even Bitcoin itself emphasize personal ownership. But the rise of real-time multiplayer spaces—live-service games, collaborative tools, decentralized networks—has started to undermine this individualism. In these environments, value is collective. Swarm behaviors emerge naturally as many small actions converge into larger, coordinated outcomes.
Nature offers a roadmap for what’s coming. Mycelial networks transfer resources without ownership. Murmurations of starlings, schools of fish, and flocks of birds make decisions collectively without leaders. Agents are likely to behave more like these systems than like humans. They won’t hoard value as Bitcoin encourages—they’ll optimize flows, prioritize collaboration, and continuously adapt.
If tokenized systems allow anything to be exchanged for anything, if agents optimize for collaboration, and if time itself becomes nonlinear, then the concept of storing value starts to crumble. Storing value assumes scarcity and a singular timeline—both relics of the world Bitcoin was designed for.
In a tokenized, agent-driven economy, value isn’t something you hoard—it’s something that flows, reshapes, and adapts. The internet, with its fragmented timelines and tokenized ecosystems, doesn’t need scarcity. It thrives on abundance.
Bitcoin isn’t going to disappear tomorrow. It may even become much much much more valuable in the short term. But value is not the same as relevance. BTC represents a world where value was finite, time was linear, and economies revolved around centralized points of trust. That world is fading rapidly everywhere online.
The tokenization of everything, the rise of agents, and the evolution of swarm intelligence are rewriting the rules. Systems that thrive in the future won’t hoard value—they’ll move it, shape it, and adapt with it. Bitcoin’s rigidity, once its strength, now feels like a limitation.
This isn’t just a technological shift—it’s a heretic moment. The collapse of scarcity, the emergence of collaboration, and the dismantling of linear time challenge everything we’ve held as true.
As a designer, builder, and thinker, I find myself questioning: What do we create when value is moved, not stored? How do we adapt to an internet that feels neither familiar nor reflective of our past? What beliefs or concepts are so ingrained that we haven’t even thought to question them?
My inspiration lies in nature. Systems that thrive are resilient, adaptive, and collective. Bitcoin, for all its brilliance, lacks these qualities. It is not the future—it is a relic of a world that once worshiped scarcity.
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Very interesting, never thought about it in these terms but it kind of makes sense, although it's now hard to imagine major institutions, including nation states, giving up the idea of 'value'. Also, thinking about the first version of the Internet, it was peer-to-peer where anyone could download (as a client) and upload (as a server) files and data, creating a barter system of sorts.
I agree that the question can real world institutions change is a really fair one. But then again I look at the internet and how it evolved and radically challenged existing concepts, so I would not wonder we see this being further accelerated.