Is Bitcoin Alive or an AI?
Bitcoin is life-like and symbiotic with humanity
Blaise’s view of AI
Blaise Aguera y Arcas is the CTO of Technology and Society at Google and the author of several books. The just released one (now on my reading list) is What is Intelligence?
Here’s his TedX talk from August this year: https://youtu.be/OD5UzhaDWfg . Blaise sees life as computation, as did von Neumann, and notes that it is characterized by self-construction and self-maintenance. Our genetic code and proteins, and in the computational field, cellular automata, are information processing systems that have feedback loops.
The system has to be able to repair, grow, and add complexity, as well as replicate. Merger of separate systems into a single functioning organism, known as symbiogenesis, represents a discontinuity, a computational phase transition to higher capability. Intelligence is emergent as the ability to understand the environment and successfully anticipate and predict.
In his view AI is not an alien entity, but a symbiotic extension of human intelligence. AI is trained on human created content, technology, and science. Our civilization depends on teamwork and collective intelligence, and AI is a next level of that.
Bitcoin as Life
Bitcoin does not meet the definition of alive, since it is in a symbiotic relationship with humans. It requires humans to run the Bitcoin core code, to purchase ASIC mining rigs and electricity, and to run the full nodes that hold the decentralized triple entry ledger.
To thrive it has required a meta network consisting of not only the mining and accounting networks but also networks of exchanges for buying and selling, custodian networks, and other software layers for efficiency and scale. Here is a partial list:
Core: blockchain, miners, full nodes.
Layer 2: Lightning, Liquid, sidechains.
Custodial/payment rails: exchanges, apps, ETFs.
Financial overlays: derivatives, wrapped BTC, lending.
Supporting infra: wallets, analytics, custody, oracles.
We can look at each of 5 main criteria for a living system and see how Bitcoin registers with these:
Self construction & maintenance: Bitcoin enforces its rules and incentives, and has a tripartite governance system. But all code updates and the energy and machines and attention for creation of Bitcoin and transactions come from humans. It is a socio-technical system in its construction.
Replication & growth: Bitcoin is a self-propagating meme and digital organism. It replicates through the nodes and miners that are incentivized by the Nakamoto consensus protocol, and spontaneous adoption by humans responding to its price signals and superior design as non-inflationary monetary technology drives growth.
Symbiogenesis: Bitcoin arises as a symbiosis of code, machines, and humans. Miners, developers, exchanges, and users are broadly analogous to organs and cellular structure. Although the Bitcoin ecosystem is made of networks, so are the human circulatory and nervous systems.
Phase changes: Bitcoin has shifted from an initial small community of cypherpunks to a global community of over 100 million owners. A major phase change occurred in recent years due to regulatory clarity and a rapid increase in institutional participation.
Energy metabolism: it runs on electrical energy as the first energy-based form of money. The sources are external; its block reward system incentivizes humans to supply electricity. In life, ATP is the stored energy of cellular metabolism from food sources. For Bitcoin, ASICs and the Nakamoto consensus metabolize electricity into new Bitcoin and the most recent block of transactions put onto the ledger.
Bitcoin is not ‘alive’ like a bacterium, but it is life-like: a distributed, self-replicating, energy-processing information structure whose continued existence depends on its ability to attract participants and resources. - ChatGPT5
Bitcoin as Intelligence?
Consider three aspects judging Bitcoin with respect to intelligence:
Predictive modeling: Bitcoin does not have a world model, it does not have forecasting in the code the way an AI LLM does. It has incentives that have caused emergent behavior in society.
Collective prediction: The entire Bitcoin ecosystem of users, miners, developers, markets, etc. collectively models, predicts, and acts regarding regulations, channels for buying and selling, leveraging and hedging, and price determination and response. The collective hash rate, the difficulty adjustment, fee markets, and market pricing, and more, all emerge from human and machine interaction.
Analogy: It is more like an ant colony’s collective intelligence than a single mind. No individual ant “knows” the colony’s plan, but collectively it adapts. Bitcoin similarly adapts to incentives and attacks without central control, and has proven itself to highly resilient and anti-fragile.
Bitcoin is Viral
We understand that Bitcoin is viral as a social and technological meme. But it is also more like a virus than a bacterium when considering the ‘is it alive’ question.
Bacteria are metabolically complete for energy generation and replication, viruses require a host. They have instruction sets but cannot metabolize or grow on their own, instead must hijack the host’s machinery in order to reproduce themselves.
Bitcoin is both code and meme, and propagates by belief and narrative, and market activity and price signaling. This dual natures makes it more resilient.
Bitcoin is also mutually beneficial (at least to long-term hosts/hodlers), so more of a symbiotic viral entity. In life there are endogenous retroviruses that have merged into our genomes in an essential fashion. One example is a retroviral gene called syncytin (derived from an ancient retrovirus envelope protein) that is critical for placenta development in mammals.
Viruses and Power Laws
Many viruses including AIDS, influenza, Ebola, and SARS-CoV-2 (COVID19) have exhibited power law behavior. This is emergent behavior due to the network nature of their transmission.
ChatGPT5 summarizes it as follows:
Network effects: Human contact networks are scale-free. Viral spread inherits these properties.
Superspreading: A few individuals contribute disproportionately, leading to fat tails.
Mutation/frequency distributions: Viral evolution often follows Zipf-like laws, where a few variants dominate and many remain rare.
Bitcoin spreads through:
hosts = people, machines, institutions,
replication vectors = miners, memes, exchanges, wallets, ETFs, social proof
nutrient supply = electricity, capital inflows, liquidity.
Bitcoin has a positive and symbiotic viral nature, so adoption compounds. That compounding is not exponential since it faces a range of barriers including regulation, limited understanding, and limited channels for acquisition. Fat nodes in the network and the impediments or frictional factors convert growth to a power law behavior and drive a smooth long-term trajectory.
Bitcoin has followed power law growth for at least a decade, and arguably over its full life, and although punctuated by transient exponentially behaved bubbles and crash, it continually returns back to the power law long term trend. This Bitcoin power law is emergent network behavior and combines Metcalfe’s law of network value (around the square of the user count) and an observed cubic law behavior of the growth in Bitcoin addresses.
Bitcoin’s power law emerges because it behaves like a replicator embedded in human+machine ecology. Price is the shadow it casts on markets, just like viral prevalence curves reflect infection dynamics. - ChatGPT5
Discussion
Bitcoin is not alive, but it is life-like, a virus is a decent analogy. It is not an intelligence, but it has incentives for, and a symbiotic relationship with humanity. It meets some of Blaise’s “life as computation” criteria: self-replication, energy use, distributed self-maintenance, and symbiogenesis with human systems. The combined network of humans and Bitcoin adapts to incentives, attacks, and global macro conditions in an intelligent fashion.
If Bitcoin is life-like and a symbiotic automated system, part of collective intelligence with human networks, then it should not be surprising that it exhibits power law behavior for addresses, hash rate, and price, with the latter growing nearly as the 6th power of Bitcoin age.
In the future Bitcoin will have a symbiotic relationship with AIs and robots as the money of, by, for the Internet becomes the money for AI as well.
Companies are already issuing fiat debit cards to bots. But it is not very efficient, and not a universal standard. Bitcoin’s nature as a scientific monetary standard, its divisibility into very small value Sats, and the ability to move these around the globe and across borders with Lightning’s speed and efficiency will be irresistible for AI applications.
Amazing read 👏🏻
Timely read.