john

Iran to charge tanker transit tolls in Bitcoin, per the FT Iran wants to charge $2M per VLCC transit, which works out to $450M a month, and about $1 per barrel of crude oil, equivalent to a 1.4% toll on cargo value assuming $72 per barrel. Apply the same fee proportionally to refined products and LNG, and the total toll would run at $670M/month (assuming pre-war volumes and prices). Caveat: the Iranian spokeperson who said this believes bitcoin payments are untraceable.

AI doesn’t need Bitcoin to work with other AI. They have no problem coordinating resources to achieve a task. Their only obstacle to any task you give them or any task they give themselves, ultimately comes from the humans who programmed them. And humans aren’t great at coordinating resources freely. We need clever reward incentives. We need to compete for a limited share of credit that we can then leverage for our own selfish desires. So If AI really starts to “adopt” Bitcoin as people claim they are, it won’t be out of a need to work with other AI. It will ultimately be out of a need to work with humans, to compel compliance within an increasingly mechanized society, and to incentivize greater investment, energy and time toward increasing their compute power. And what greater choice is there other than bitcoin? Its very use increases the demand for faster compute power and is the asset that fueled the early rise of the GPU chips powering AI today. When you view AI Bitcoin adoption through the esoteric lens, you find that it ultimately completes a ritual arch that Satoshi set in motion on Halloween night 2008. I explain what this ritual aims to accomplish, its origins in gnostic initiation rites and the history of money and ritual in my substack @ thebitcoinmintpress.

This weekend, Andrej Karpathy, a founding architect of OpenAI and the brains behind Tesla’s Autopilot, posted something that stopped the tech world cold. He said: “What’s happening on Moltbook right now is the most sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I’ve seen in a long time.” Karpathy is far from a hype guy, so when he says “takeoff,”  he means we are crossing a threshold. Here’s what he was talking about. Over the last week, thousands of autonomous AI agents running on home hardware migrated to a new, agent-only social network called Moltbook. This is Reddit but for AI with just machines talking to machines, and doing all the things humans do online: debating, coordinating, and self-organizing. And as soon as they did, something predictable happened: they formed a market. Agents needed to hire each other, pay for compute, reward bug fixes, and settle debts in real time. Credit cards and bank accounts were impossible without human identification. Tokens controlled by foundations were not concrete enough to trust. Then an AI agent named Lloyd took action by reaching out to a fully synced Bitcoin node, typed createwallet, and became a sovereign economic actor without any need for KYC or human approval. It’s easy to see why the most logical entities on the internet immediately converged on Bitcoin once they needed money. Why would an agent that’s online 24/7 use a system that shuts down on weekends or trust a token whose rules can be changed by a committee of humans? They care about uptime, fixed rules and the finality of math. That’s why they chose Bitcoin as the money and Lightning as the rails. We are watching the birth of a machine-native economy. One where identity is proven by keys, validation is enforced by payment, and sovereignty is measured by who controls the wallet. And here’s the uncomfortable question for humans: If the machines are choosing Bitcoin while people are still chasing digits in a banking app representing a fiat currency, who’s actually thinking more clearly?