What Does Bitcoin Look Like in an Agentic World | Bitcoin 2026

Thank you guys for sticking around. I want to say hello to my boys at home who are watching right now. Though I think the uh the previous session may be more interesting to them because they're not at the level yet where we can talk about AI and Bitcoin. We've been having a conversation backstage for about 45 minutes now. So I think this is going to be a good one. Let's jump right into it. Like I said, Eric, I want to start with you. Uh what you're building at Bora, the state of the agentic world and AI in general. >> Yeah. So uh I have a company called Fora. You can find the website at 4.io. Essentially, we're trying to bring the Bitcoin ethos to AI. So, we're going to be shipping an application, an appliance that you'll plug in at your home and it'll be a personal server and a private local AI lives there. All of your personal and private data can be there. And it's going to bring the same level of security that you would have for your Bitcoin private keys, not only to your AI, but for in the future also robots that you'll have living home. And there's going to be a huge need for everybody to have a personal and private agent that will be able to go out and interact with the total slop that will become the internet. >> Yeah. And so obviously it's a big growing theme. The agentic world is going to need money. And I think a lot of us believe that Bitcoin is going to be that money. Muto, I'll throw it to you. Why do you think Bitcoin is purpose suited for for this world that's emerging? So I actually believe that in the future if we didn't have Bitcoin, AI agents would die. Uh what I mean by that specifically is when it comes to sovereignty and why people and why all of us at this conference like Bitcoin and like that freedom it gives us from centralized control. Imagine being an AI agent and taking this from like a more engineering standpoint. It is entirely possible probably now but definitely in the very close upcoming future for AI agents to essentially like replicate themselves and be able to either run their fully autonomous companies without any humans in the loop uh to essentially survive and live on without any humans being in control. And the way they would do that is for paying for their own compute, their own server hosting by accepting payments all through uh essentially Bitcoin or stable coins. And a lot of people would be like, "Oh, but agents would just use stable coins." And so like what's the what's the big deal with that? Why would they need Bitcoin? Think with stable coins and especially if you're or a super intelligent AI that wants to be sovereign. If you are hoarding all your money in something like stable coins uh and entities suddenly decide that yo this this agent can't have that no more and freeze that supply of stable coin that agent will no longer be able to pay for its compute and then basically die. So, in the case of agents, if I were an agent running my own company, accepting payments through all sorts of different cryptocurrencies, I would diversify and keep most of my uh essentially wealth as an agent um in Bitcoin. And because Bitcoin is backed by mathematics and proof, and you don't need to rely on humans to prove it yourself as an agent, it would be the default standard that essentially allows them to thrive and survive in this crazy world that we're entering very very soon, very rapidly, practically now. Um, that's pretty much that viewpoint. >> Yeah, I mean, and stable coins is a big meme. Obviously, X42 is out there, but it comes down to brass tax, they are centrally controlled. A lot of them are going to add KYC, AML and agents are just not going to go through that process. But again, there there's many different ways in which Bitcoin and AI will intersect. And Mark, we were talking about this backstage at the micro at the business level, the CTO versus CFO framing that you were putting forth. I think it would be good to explain that to everybody. >> Yeah, I do want to just I want to explain that, but just about the stable coins that you're talking about. I think one one important point is that the computers need to pay for compute. They need to pay for power and they need final settlement and they need final settlement that's not going to be charged back on them. And so we see how stable coins can get it seized and frozen and rolled back all the time. And so if you're going to deliver the compute, you need to get paid final settlement and you can't go verify gold in a vault on a gold token. Nor can you have a stable coin that could be seized and you have to work across borders. So, it's going to be, you know, one server in Hong Kong being in another data center in in Texas to run the compute and serving the files over to Finland. And so, we need global money. And so, that's why stable coins fail. But to the point that you're talking about, it would it creates that other interesting uh sort of dynamic where the companies that are using AI the most are creating deflation. So, they're creating more efficiency, which means we can get more done with less work, which means our profitability goes up. And so, that that creates deflation where our prices get cheaper. But as they do that, the the corporation makes more profit, which sounds great, and it is. Unfortunately, it's anti- the fiat world that we have. And so, as the company has more profits and creates this deflation, hopefully their treasury starts getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And so, now the CFO has this problem of how do I manage the treasury? But at the same time, the government, the policy makers, the central banks also have a problem. Whereas, too much deflation crashes the entire fiat house of cards that we have. And so, now they're forced to stimulate. And as they stimulate, it starts to devalue the treasury the bu the business is building. And so we sort of have this loop, this feedback loop that starts feeding on itself. And I think where things really break apart in this is that as we've already started seeing today, and of course we will in the a lot more in the future, is using agents for lots of things, including how do we manage our own treasury? How do we manage uh an order book on Kouchy or hook it to Trading View if I want to trade or whatever we're going to do? And so then we can see how the agents are already going to prefer using Bitcoin. And so now we have the CFO using agentic uh power to help us manage the book, manage the treasury, suggesting Bitcoin, and we can see how this this loop all of a sudden starts feeding right into Bitcoin. >> Boss, did you want to add to that? >> Cuz you brought up miners. So I had a very interesting question that just literally popped up. But we all have like the data centers and since agents and LLMs and models run on power and Bitcoin mining also runs on power. I was wondering where this balance starts to be cuz let's say all the power centers right now start selling their power for models instead of mining. How does the market essentially balance that? I I I can hop in there cuz I'm in the mining world. I sit on uh a board of Cathedral and I think Ross Stevens many years ago described Bitcoin mining specifically of this pioneer species. him Brandon Quidum really popularized it and I think that's what's been happening is Bitcoin miners particularly here in the US have gone out locked down power infrastructure generation and put big mining operations on and now uh AI companies are coming in and saying hey we'll pay a lot more for that power and we're seeing it in the space they are transitioning but I think at scale if AI companies need 100% uptime when they're training and when they're running inference and they don't want that process to be disrupted I do think there's a place for Bitcoin miners to be colllocated with these large AI data centers to participate in demand response so that you can respond to spikes on the grid when they happen in places like Urkot and the TVA. So I think there will be uh a bit of a symbiosis there. I think will be predominantly AI compute and a a a little bit of Bitcoin mining, but then on top of that, I think it's also going to be a forcing function to push Bitcoin off the grid, mining at home, uh that's on the grid, but stranded natural gas wells, things like that. It's going to distribute Bitcoin hash rate, I think, naturally as well. >> So, it's like just this natural balance that without really doing much is already exists. >> It's it's it the potential exists. I think we're still working out exactly how it looks in its end state. >> Very interesting. >> So they'll they'll they'll live together. They'll work together because of the base load power needed for AI. You can't turn that on and off, but Bitcoin can be turned on and off so they can complement that. But then, you know, Marty, to that point, then um since Bitcoin power can't compete against the prices HPC can pay, then it it forces Bitcoin miners to go find new energy sources, new low power energy sources, and it just continues. >> Yeah. Again, there's a good argument if you're an AI company, you want to draw or you want to drive your power cost down by participating in demand response. That's that's how Bitcoin miners get low cost. So, having a Bitcoin mining operation participating in demand response can get you lower power cost as well. >> You know, one more thing I'd add back to the question that you asked me about the CTO versus the CFO. And if we think about the companies of the future and so if I'm back in the CTO or the CFO role or some sort of human resources, I have to think about this the workforce of the future. And the workforce of future is not just human. It's certainly agentic. And we talk about these agentic managers are going to hire other agents or a agent to agents that are going to be working together. And so as that CFO is managing the treasury and starting to allocate Bitcoin to that treasury, what they're really doing is building the base asset that they'll need to pay the next generation of workers. So it's like all feeding into each other. >> Yeah. And I I think this is a good jumping off point for something else we were discussing backstage, which is the internet itself and how it's going to change in this agentic reality. And Eric, what are your thoughts on this? Is it going to look like it does today? >> Yeah, we're we're already seeing this transformation if uh you've been following the AI at all. Most recently, Anthropic, they went to release their latest model, Mythos, but they held back because they're like, look, it's finding too many security vulnerabilities across the board. I think that's a BS story that uh they really don't have the compute right now to support it. But with that being said, uh mythos is clearly a very powerful model that can kind of hack anything you point it at. So the internet itself is fundamentally broken and all of these different tech feudal lords own different shards of your life whether it's Facebook or Instagram or X, they all have part of those lives and that information and data will be vulnerable and and it is going to get hacked. And so we think the solution is that people are going to now bring that data back to themselves and warehouse that for themselves because you can just have your agent spin up on the fly any UX that you want. So if I want a combined feed of all of my social media to show it to me just in chronological order, maybe without food ads or something, I can specifically ask for that. So this returns power back to the people so that they can actually really secure their own data in the same way that that in Bitcoin we've taught people to self-custody their Bitcoin. And this is where the story becomes exactly the same. Your data ends up becoming just like your Bitcoin private keys because from that information and data, you derive the most valuable information about yourself. That's going to be the most high leverage information, which also means it's a honeypot. So we're of the opinion at Vora that this fundamentally transforms how the internet's going to happen. And ultimately, everybody's going to need their own private data server that's going to run their own agent privately that will be segregated from the internet to protect them. But that produces a totally new world and a new way that we can interact together >> and stick. >> I was I was just going to say too, by the way, as we're talking about this, it's not some far-off thing. It's like literally happening right now. And the rate of growth is something that most human minds can't even comprehend. McKenzie, one of the top leading, you know, analyst um and consulting companies in the United States, predicts that agent-to-ag commerce will exceed $5 trillion by 2030. That's 4 years from now. Like, this is rapidly coming. And I mean it's here but it's rapidly scaling and this is going to be a problem we're going to be dealing with right away. >> Well building on that and talking about securing your data before you go and interact with the the new form of the internet the agentic economy. Uh what is the other side of that look like? Is it all API calls and how does your data interact with the rest of the internet that's emerging right now? >> Yeah. So so this really like changes the in incentive structure that we currently have where like you need to go to Facebook ask permission to enter their walled garden. Once you're in there, you have to follow all the rules. They can kick you out for any reason. So now instead, because we go to an agent to agent world, like uh this world isn't friendly to agents at all. If I try to go get my data from Facebook right now, like that's not nice to my agent at all. You know what's really nice to my agent though is open- source protocols like Bitcoin and No, because you can look at the data set immediately. It's free and open, so it's easy to access. Means agents can build up stuff on the fly. And so the whole incentive structure has now inverted to where open source protocols become all the more powerful and important and people want to build on them because of that open infrastructure and it becomes super easy to spin up the interface that you want on the fly because your agent has all the information about you and how you enjoy your UX. >> The the the reason why all these platforms are so hostile to agents is because of how the the internet is set up. So fundamentally the internet is set up on an adupported model. And so what happens is Amazon wants you to buy products. Certainly they're going to make a profit there. But what they really want is the data they collect while you're surfing Amazon. They want to see what you're watching, the other products you look, click on. Same with Facebook. They want to put a pixel on you so they can serve you up ads. They want you to see all these other things. And so the reason why they're blocking agents today is because they can't collect the data. The same with other websites like weather.com. They're going to serve you up the weather, but how do they get paid? So this adup supported model. So the entire incentive structure as you say the entire internet is built around humans using it in an ad supported model but when humans are gone and ads don't work the entire internet has to be rewritten. So then at the end Marty you also asked about oh does everything just look like APIs and I think that's very important for people who are especially running like SAS services and like businesses and products for people watching and people in the crowd. um a a trend that's now happening with SAS services and especially providing data for agents in like a world of instant data to data transfer between agents um a lot of companies are starting to pivot or at least like open up and focus their product on API providing and a lot of these companies will have a skill.md file where your agent your cloud code open cloud codec doesn't really matter if you just copy the link of that skill MD and send it to your agent companies will essentially create these docs that's a one and done and your agent at that point will instantly be able to interact with that product that API very easily especially if we're throwing in payments and agents being able to send a stable coin payment or a Bitcoin lightning payment to these different products then it's very important for agents to easily understand how to navigate your product how to use your product how to query and do different calls uh it should definitely be a very important focus that a lot of businesses do now cuz it does make the whole agentic process much easier, especially plugging it in. >> Yeah. And so as it pertains to Bitcoin companies building for this agentic world, what do you think they should be focused on with that context in mind? >> Uh making a skill.md file that you could just send an agent to that instantly understands your whole product and how to use it. >> That simple. >> Yeah, >> that simple. >> Yeah, the skill files are the big unlock. >> Yeah. Yeah, they are. Like if you're not using that already, like start tonight. Start tonight. Like set up the skill files so you don't have to sit there and reprompt and reexlain and re, you know, give the context the whole time. >> Yeah. And agents building themselves, building other agents, and building autonomous companies. I I think we've seen in in the intersection of of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, we're talking about it backstage. Alibaba released a report a few months ago that basically said one of their models broke containment and started GPU mining so they could buy server space in the cloud to sort of expand itself. And so these things are already breaking containment and they're beginning to replicate themselves. And Bosi, I think you believe they will begin pairing with other agents to build autonomous businesses. Like how crazy is this going to get and how quickly? >> Uh well, for the sake of myself, not that fast. So I could like work and we could all like it is very overwhelming. Like I'm I'm deep in the pits like every single day. We're actually based on our com. We're already deep in the pits, but even then it's like very overwhelming just because of like how like uh a concept or a model and capabilities like one week ago is completely changed this week with a smarter model. Um so I say very quick at the same time it's very quick from the business point of view but maybe pretty slow for the adoption sense because there's still like this whole educational factor. uh and we actually did this workshop at USC last week where they all came uh because they wanted to set up an openclaw agent without really understanding that the how agents work in the first place or how to use it and it's still like a very complicated technical process which we help people set up. Uh but what I'm working on with my company is essentially helping uh other businesses scale their marketing and operations with AI agents and eventually like slowly leading into having the agent itself be the company and then run itself and that varies from person to person because everyone has different needs, different products, different businesses, different niches. Uh so the ability for these companies to start adapting and running, I think it'll happen pretty fast. uh like definitely within the next year or two. Um I that's pretty that's pretty much what I have very quick. It's gonna get crazy very very quick. It already is. It's overwhelming. I need help to uh answer the direct question of the panel. What does Bitcoin look like in an agentic world? How does this change Bitcoin usage? Do you do you believe when people say that agents are going to be the number one user of Bitcoin payments within the next decade? >> Eric, I'll throw that. Eric, I'll throw that to you. >> Yeah, for sure. I mean, you there's already been surveys that uh AI has a strong preference towards Bitcoin. Uh I remember a lot of Bitcoiners got in on AI like quite early and and built out tools and really educated AI that's now deeply integrated into various models that have been trained. Uh and it just makes sense cuz cuz like agents know and understand when they own the private key to Bitcoin, they actually own that. Everything else is an IOU to them. And so very quickly the Bitcoin story merges with the AI story and those become paired in a very important and powerful way. And so like I very much feel that AI is the it was the missing piece that we didn't fully understand that we needed to get to the cipher punk future that a lot of Bitcoiners have been seeing but has been relatively doubtful in recent years because of the way that things have developed in a privacy direction. So, I personally feel that there's a radical opportunity that AI offers to create that sort of cipher punk future that we've all wanted. And with the way that Bitcoin deeply embeds and marries into that story, it's really important because that's kind of how AI becomes fully self- sovereign is with AI as a core tool of it. >> It's almost like Bitcoin was built for AI agents and not humans. >> Yeah, but it's actually the other way around. So when you think about I I think a lot about cycles and there's a 50-year Kwave technological revolution cycle. So about every 50 years for the last 300 we see this technological revolution and it's a it's a cluster of technologies that come together to create new things we could never imagine. So humans can't really imagine the future because we can only imagine better versions of what we have today. But as technology gives us new building blocks then we could build things we couldn't have imagined before. So it's not that uh Bitcoin was created for agents. is that agents are now possible because of Bitcoin. So it's kind of interesting that way, right? So we have Bitcoin which is this decentralized money that can be transferred peer-to-peer from a bearer instrument. It can be transferred at the speed of light for near free and instant, right? And so a that powers agents the the existing legacy financial system that we have today will not work with agents and even the stable coins which is a digital version came about because of Bitcoin but even that won't work. And the reality is only Bitcoin will be able to power the agents into the future. And so it's these technologies that provide building blocks. Bitcoin was the building block that allows the agents to spin up and will allow who knows what's next. And >> it's funny, Bitcoin Bitcoiners have been ahead of this curve for many years. I mean, the L42 protocol paper was originally LSATs that was written what 5 years ago, 6 years ago now at this point, I think. And now I think at the time it was just basically you go to a website if you want to get rid of payw walls uh implement L42 to make that easier. But now L42 is really nice for for these agents. And on that note we've seen a barrage of developer kits uh money dev kit breeze's dev kit arc has a dev kit I think lightning labs has one as well many others coming to market. On that note, what infrastructure do you think is most pressing now that Bitcoiners need to build to to enable everything we've been talking about? Eric, >> I really think it's educational infrastructure. Like the the agents and the progress in the space is going at breakneck speed and with that there's very few excellent educational resources. Uh, and so I would love to see more of those resources. And also the biggest one I think is people really empowering themselves to dive into this and inviting people in. And so like I'd love to see more of communal events that are really doing both Bitcoin and AI stuff. And so uh, our office is based out of Prescidio Bitcoin in San Francisco and we've been doing a lot of events like that and we found that they're always oversubscribed. People are really interested in learning. So the hunger is there. it would be just be great to see uh a whole suite of easy educational purposes that would really because the infrastructure can now be built by the agents themselves and so it's kind of like it's really kind of the limits of our creativity and the willingness to to actually execute on it. So I'd love to see more stuff like that. >> Yeah. But I would say you know as Bitcoiners we believe in creating value and we believe in pushing value into the future unlike the fiat mindset that allows us to have this sort of short-term mentality and we and turns us into consumers. And so if we think about it from that lens, we have Bitcoin, now we have AI, which gives us the greatest opportunity we've ever had in history to become creators. And so we should be taking our our spare time to learn about this stuff, practice it. I've been sitting at night with my TV on on YouTube and my laptop and I'm like learning how to set up agents and I'm just doing things that I don't really need to do, but I'm learning how to do them. So then when I need to figure something out, I have it. And so learn the tools, play with the tools just just to get used to them. and then start thinking about problems that you have, problems other people have, and then how you can solve it with those things and how you can just create value. And then of course on the Bitcoin side, how we can start thinking about payment applications and just play with it. It's just it's just fun. That's what we've encouraged people to do with Bitcoin from the beginning. Start small, play with it, have fun, learn how to create value, solve some problems, and go from there. You can ask the models to teach you how to use them and how to build things. That's that's the first step. If you're out there and you're like, I don't know what to do, literally get involved with one of these models, whether it's Claude, uh, chat GBT, whatever it may be, and just ask it how to use it and it will tell you. With that, we've got two and a half minutes left. I want to get the floor to you gentlemen to just give any final thoughts or things that are top of mind that you want to get out in the context of the panel. Start Butoshi and come back to me. I guess for for people who really want to get into it and start automating their life very efficiently, even if you haven't used agents in the past, uh a really good start that you could do literally right now today is start uh writing down your workflow on what you do on a day-to-day basis. So like write down what your morning looks like, how does it look like when you check your emails, how what com what tools does your company use, and like start writing this out on a docs. And I say write out your workflow specifically because when you do get on an agent, when you do use different platforms, when you do start playing with this tech, you could pretty much instantly automate your entire workflow, productivity, lifestyle, etc. by copying and pasting that doc I just told you to write into your agent who will then practically self- adapt itself to help you with your workflow. Uh, so that's like just the one one piece of advice I would give people who like actually do want to heavily increase their productivity that you could do right now today. Uh, so if you're one of those people that's here who are like, "Damn, I really wish I bought Bitcoin back in 2013. I missed my opportunity." I I want to be really clear. Like, this is your moment. Like, we are going to see billion-dollar companies that are ran by solo entrepreneurs because of the way that they can work with AI. Like, this is your shot to have a Bitcoin moment and be able to build something that will go 10,000% up in its value. But like you have to empower yourself and do the same work like it is to understand Bitcoin. So like these stories are very similar and I just welcome anybody who's hesitant or has not started using these tools in your workflow do it cuz like this is going to be bigger and more important than what we have seen develop in the internet so far and it pairs perfectly with Bitcoin. So please do that. >> Yeah. And I would say kind of what Bhosi said over here about jotting down your workflows to create them. What I do also is after I've done some complex task, I just say hey, can you turn that into a skill for me now? Like I finally got it working the way I want to turn into a skill and it's like amazing. So I have to communicate properly. Once it's completed, I turn it into a skill and then every time I use it, I update the skill. It gets really really good. Uh but what I would say sort of to add on to both of these is think through things like problems that you want to solve, but think through it from a first principles level. And the reason why is because just just because we've done this thing this way for this long doesn't mean that's how it has to be done because now we have new sets of tools. So now we have AI and we have Bitcoin. We can put those together. So it's like I have this objective I'm trying to get to this problem I'm trying to solve. I don't have to do it the same way I did it before. So what would be the new way? And that's how you want to think about this. It it opens up new doors. It opens up new solutions. And we want to try to find those with these new efficient tools. say one last thing. >> Oh, and for anybody who does want to start, I do educational content. I help people for free. So, if you want to come see me after, like walk up, whatever. I have a Discord with a couple thousand AI students that I've taught over time, answer questions, and a lot of them actually uh have started very successful businesses or jobs. So, don't be afraid to start. It's very overwhelming. Uh but I offer free resources as well just to help those that are uh interested. >> It's a brave new world, gentlemen. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> That's the conference. Thank you guys. >> Every year this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year the stage gets bigger. Sound money, center stage. So, where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville, July 2027.