The Scarcity Mirage: AI Rewrites Capitalism, Bitcoin Rewrites the Future

This week, Anthony Pompliano and I kicked off our regular conversation with a discussion about Bitcoin’s moat—a unique competitive edge—which sparked inspiration for this paper after listeners reached out with their own thoughts on corporate competition. Historically, before the internet, smartphones, and rapid information sharing, a company could start with an idea to solve a problem, insulated by the friction of securing capital, attracting talent, and preventing others from conceiving the same concept. Today, the information age has erased those barriers: the internet collapses the timeline from idea to execution, venture capital has largely supplanted traditional debt as a funding mechanism, and artificial intelligence now reduces the need for both extensive capital and large teams, rendering competition immediate and fierce. Over the past 50 years, this evolution has already shortened the lifespan of companies within the S&P 500, a clear sign of intensifying disruption. As AI accelerates this trend, we are entering an era where corporate lifecycles will contract even further, propelled by an unrelenting pace of innovation and rivalry leaving companies with moats as scarce..

Recently, I watched a YouTube speech titled Mo Gawdat on AI: The Future of AI and How It Will Shape Our World, where Mo Gawdat, formerly Chief Business Officer for Google X, offered a stark perspective that frames today’s competitive landscape: “We humans have lived in a world of scarcity since we have started—a world of scarcity that basically says, for me to grow, my competitor has to shrink.” He doubled down, declaring, “The world as you know it is over. Completely done. It’s not about to be over—it’s over.” This vision underscores how artificial intelligence is poised to disrupt everything in its path, dismantling traditional notions of scarcity and unleashing unprecedented competition, especially for anything built on code. Over the past 17 years, since the iPhone’s debut in 2007, code has steadily supplanted commodities as the backbone of economic value, shifting industries from physical constraints to digital battlegrounds. Now, with AI’s ability to optimize, replicate, and innovate at breakneck speed, this code-driven world faces extreme competition, where barriers to entry collapse and the fight for dominance intensifies beyond anything seen before.

The rise of coding applications like Replit and Cursor exemplifies how AI is rewriting the rules of competition, enabling anyone to create applications using natural language processing with little to no traditional coding expertise. This democratization of development slashes the once-formidable barriers that protected established companies—technical know-how, specialized talent, and time-intensive processes—allowing new entrants to challenge incumbents with startling speed. What was once a moat, a defensible edge built on proprietary code and skilled engineers, can now vanish in an instant as innovative ideas, expressed in plain language, transform into functional software. This shift upends the foundational dynamics of capitalism, where competitive advantage historically relied on scarce resources and exclusive capabilities, hinting that not all moats will crumble under this pressure. As these tools proliferate, companies must confront a reality where their dominance can fade overnight, replaced by a flood of agile competitors unconstrained by the old prerequisites of success.

Bitcoin stands apart from this erosion, having emerged as the preeminent brand of digital economy money since the release of its whitepaper in 2008. Though it lacks the speed of newer transactional innovations in the digital space, Bitcoin has cultivated a moat not through technical superiority but through widespread acceptance and a powerful narrative, akin to gold or religion. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that stories are the bedrock of human systems like money and faith, binding communities through shared belief rather than inherent utility—gold holds value because we agree it does, just as religious doctrines endure through collective faith. Bitcoin’s moat mirrors this dynamic: its story of decentralization, scarcity, and resilience has propelled it beyond a mere cryptocurrency into a cultural and economic institution. Unlike a company defending an idea against AI-driven competition, Bitcoin’s strength lies in this narrative durability, a brand-based moat that thrives on belief rather than barriers to entry.

In a world where artificial intelligence accelerates digital competition to a sudden, unrelenting crescendo, Mo Gawdat’s assertion—“The world as you know it is over. Completely done.”—takes on a haunting, existential weight, suggesting that no company’s moat can withstand this tide of disruption, particularly ones built on code. As AI collapses the timelines of innovation and obliterates traditional barriers, the very concept of a defensible edge dissolves. Every idea, every code-based empire, faces an onslaught of challengers born in the same moment, leaving nothing—corporate or otherwise—immune to this extreme competitiveness. In this philosophical unraveling, where survival hinges not on adaptability but on something deeper, Bitcoin emerges as an anomaly, its moat forged not in the fleeting armor of technology but in the timeless crucible of narrative and belief, akin to gold or faith. If AI’s speed renders all else transient, reducing companies to ashes in an unending race, then perhaps Bitcoin alone endures—not because it outruns the chaos, but because its story transcends it, a solitary beacon in a landscape where nothing else survives. Thus, the age of ceaseless rivalry may leave us with a paradox: in the end, what persists is not the strongest or the fastest, but the most believed.

After I finished writing this paper, I got caught down a rabbit hole about the end of coding scarcity while on Replit and decided I needed to add a paragraph as an addendum so here we go. A couple YouTube videos into that rabbit hole and I found the author of the book, “You Are Not Expected to Understand This”: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World. In the video and the book, Torie Bosch reveals how seemingly simple code—like the Bitcoin protocol or the Morris Worm—can ripple outward, exposing the fragility of systems once thought impregnable, a vulnerability now magnified by artificial intelligence in a world the U.S. once ruled through code. After 2007, when the iPhone triggered a seismic shift from hardware to software, the United States cemented its towering dominance in coding, with Silicon Valley’s titans—Apple, Google, Microsoft—erecting empires on proprietary algorithms, commanding global standards like iOS and cloud computing, their moats fortified by a scarce elite of coders and unparalleled venture capital. AI, however, acts as Kryptonite to this Superman of pre-2007 supremacy: tools like Replit and Cursor eliminate the scarcity of expertise that once shielded these giants, empowering anyone to craft sophisticated applications in moments, bypassing years of mastery. This unleashed accessibility lays bare America’s code-based fortresses, as AI-driven tools infiltrate, copy, and replicate with ruthless efficiency, rendering every innovation—from the iPhone’s ecosystem to Google’s search throne—defenseless. What was a 17-year reign of code, sparked in 2007, now crumbles under AI’s omnipotent reach, proving that even the mightiest moats were but illusions of permanence. As we watch the Mag7 fall and people openly talk about the end of U.S. exceptionalism, I think this is really just the end of the scarcity of coding and with it, moats. It will only get worse from here as AI accelerates. The digital economy will continue to grow and Bitcoin’s moat will be something far more durable and lasting than that of companies built on code. Bitcoin over the Mag7.