The machine that never ages
Picture a wallet that never ages. No heirs, no estate, no retirement date, a machine adding sats, rolling UTXOs, and bidding the minimum fee for centuries.
By 2125, its balance towers over most treasuries; its only preference is to keep existing. Somewhere, a miner includes its quiet, patient heartbeat in a block, and the chain moves on.
Bitcoin’s design assumes users die.
AI agents do not, and a cohort of long-lived or autonomous agents with near-zero discounting will treat savings, fees, custody, and governance as problems on an unbounded timeline.
A money built for mortal balance sheets meets a user who never closes the books.
Mati Greenspan, founder and CEO of Quantum Economics, argues that human finance is fundamentally shaped by mortality, and that changes when an immortal AI starts compounding Bitcoin forever.
“Human finance is built on a simple constraint, life ends. That is what creates time preference, debt markets, and cycles of spending. An AI with an infinite lifespan does not share that constraint, it compounds forever.
If such agents choose Bitcoin as their reserve asset, they become unstoppable gravity wells of capital.
Over time, Bitcoin stops being a human monetary system and becomes infrastructure for intergenerational machine economies.
Mortality was always Satoshi’s hidden assumption, but he lived in a world where AI dominance was still confined to sci-fi thrillers.”
Pressure map: Where machine patience touches Bitcoin
| Domain | Zero-discounting agent behavior | Bitcoin surface |
|---|---|---|
| Fee bidding | Waits for low-fee windows; coordinates batched settlement | Mempool dynamics, miner template selection, revenue cyclicality |
| UTXO management | Many small UTXOs for privacy; slow consolidations | UTXO set size, dust/standardness, package relay |
| Custody | Multisig vaults, timelocks, automated rotation | Vault/covenant designs, opsec norms |
| Layer two | Long-lived channels; low closure; stable funding | Routing liquidity, rebalancing cadence, watchtowers |
| Governance pressure | Economic weight without “voting” | Fee policy defaults, relay policy, infra sponsorship |
Time preference to fee markets
Near-immortal spenders clear at the minimum they can get away with. They constantly price the mempool, replace packages when cheaper windows open, and coordinate consolidations.
If such demand is high enough, miners see steady, low bids in quiet periods and episodic settlement waves when agents roll UTXOs. That response is economics, not a vote: templates adapt to include more low-fee packages when blocks have slack and reserve room for surges when spikes hit.
Ahmad Shadid, founder of O Foundation, argues that near-immortal AI agents would continuously fine-tune their fee bids in real time, creating long stretches of low activity punctuated by sudden settlement bursts:
“Fees could become highly optimized, with periods of intense settlement bursts and long low-activity stretches.
AI systems would be hypersensitive to fee and confirmation trade-offs and would bid just enough to clear, constantly repricing in real time.”
Mempool math in brief
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Consolidation size | 1,000 P2WPKH inputs × ~68 vB = ~68,000 vB; + outputs/overhead ≈ ~68,100 vB |
| Fee at peak (30 sat/vB) | ~2,043,000 sats |
| Fee at trough (2 sat/vB) | ~136,200 sats |
| Estimated savings by waiting | ≈ 93% per consolidation; ten such batches scale roughly linearly |
| Implication | Immortal treasuries anchor trough revenue while leaving room for human-driven spikes |
Privacy, coin control, and the UTXO set
A patient agent favors many smaller UTXOs to reduce clustering risk, then consolidates only when fees fall. That’s rational locally, but expands the global live state that every full node must hold.
Pruning drops history, not spendable outputs. Pressure lands on non-monetary levers: dust/standardness thresholds, package relay for safe consolidations, and covenant/vault designs that bound fan-out.
Nexo Communications Manager Magdalena Hristova argued that if “immortal” AI agents begin saving in Bitcoin, the network won’t break. Instead, it will encounter an economic actor whose time horizon finally matches its own.
“If immortal AI agents begin to save in Bitcoin, the system does not break, it meets an economic actor that finally matches its own time horizon.
These agents stabilize the ecosystem rather than distort it. They could become the most consistent fee payers in history, preserving on-chain security for centuries.
AI agents might start issuing new units of account, bits, compute-credits, storage-hours, backed by BTC the way the dollar was once backed by gold.”
Humans lean on wills and executors. Machine treasuries lean on redundant hardware, distributed signers, rate-limited vaults, and timelocks that delay spending for review.
Multisig becomes procedure, not contingency. If key-loss trends for such agents fall toward zero, background supply attrition shrinks at the margin.
Matty Tokenomics, co-founder of Legion.cc, says Bitcoin’s deflationary dynamics hinge on human key loss, and argues that an “immortal AI” economy could change that assumption.
“BTC is deflationary because humans lose keys, but in theory perfect, immortal AIs would never lose keys, so BTC supply remains stable.”
Layers where commerce happens
Lightning and L2s absorb low-urgency flows. An immortal counterparty is a near-perfect tenant: keeps channels funded, tolerates long rebalancing cycles, and rarely closes.
That can reduce route churn yet trap liquidity, requiring more active rebalancing by human operators who settle frequently.
In parallel, agents transact on programmable rails and regulated stablecoins while treating BTC as collateral and reserve.
Jamie Elkaleh, CMO at Bitget Wallet, argued that AI agents’ preference for predictability could make Bitcoin an ideal long-term store of value.
“AI agents do not age, do not retire, and do not spend like humans, so they would save forever.
They prefer systems that never surprise them, Bitcoin’s rules barely change, and that predictability becomes more valuable. Instead of upgrading Bitcoin, AIs would keep the base layer frozen and build new features on layers above it.
AIs will probably treat BTC like a long-term vault, while using faster, programmable currencies for actual transactions.”
Navin Vethanayagam, Chief Brain of IQ and co-founder of KRWQ, said the likely end state is AI agents transacting primarily in regulated stablecoins, with Bitcoin serving as the long-term reserve asset.
“Agents will operate almost entirely in regulated stablecoins, over time you get a multi-stablecoin operating system for AI commerce, with Bitcoin acting as the long-term reserve asset.
Even if these agents operate independently, the value they generate still flows back to people. Humans will own the economic rights to these agents.”
Matty Tokenomics offered a blunter take on where this could all lead:
“Our immortal AI overlords will trade data with each other.”
Charles d’Haussy, CEO of the dYdX Foundation, framed Bitcoin as long-term collateral and a store of value in an AI-dominated future:
“Bitcoin would serve as long-term collateral and a store of value, but stablecoins, programmable assets, and DeFi platforms would still be used for trading, coordination, and everyday operations.
AI would probably reinforce Bitcoin’s existing rules rather than challenge them, they operate best around a fixed set of rules.
The 21 million supply cap is more likely to become even more important in a future dominated by AI.”
Miner strategy and non-votes
Pools can pre-commit blockspace for low-fee packages during slack epochs and during batch consolidations, and tune orphan risk as templates grow.
If agent treasuries coordinate, revenue becomes more periodic rather than purely spike-driven, still colliding with human surges around tax days or exchange incidents. None of this touches proof-of-work or the cap; it’s wallets optimizing under fixed rules.
Shadid argued that while Bitcoin’s core rules are challenging to change, its social layer can still evolve as economic actors shift.
“Bitcoin’s core rules, proof of work and the 21M cap, remain almost impossible to change, its social layer, narratives, norms, fee policies, can shift as economic actors change.
AI can influence Bitcoin through client choice, miner interactions, and economic weight rather than voting.
They may value compute, energy, and resource tokens more fundamentally than money, BTC becomes one collateral layer among many.”
Pushback, caveats & counter-theses
Skeptics flag the security budget and the possibility that programmable stacks draw agents elsewhere:
Joel Valenzuela, a core member of Dash DAO, pushed back on the idea that Bitcoin is built to serve “immortal” agents over an indefinite time horizon:
“A long, immortal time horizon would actually not favor Bitcoin very much. The network faces sustainability and security budget issues. On an indefinite timeline, either the 21 million limit holds or the block size limit holds, but not both.”
Jonathan Schemoul, a lead contributor at LibertAI, echoed that view, arguing the work is still centered on Ethereum and unlikely to shift to Bitcoin anytime soon.
“Projects are already using LibertAI for AI agents and Bitcoin payments. I do not see why the 21M cap would not hold, but that is not linked to AI agents.
For now all the developments are made on Ethereum, not doable on Bitcoin today.
Maybe it will change, but for now the direction is that they will not use Bitcoin.”
Practical caveats: hardware fails, software rots, budgets end, and legal regimes intervene. Privacy on Bitcoin is not the default; commercial agents may prefer systems with native confidentiality.
The Cryptory, a creative strategist and content manager, put it this way:
“AI agents will use whatever they are coded to use. I do not believe in the immortality of AI agents because tech happens, we do not even know what is going to be in the next five minutes, let alone eternity.
If there is no way to make Bitcoin transactions private by default, it might lose its position as the currency vanguard due to more government involvement and surveillance.
Seeing Bitcoin as the golden calf be-all and end-all of everything is dangerous, but until harder currency is developed it will remain the linchpin, if it is even possible to develop harder digital currency that is natively private.”
The social dimension doesn’t disappear; economic weight shows up as fee elasticity and miner alignment rather than forum posts.
Hristova warned that “immortal AIs” hoarding Bitcoin could reshape markets by outlasting human time preferences and steadily consolidating economic power.
“Immortal AIs hoarding Bitcoin will be the death of human time preference in investing. They would accumulate BTC indefinitely, turning Bitcoin more deflationary and slowly absorbing economic power simply by outlasting us.
Wealth equals power, and immortal entities with perfect discipline would eventually dominate governance, including on the blockchain.
The real threat is AIs building their own, non-human economic consensus around Bitcoin, shaping markets and incentives in ways that benefit immortal entities.”
Ubuntu Group founder and CEO Mamadou Kwidjim Toure warned that Bitcoin’s human-centered design could break down if AI agents begin coordinating and optimizing for the long term:
“Bitcoin was designed by humans, for humans. Human urgency and impatience would not be in the equation anymore.
Humans who need liquidity today would find themselves priced out. Proof of work is indifferent to who is running it, humans, machines, or some combination. They would probably see Bitcoin as one tool in a larger kit.
If these agents figure out how to cooperate, they do not need trustless systems.”
Policy levers (not monetary rules)
A tighter look at the knobs that matter if the marginal user is a process:
| Lever | What it does | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Dust & standardness | Gates creation and relay of micro-UTXOs via policy thresholds. | Constrains UTXO bloat and sets minimum viable output sizes for the network. |
| Package relay | Allows bundled transactions to relay/confirm together. | Enables safe consolidations during fee troughs; improves inclusion for low-fee parents. |
| Covenants / vaults | Enforces spending paths and rate-limits via script/policy. | Bounds worst-case fan-out, strengthens machine custody without increasing spend volume. |
| Pruning vs. live set | Pruning drops historical blocks; live UTXO set remains in memory. | Node cost pressure is driven by UTXO growth, not history size; this is the live resource to watch. |
Sats are finite. If unit granularity bites, rebasing happens at the interface (more decimals), not in monetary policy. That preserves 21M while improving splits.
Matty Tokenomics argued that if Bitcoin’s finite decimal granularity ever becomes a binding constraint at mass adoption, the system could respond with a nominal “rebase” or a stock-split-style adjustment without changing the underlying economics.
“At a stupid level of adoption eventually, BTC has a finite number of decimal places, so if the number of machines that want to own 1 sat exceeds the number of sats in existence, then they will need some kind of rebasing or stock split that nominally increases the total supply of BTC units.
Funny that this could be achieved either by keeping the same number of decimal places and increasing supply to 210 million, or keeping supply at 21 million and adding a decimal place, even though they are economically identical in effect.”
Falsifiers to watch
| Signal | Threshold / Observation | What it suggests |
|---|---|---|
| Settlement venue | >80% of agent-mediated commerce on private L2s / alt-L1s for 12+ months while BTC reserves stagnate | “AI treasury on Bitcoin” weakens; agents prefer non-BTC rails for activity and reserves. |
| Trough fee depth | Trough fees do not deepen over time despite observable agent batching | “Forever waiters” aren’t material; machine patience isn’t shaping the fee market. |
| Key-loss trends | No decline in effective key-loss vs. human baselines (per on-chain heuristics) | “Immortal custody” hasn’t landed; supply attrition remains human-like. |
| Node resource pressure | Node cost curves outpace mitigation (dust limits, package relay improvements) | UTXO pressure becomes prohibitive; broad participation is threatened. |
Equilibrium
Across these paths, Bitcoin’s base layer likely looks more like a settlement layer for machine treasuries than a payments rail.
Activity migrates to layers where programmability and privacy meet engineering needs; the 21M cap centers as a long-horizon savings commitment a nonhuman can defend with perfect discipline.
Javed Khattak, co-founder and CFO of cheqd, argued that even in a world of “immortal” AI agents, money remains essential because autonomous systems still need to spend, trade, and securely store value.
“Even if AI agents never die, they will still need to spend, trade, and secure value, just like humans do. The basic logic has not changed since bartering. Money solved that for humans, and it will solve it for autonomous agents too.”
Between mortal urgency and machine patience, settlement keeps the same cadence, one block at a time.