Structure of the Argument

The argument addresses four questions.

The first concerns the floor beneath computational economics. Energy has a price; computation consumes energy; therefore computation has a thermodynamic cost that no amount of algorithmic cleverness can eliminate. But does this cost create a measurable discipline on which applications survive and which do not? The manuscript argues that it does, and that the mechanism is already observable in how capital allocates between different uses of the same electricity.

The second concerns the sequence of automation. Tasks are not automating in order of cognitive difficulty. Some technically demanding work has yielded to machines while some technically simple work has resisted. What determines the order? The manuscript argues that verification cost—what it takes to confirm that a task was performed correctly—predicts the sequence better than capability benchmarks. Tasks with cheap verification automate first, regardless of their complexity.

The third concerns the migration of rents. If cognitive capability becomes abundant and cheap, where does durable value accumulate? The consensus answer is “in the models” or “in the platforms.” The manuscript argues otherwise: that value migrates to the bottlenecks that remain scarce even as cognition commoditizes. These bottlenecks are physical, institutional, and legal—not algorithmic.

The fourth concerns coordination infrastructure. Autonomous agents transacting with one another face a problem that human commerce solved through credit markets and legal enforcement. Neither mechanism is available to machines in their current form. What substitutes? The manuscript argues that a specific kind of financial infrastructure is required, and that its emergence will determine whether the agentic economy scales or stalls.

Each question receives a specific answer in subsequent sections. Each answer generates testable predictions. The framework succeeds if those predictions survive contact with evidence, and the conditions under which they would fail are stated explicitly when the claims are made.

The derivation begins with the monetary precedent—not because Bitcoin is the primary subject, but because it provides the existence proof that one version of the underlying transaction is already occurring at scale.