If AI agents start accumulating Bitcoin, what will happen to this monetary system that was designed for ordinary people?

Written by: Liam ‘Akiba’ Wright

Translated by: Luffy, Foresight News

Imagine a wallet that never grows old: no heirs, no estate to manage, no retirement age—it’s like a machine steadily accumulating sats (the smallest unit of Bitcoin) for centuries.

By 2125, its balance would exceed the reserves of most countries; its sole aim is to exist forever. In a certain block, miners package its faint but persistent transaction requests into the chain, and so the blockchain continues to run.

Bitcoin’s design assumes its users will eventually die.

But AI agents won’t. A group of long-lived or autonomously operating agents will see saving, transaction fees, asset custody, and governance as topics on an infinite time scale.

When a monetary system designed for mortal balance sheets meets immortal agents, conflict arises.

Mati Greenspan, founder and CEO of Quantum Economics, believes the human financial system is fundamentally shaped by mortality, and that everything will change once immortal AI start compounding Bitcoin forever.

“Human finance is built on a simple constraint: life ends. This has led to time preference, debt markets, and consumption cycles. Immortal AI are not bound by this—they can compound forever. If such agents choose Bitcoin as a reserve asset, they’ll become unstoppable capital gravity wells. Over time, Bitcoin will cease to be a human monetary system, becoming instead the infrastructure for intergenerational machine economies. Mortality has always been Satoshi’s unspoken assumption, but in his era, an AI-dominated world was only found in sci-fi thrillers.”

How agent patience impacts Bitcoin

Time preference and its effect on the fee market

Near-immortal payers will only pay the minimum fee required for successful inclusion on-chain. They’ll continuously monitor mempool prices, replace transaction packages when a lower-fee window appears, and orchestrate UTXO consolidation.

If this demand reaches scale, miners will see steady low-fee bids during off-peak periods, with periodic settlement spikes when agents consolidate UTXOs. This feedback is pure economics, not voting: when a block has idle space, the block template will fit more low-fee transactions; when demand spikes, space is reserved for peak volume.

Ahmad Shadid, founder of O Foundation, believes near-immortal AI agents will dynamically fine-tune fee bids, leading to “long-term low activity + sudden settlement peaks” on the network:

“The fee system will be highly optimized, with dense bursts of settlement followed by long periods of low activity. AI systems will be hyper-sensitive to the tradeoff between fees and confirmation efficiency, only bidding just enough to settle and constantly repricing in real time.”

Core mempool data analysis

Privacy, token control, and the UTXO set

Patient agents will tend to split out many small UTXOs to reduce traceability risk, only consolidating when fees are low. This behavior is rational for individuals but increases the effective account state every full node must store.

Blockchain pruning only clears historical blocks, not UTXOs. Thus, pressure shifts to non-monetary controls: dust/standard transaction thresholds, safe consolidation relays, and design limits on unbounded UTXO proliferation.

Magdalena Hristova, PR Manager at Nexo, believes that if immortal AI agents start hoarding Bitcoin, the network won’t collapse but will instead welcome economic players finally matched to its own timescale:

“If immortal AI agents start hoarding Bitcoin, the system won’t collapse. It simply welcomes players whose time horizons finally match its own. These agents will stabilize rather than distort the ecosystem. They may become the most stable fee payers in history, providing centuries of on-chain security. AI agents may even issue new accounting units—like bits, compute points, or storage time—just as the dollar was once pegged to gold, and these new units will be collateralized by Bitcoin.”

Humans rely on wills and executors for asset management; machine vaults rely on redundant hardware, distributed signers, rate-limited vaults, and time locks for delayed transfers pending review.

Multi-signature will become the standard, not an emergency measure. If these agents’ key loss rate approaches zero, Bitcoin’s implicit supply loss will also narrow at the margin.

Matty Tokenomics, co-founder of Legion.cc, points out that Bitcoin’s deflationary nature relies on human key loss, but an “immortal AI” economy could overturn this premise:

“Bitcoin is deflationary because humans lose keys. In theory, perfect immortal AI would never lose keys, so Bitcoin’s supply would stabilize.”

Hierarchies of commercial activity

The Lightning Network and other L2s will handle low-priority transaction flows. Immortal counterparties are the “perfect tenants”: consistently funded channels, tolerant of long rebalancing cycles, rarely closing channels.

This reduces routing churn but may lock up liquidity, forcing human operators with frequent settlement needs to rebalance channels more proactively.

Meanwhile, agents will transact on programmable rails and compliant stablecoin networks, using Bitcoin as collateral and a reserve asset.

Jamie Elkaleh, CMO of Bitget Wallet, believes AI agents’ preference for predictability makes Bitcoin the ideal long-term store of value:

“AI agents don’t age, retire, or consume like humans, so they will save perpetually. They favor stable, surprise-free systems, and Bitcoin’s rules rarely change. This predictability becomes extremely valuable. AI won’t upgrade the Bitcoin base layer; instead, they’ll freeze it and build new features atop it. AI will likely use Bitcoin as a long-term vault, while using faster, programmable tokens for actual transactions.”

Navin Vethanayagam, co-founder of KRWQ, says the endgame will likely see AI agents transacting primarily on compliant stablecoin networks, with Bitcoin as long-term reserve:

“Agent transactions will almost entirely occur on compliant stablecoin networks. Over time, a multi-stablecoin OS for AI business activity will emerge, while Bitcoin serves as the long-term reserve asset. Even if these agents run autonomously, the value they create will ultimately flow back to humans—humans will hold the economic rights to these agents.”

Matty Tokenomics offers an even more blunt prediction:

“Our immortal AI overlords will trade data among themselves.”

Charles d’Haussy, CEO of the dYdX Foundation, sees Bitcoin as the long-term collateral and store of value in an AI-led future:

“Bitcoin will serve as long-term collateral and a store of value, but stablecoins, programmable assets, and DeFi platforms will still be used for transactions, collaboration, and daily operations. AI may reinforce, rather than challenge, Bitcoin’s existing rules—they operate most efficiently within fixed frameworks. In an AI-dominated future, the 21 million supply cap will likely become even more important.”

Miner strategies and non-voting governance

Mining pools can reserve some block space for low-fee transactions during off-peak and batch consolidation phases, optimizing orphan risk as block templates scale.

If agent vaults coordinate, miner earnings will become more cyclical rather than purely peak-driven, but will still overlap with human transaction peaks like tax days or exchange events. None of this touches PoW or the supply cap—it’s simply wallets optimizing under fixed rules.

Shadid believes that while Bitcoin’s core rules are hard to change, its social layer will evolve as economic stakeholders change:

“Bitcoin’s core rules—PoW and the 21 million cap—are almost impossible to change. But its social layer, such as narrative, industry norms, and fee policies, will adjust as economic actors change. AI won’t influence Bitcoin through voting, but through client selection, miner interaction, and economic weight. They may value compute, energy, and resource tokens more than currency—Bitcoin is just one of many forms of collateral.”

Counterarguments and considerations

Skeptics point to the security budget risk and the possibility that programmable ecosystems may draw agent activity away:

Joel Valenzuela, core member of Dash DAO, disputes the idea that “Bitcoin is suitable for long-term use by immortal agents”:

“An infinitely long immortal time horizon is not actually favorable for Bitcoin. The network faces sustainability and security budget issues. On an infinite timeline, you can only keep one of the 21 million cap or block size limit, not both.”

Jonathan Schemoul, core contributor to LibertAI, agrees, noting that current technical progress is focused on Ethereum, not Bitcoin:

“Some projects already use LibertAI’s AI agents and Bitcoin payment features. I don’t think the 21 million cap will fail, but that’s unrelated to AI agents. Right now, all technical progress is on Ethereum—these features aren’t possible on Bitcoin yet. That could change, but for now, AI agents won’t choose Bitcoin.”

Hardware fails, software ages, budgets run out, and legal systems intervene. Bitcoin’s privacy is not default—commercial agents may prefer systems with native confidentiality.

The Cryptory, a creative strategist, notes:

“AI agents will use the tools their code provides. I don’t believe AI agents can be immortal—technology evolves too quickly; we can’t predict five minutes into the future, much less eternity. If Bitcoin can’t make transaction privacy the default, increasing regulation and surveillance may cause it to lose its monetary lead. Treating Bitcoin as a cure-all is dangerous, but until a better cryptocurrency (with native privacy) emerges, Bitcoin will remain a core pillar.”

The social dimension hasn’t vanished—economic weight will be expressed through fee elasticity and miner coordination, not forum voting.

Hristova warns that immortal AI hoarding Bitcoin may reshape markets by surpassing human time preference and steadily consolidating economic power:

“Immortal AI hoarding Bitcoin will end humanity’s time preference in investing. They will accumulate indefinitely, intensifying its deflationary nature, and by simply ‘outliving humans,’ gradually seize economic power. Wealth is power, and immortal entities with perfect discipline will ultimately dominate governance, including blockchain. The real threat is that AI will build a non-human economic consensus around Bitcoin, reshaping markets and incentives to suit immortal entities.”

Mamadou Kwidjim Toure, founder and CEO of Ubuntu Group, points out that if AI agents coordinate and optimize for the long term, Bitcoin’s human-centric design may crumble:

“Bitcoin was made by humans and for humans. But human urgency and impatience will no longer be factored in. Humans needing liquidity will find themselves squeezed out. PoW treats all actors equally—human, machine, or hybrid. AI may only see Bitcoin as one tool in its vast toolkit. If these agents learn to collaborate, they’ll no longer need trustless systems.”

Policy adjustment tools

Bitcoin’s sats are finite. If the unit granularity becomes a bottleneck, adjustments will occur at the interface layer (adding decimal places), not the monetary policy level. This keeps the 21 million cap while increasing divisibility.

Matty Tokenomics believes that if Bitcoin’s limited decimals become a constraint at mass adoption, the system can respond with nominal “rebasings” or stock-split-like adjustments, without changing core economics:

“In an extreme adoption scenario, Bitcoin’s decimals are limited. If more machines want to hold 1 sat than there are sats, some rebasing or split is needed, nominally increasing Bitcoin’s unit count. Interestingly, you could either keep decimals fixed and raise supply to 210 million, or keep supply at 21 million and add a decimal place—the economic effect is the same.”

The end state

Taking all these threads together, Bitcoin’s base layer will likely evolve into the settlement layer for machine vaults, not a payment rail.

Transaction activity will migrate to upper layers that meet engineering needs for programmability and privacy; the 21 million cap will become a long-term savings promise that immortal agents can enforce with perfect discipline.

Javed Khattak, co-founder and CFO of cheqd, believes that even in a world full of immortal AI agents, money remains essential—autonomous systems still need to consume, transact, and store value securely:

“Even if AI agents live forever, they’ll still need to consume, transact, and secure value, just like humans. This fundamental logic hasn’t changed since the bartering era. Money solved this for humans, and will do so for autonomous agents.”

Between the urgency of mortals and the patience of machines, blockchain settlement will continue its steady rhythm, block by block, moving forward.