08/04/2026
I'm recommending Jordi Visser's latest Substack: The Age of Abundant Intelligence and Scarce Bitcoin. This is an important piece for all investors. Here is a summary of the article: Jordi Visser: AI, Scarcity and Why Bitcoin May Be the Purest AI Trade
Executive Summary
Jordi Visser's central thesis is that AI is fundamentally changing how investors should value assets. Rather than simply making companies more productive, AI is compressing the lifespan of competitive advantages (moats). This creates a world where corporate winners become less predictable while truly scarce assets become increasingly valuable.
His most important conclusion for digital asset investors is this:
Bitcoin is no longer simply a hedge against fiat debasement. It is becoming a hedge against AI-driven debasement of corporate value.
Five Key Takeaways
1. AI is Compressing Investment Time
Traditional investing assumes that great companies can maintain competitive advantages for decades.
Visser argues AI changes this assumption:
products are built faster
competitors emerge faster
software advantages disappear faster
terminal values become much harder to estimate
The implication is profound:
The market is beginning to value "duration of advantage" more than current earnings.
2. July's Volatility Crossover Matters
One observation particularly stood out.
During July:
AI technology stocks experienced record internal volatility.
Bitcoin remained near multi-year lows in realized volatility despite a significant correction.
Visser argues this is not a coincidence.
The market is becoming:
less certain about future corporate cash flows
more certain about Bitcoin's monetary properties
That represents a major psychological shift among institutional investors.
3. Double Debasement
This is probably the article's most memorable concept.
Historically investors worried about:
Fiat debasement
→ governments print money.
Now there is a second form:
Moat debasement
→ AI prints competition.
Therefore:
cash loses value through inflation
companies lose value through faster competition
Only assets that cannot be diluted by either process become increasingly attractive.
4. Bitcoin May Be the Purest AI Trade
This is where Visser's argument becomes particularly relevant for CryptoTradingAcademe.
His reasoning:
AI can:
write software
replace workers
compress margins
destroy corporate moats
AI cannot:
create more than 21 million Bitcoin
change Bitcoin's issuance schedule
weaken its monetary scarcity
As AI makes intelligence abundant, digital scarcity becomes even more valuable.
5. The New Investment Hierarchy
Visser proposes a four-layer investment framework:
Own physical bottlenecks
compute
power
networking
data centres
Own trusted distribution
companies that package AI into enterprise products
Re-underwrite every moat
ask how much depends on intelligence remaining scarce
Own monetary scarcity
Bitcoin
highly liquid scarce assets
This is perhaps the most practical section of the paper.
What This Means for CTA
Several of Visser's ideas align closely with the philosophy we've been developing for the CTA Market Intelligence Brief.
✓ Trade the Evidence, Not the Narrative
Visser repeatedly emphasizes Bayesian thinking:
update probabilities as evidence changes
rather than becoming emotionally attached to stories.
That mirrors CTA's evidence-based methodology almost perfectly.
✓ Scarcity Will Outperform Abundance
Markets are entering an era where:
AI → abundance
Capital seeks → scarcity
This strengthens long-term conviction in:
Bitcoin
digital stores of value
tokenized scarce assets
certain real-world assets (RWAs)
✓ Bitcoin Volatility Is Evolving
One of the strongest observations is not philosophical but empirical.
Bitcoin:
absorbed a meaningful correction
maintained historically low realized volatility
behaved more like a mature institutional asset than in prior cycles
If this trend persists, institutional portfolio allocations could continue to increase.
Full paper is at this link:
“Two presses running at once. One dilutes the unit you measure wealth in. The other dilutes the durability of the corporate claims you bought to protect that wealth.”
