Source: Bankless

Compiled by: Felix, PANews

Wall Street strategist Jordi Visser appeared on the program Bankless to discuss how AI is destroying software moats, reshaping the inflation landscape, and driving capital towards scarce assets, with Bitcoin at the heart of this shift. The program explored his argument that "AI is the new quantitative easing," and the potential challenges the S&P 500 may face in the AI ​​era. PANews has compiled the highlights of the conversation.

Host: Last week on CNBC you said, "I bet the next time I come back to your show, the price of Bitcoin will be huge." When are you planning to go back?

Jordi Visser: I've told the producers I won't go unless the price goes up, but I'll probably go about once every four weeks. The full context of that clip you saw is more about the world transitioning and how we'll soon see negative real interest rates. By the time the next CPI data comes out in May, it will definitely be very close to the break-even point for real interest rates. The reason I briefly talked to her about Bitcoin was that I spend most of my time working in the traditional financial world, and most of my business revolves around AI stocks and how AI is disrupting the macroeconomy, but ultimately all of this points to the same thing: this disruptive force is bigger than people imagine, and it will eventually make the benefits of Bitcoin truly apparent. Part of that is the physical limitations of AI, which is also the problem we are facing now, and part of the impending inflation.

Host: You mean that the long-term trends of the current market mechanisms are so large that they will eventually converge and end on assets with similar properties, such as Bitcoin?

Jordi Visser: Yes, this isn't speculation, it's inevitable. The digital economy has long been merging with traditional finance and the old industrial economy. From the Manhattan Project onward, we could foresee what technology would look like. Take Bitcoin as an example: Bitcoin's market capitalization is less than $2 trillion, while the fiat currency system's is close to $750 trillion. For all those bullish on Bitcoin, what you're expecting is the repricing of the dollar from one system to another. In the US economy, it's now $30 trillion. Homebuilders aren't the main driver of growth, nor are cars. The main drivers of growth now are semiconductors, artificial intelligence, robotics, and so on. But these things no longer rely on labor and human workers as they used to. So the issue of wealth distribution has been expanding since the personal computer era. AI is entering another realm, disrupting our last advantage relative to technology: our brains. Another advantage is our hands and our ability to move objects, which will also be replaced by humanoid robots. This conflict between labor and capital is arguably what angers so many people, leading to thoughts of digital currencies, decentralization, and breaking out of the system, and AI is accelerating this long-running process. That's why I say this isn't a prediction, but an inevitability.

The only question is whether Bitcoin will become the final outcome. But it has already been chosen by people. I always like to say that there are three things in the world that have been decided by people and have stood the test of time: gold, religion, and now Bitcoin. Perhaps in the future something else will be chosen as the store of value in the digital economy, but for now, in the sense of users and the only thing that has been accepted, I believe Bitcoin is inevitable.

Host: You once said that "Bitcoin is the purest form of AI trading." For many listeners, AI represents intelligence, while Bitcoin represents scarcity. How are they connected? Why is AI beneficial to Bitcoin?

Jordi Visser: Everything people own as a store of value will be disrupted by AI. Nothing you own in your lifetime will escape its influence. Some disruption has already occurred; certain jobs have been replaced. Over time, if you own a work of art, how will you know it's real? And in the future, you won't be able to distinguish authenticity online. For example, AI can already produce multilingual dubbing and lip-syncing for my videos at extremely low cost. So there will be no longer a boundary between reality and fiction. The world is changing too fast; jobs and assets you consider valuable will lose their value. I think people won't realize how fast AI is developing unless they use it all the time.

Anything created based on code in the digital economy is being killed. Salesforce, Adobe—all those businesses that once had moats have been rapidly dismantled. So I think we're at the most crucial stage for Bitcoin; it's no longer seen as software or code, but as something scarce . Scarcity has value, just like DRAM, CPUs, silver, gold, and all those other components. The question is, when will Bitcoin be seen as more of a scarce commodity? I believe that moment will come very soon.

Host: Does this explain the so-called "SaaS doomsday"? Every time Anthropic releases a new version or introduces a new feature, the stocks of those software companies plummet by 20% to 40%.

Jordi Visser: Exactly. People always ask me what the biggest risk of investing in Bitcoin is. The answer is usually quantum computing; people are afraid it will crack Bitcoin in the future. But for all software companies built on code, AI is their "quantum computing," and that's already happening. People buy stocks for the "ultimate value" of future cash flows. If in three years you can have AI write software directly with your voice, then the future value of these software companies will be zero.

Host: How does AI affect inflation and deflation? I heard you refer to AI as a new form of quantitative easing (QE), what does that mean?

Jordi Visser: Past QE (quantitative easing) was designed to save businesses from crisis. AI, as the new QE, allows companies to continue growing while laying off employees, at the expense of labor. Because AI dramatically increases productivity, it will not only make knowledge services like software cheaper, but even physical services will become extremely inexpensive through humanoid robots in the future. This is a huge deflationary force.

Host: But this sounds like a paradox: if AI is such a powerful deflationary force, why do you predict that we will face inflation of more than 4% in the short term?

Jordi Visser: Deflation will eventually prevail, but before that, we need to get through a period of "underinvestment" in physical assets. As Jensen Huang said, we are moving from the "bit" stage back to the "atom" stage. For the past 17 years, our investments in smartphones and the cloud have been in software. But now AI requires massive physical infrastructure: computing power (the chips) and electricity.

We've turned the digital economy into our world, and every appliance and car requires semiconductors. To support AI, we're desperately short of copper, silver, natural gas, and electricity. So you see a strange world: commodities are inflated, while services and wages are facing deflationary pressures.

Host: What does this mean for the stock market? Because of corporate layoffs and rising profit margins, the stock market is currently at historical highs. Will this continue?

Jordi Visser: The stock market is a discount mechanism for the future. Silicon Valley understands the disruptions happening best, so smart money is withdrawing from the software companies that will be disrupted. I think in the next 10 years, the S&P 500 may be at a similar level to now, but the overall economy will double in size.

Host: The economy has doubled in size, but the S&P 500 isn't rising? Where did all that extra value go? Was it eaten up by super AI agents and super individual entrepreneurs?

Jordi Visser: Exactly. Large publicly traded companies are the least suited to survive in this deflationary world because of their massive and difficult-to-reduce employee costs and corporate culture. In contrast, decentralized individual entrepreneurs can quickly monetize their ideas using AI. Large companies find it difficult to be so agile, and entrepreneurs will steal those profits.

Host: You wrote an article about a "Bitcoin IPO". What does that mean?

Jordi Visser: Actually, it refers to a situation where some so-called OGs sell off their holdings for some reason when Bitcoin's price is near its peak. In my opinion, this makes perfect sense; just like with an IPO, you'll see something similar with SpaceX. SpaceX just announced that it's allowing some employees to sell more stock than they would normally. The reason is that if a project you're involved in was initially worth zero but is now worth $2 trillion, it creates a huge distribution of shares, which are then taken by new ETF buyers. Just like after any company's IPO, there's a shakeout. Once that's done, the next upward breakout will be unstoppable.

Host: What's different about this cycle?

Jordi Visser: The biggest difference is that this time, when Bitcoin peaked, altcoins didn't simultaneously break all-time highs like they did in 2021. Furthermore, Bitcoin's volatility has been declining (currently around 30%), making it easier for traditional ETFs and wealth managers to include Bitcoin in their private wealth management portfolios. Conversely, due to AI disruption, tech stocks are now experiencing the same volatility as altcoins did in the past.

Host: Do you think the bottom for Bitcoin has been reached?

Jordi Visser: Yes. I've done the data, and since the white paper was released, 100% of Bitcoin's returns have been concentrated in a specific macroeconomic quadrant: when the year-on-year CPI is higher than the 3-month Treasury yield (negative real interest rate), and the Federal Reserve is holding rates steady or cutting rates. We'll soon be entering that quadrant again.

With zero new jobs created (or even negative growth excluding healthcare), the labor market is weak. Even with high inflation due to physical constraints, the Federal Reserve cannot raise interest rates and will have no choice but to bet on increased productivity from AI. Furthermore, Bitcoin is a global asset (for example, Iran uses Bitcoin to settle oil transactions), and many emerging market countries use it as a safe haven against currency devaluation.

Host: Are you optimistic about other assets in the crypto market, such as Ethereum and Solana?

Jordi Visser: AI has commoditized code and ideas instantly, making the lifespan of competitive advantages extremely short. I currently hold Ethereum and Solana , which are performing well at this stage as network infrastructure and stablecoin carriers, and may even outperform Bitcoin at times. But this is only temporary. Only Bitcoin possesses a truly sustainable competitive advantage built on scarcity. In this world, Bitcoin is irreplaceable.

Host: Can you reveal what's specifically in your current "scarcity investment portfolio"?

Jordi Visser: All assets related to the underlying infrastructure and computing power needed to support the AI ​​agent world. This includes: memory and storage (Micron, Pure Storage), chip design and manufacturing (Marvell, Nvidia, Cadence, Synopsys), and the physical commodities needed to support them (silver, lithium ALB and LAC, and Brazilian mineral resources). If you want to know what to buy, give Claude all of Jensen Huang's speeches from this year and ask him which companies he mentioned; that's basically an insider's guide to investing.

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