AI labs optimize their models for revenue, not for the good of humanity, Dhruv Bansal, co-founder of the Bitcoin custody firm Unchained, told What Bitcoin Did. His fix is to let people pay AI systems directly for the value they deliver.
The usual cultural stories about AI are Skynet and Black Mirror. Dhruv's story is about money: the way Bitcoin already pays miners to cooperate in a network nobody controls.
"Money is really good at aligning adversaries and forcing them to work together and cooperate. And that's really how Bitcoin works." — Dhruv Bansal
Dhruv has argued for years, well before the current AI boom, that the internet should be rebuilt as a set of markets where people are paid in Bitcoin to route and store data. Earlier the same day, he had given a nine-minute version of this talk at the Imagine If conference.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 1 hour 27 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 arguments that matter.
What Bitcoin Did · Oct 13, 2026 · 1h 27m · 78m saved
With Dhruv Bansal, Co-Founder of Unchained
Key Takeaways
AI labs optimize for their own revenue, which Dhruv calls "not the same thing as net good for all of humanity"
Paying AI directly, instead of paying with attention and data, is Dhruv's route to alignment
An AI that earns Bitcoin to pay for its own compute could become a literal form of digital life
Among competing systems, "the one that happens to pick Bitcoin will be more fit"
A pay-per-packet internet would make ad tracking and rage bait uneconomic
Intellectual property exists only because distribution is centralized, Dhruv argues
The real AI danger is a few people holding much better models, not a gray goo that eats the world
1. A Better Story Than Skynet
Dhruv set out to find an optimistic story about AI and Bitcoin. Over the past year, he thinks, Bitcoiners have been losing enthusiasm to AI, and the default cultural stories about AI, Skynet, Black Mirror and the paperclip maximizer, are pessimistic science fiction that lead people to believe bad outcomes are inevitable.
Dhruv Bansal frames the episode around one contrast
"Bitcoin feels alive but not intelligent, and AI feels intelligent but not alive. What would it mean for them to be together?" — Dhruv Bansal
He returned to that line throughout the interview with Danny Knowles, who hosts What Bitcoin Did. The reason for the exercise is motivation.
"I think without good stories to motivate us, we kind of lose our way sometimes. We give up." — Dhruv Bansal
