Macro Investor Links Bitcoin Rise to AI Disruption

Macro investor Jordi Visser has published an essay arguing that Bitcoin is “the purest AI trade.” This claim, he says, has been a recurring theme in his videos, Substack posts, and conversations with Anthony Pompliano. The essay, titled "You Don’t Find Bitcoin, Bitcoin Finds You: Why It’s the Purest AI Trade," presents a personal and macro-economic narrative that Visser believes links artificial-intelligence disruption to the rise of the world’s first decentralized digital asset.

Visser, who now heads AI Macro Nexus Research at 22V Research, has a background that includes three decades of trading derivatives at Morgan Stanley, running a global-macro hedge fund, and serving as president and CIO of Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers. He frames the essay as a response to critics who “don’t see it or understand it.”

Visser’s journey to this conclusion involved three distinct steps and four accelerating forces. The three steps were “personal awakening, macro-economic context, and the recognition of Bitcoin as foundational infrastructure for the digital economy.” The four forces he identifies span monetary policy, technology, and sovereignty. The first force is “unprecedented fiscal and monetary intervention,” which Visser believes marked the end of the global government debt super-cycle and the dollar as the global reserve currency. The pandemic-era explosion in government spending exposed the limits of fiat systems propped up by central bank liquidity.

The second force centers on structural deflation: “deflationary pressure from exponential technologies.” Visser sees AI and automation as not just economic disruptors but forces that drive prices downward across the board, pressuring legacy systems built on perpetual inflation and debt. The third pillar of his argument is institutional erosion. “Accelerating institutional obsolescence through AI,” he warns, will hollow out bureaucracies and corporate incumbents that are too slow to adapt to exponential change. Finally, Visser cites “Bitcoin’s emergence as a sovereign digital asset—independent, decentralized, and not defined by any nation-state.” In contrast to fiat currencies reliant on state power and monetary intervention, Bitcoin exists as an autonomous, verifiable infrastructure layer for the digital economy.

Visser dates his “personal awakening” to early 2021, when the pandemic-era money print collided with a household epiphany: “Asset prices jumped and crypto prices were rising daily, and I was struck by the fact that my 13-year-old son … could explain the space in a way that I could not understand.” That curiosity pushed him toward Michael Saylor’s corporate-treasury bet on Bitcoin and Paul Tudor Jones’s description of the asset as “the fastest horse in the race,” convincing him that “Bitcoin [was] a rational response to an irrational system looking for a new one.”

The second intellectual milestone came through Jeff Booth’s book The Price of Tomorrow, from which Visser lifts the line: “Innovation is always deflationary for the economy so the baseline for inflation is always negative.” Booth’s argument, he says, revealed “an Economic Trilemma” in which a debt-laden industrial economy can only survive by tapping government balance-sheets, even as a capital-light digital economy accelerates away. The result, he warns, is a fragile fiat system propped up by “artificially low rates, quantitative easing, and fiscal stimulus” that cannot be maintained indefinitely.

Visser’s third pivot came with Marc Andreessen’s 2014 essay Why Bitcoin Matters. Andreessen’s framing of the Bitcoin white paper as a monetary protocol—“on par with the creation of the internet itself”—convinced Visser to stop viewing Bitcoin as a challenger to sovereign currency and start seeing it as “the base-layer for a new, decentralized economic system.” Stablecoins, he concedes, may bridge fiat and crypto, but they remain “tethered to the very institutions they’re trying to outrun.”

The final, self-described “force” is AI itself: “For years, we’ve said software is eating the world. But now, AI is eating software and soon it will eat everything in its path.” He argues that intelligent agents will erode the scarcity premia that support most legacy assets, leaving Bitcoin—algorithmically finite and independent of any issuer—as “sovereignty at digital scale.” In one of the essay’s bleakest forecasts he writes, “AI will destroy everything eventually—not maliciously, but systematically. And the economic system we’ve built on top of scarcity, debt, and centralization is not equipped to survive it.”

Visser closes by channelling Saylor’s mantra—“You don’t find Bitcoin, Bitcoin finds you”—to explain why adoption is emerging first in the periphery: retail investors in emerging markets, smaller firms outcompeted by big-tech AI monopolies, and early-mover states. “This bottom-up foundation is setting the stage for a future top-down capital rotation as FOMO and greed eventually force more and more of the doubters in,” he concludes. “That’s why Bitcoin is, in many ways, the purest AI trade—an opt-out of a system being reshaped by intelligence no one fully controls.”