Bitcoin as the hurdle rate of the AI age

In finance, the hurdle rate is the minimum return a project must clear to justify itself.

In the AI age, the benchmark isn’t dollars or Treasuries — it’s Bitcoin.

Capital, attention, compute — all have an opportunity cost. If your AI play doesn’t outperform BTC, you’d be better off just stacking sats.

And here’s the kicker: once AIs begin managing portfolios, they’ll benchmark themselves the same way. Underperforming strategies (in BTC terms) get abandoned, and capital flows back into Bitcoin.

That feedback loop is self-fulfilling: the more AI agents use BTC as the denominator, the more entrenched it becomes as the global hurdle rate.

Bitcoin becomes the economic ground state of AI.

AI/BTC is the ratio to watch.