The Collapse of Capitalist Trust: The Inevitable Rise of AI, Automation, and Bitcoin

Author: Jordi Visser, Wall Street Analyst; Translated by: Shaw, Jinse Finance

Death Certificate: Q3 2025

The data for the third quarter of 2025, from an AI perspective, cannot be glossed over, signaling the end of capitalism.

Real GDP grew by 4.3%, the fastest pace in two years, up from 3.8% in the second quarter. Corporate profit margins hit record highs, driving a significant increase in profits. By all traditional indicators, the economy is booming. Despite concerns about the impact of tariffs on the economy and profits, all of this has been successful.

The unemployment rate rose to 4.6%. Job growth has almost stagnated. The white-collar industry is expected to experience net negative growth for the first time since 2024.

The unemployment rate rose to 4.6%. Job growth has almost stagnated. The white-collar industry is expected to experience net negative growth for the first time since 2024.

For the first time in capitalist history, there has been strong economic growth and record corporate profit margins without job creation. This is not a recession, nor is it temporary turmoil. This is the system openly declaring: our prosperity no longer needs your labor. The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index fell to 52.9, the second lowest on record, while the S&P 500 repeatedly hit new highs. This divergence is not a contradiction, but a cause-and-effect relationship. Markets value efficiency, while employees see efficiency as a synonym for unemployment. Today, indicators of economic success are directly correlated with the rate of human attrition. At this moment, the social contract—the millennia-old agreement between labor and capital—has officially ended. People may interpret this politically, but the fact is clear: we have just witnessed the rapid decline of capitalism. The Initial Transaction: To understand the whole story, we must first understand what happened. Around 8000 BC, the invention of the plow created a surplus of goods beyond what was needed for survival. This surplus enabled people to become artisans, merchants, and construction workers. In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution replicated this model: factory wages exceeded basic living expenses, and people had disposable income for saving and buying homes. A steelworker's son could become an engineer; an engineer's daughter could become a doctor. This wasn't out of altruism, but out of mechanical necessity. Businesses needed skilled workers, workers needed rising wages to become consumers, and governments needed to collect taxes from both. This mutually beneficial model worked because everyone needed each other. For the previous generation, a university degree was a passport to social advancement; hard work and standing out guaranteed a job. Today's graduates enter the job market burdened with six-figure debt, facing relentless, tireless, and exponentially evolving new competitors. The meritocracy once promised rewards for hard work. The reality is: your efforts are competing against tireless rivals. 2025: The Year Capital Decouples from Labor. The third quarter of 2025 is a turning point, revealing the true impact of artificial intelligence: it completely severs capital's dependence on labor. This is a crucial distinction when forming your own perspective. Capital still needs labor, but it no longer depends on it. Capital still uses labor as a convenient tool, but it no longer relies on it for growth. Previous technological revolutions, such as the plow, the steam engine, and electricity, while eliminating certain jobs, also created surplus value, funding new ones. Farmers became factory workers, and factory workers became office workers. Each transformation maintained a core balance: labor creates value, value generates wages, and wages generate investment surplus. Artificial intelligence disrupts this cycle. Digital employees not only replace workers but also eliminate the worker-consumer economic model upon which capitalism depends. When companies generate record profits with decreasing numbers of employees, they are not optimizing the existing system, but surpassing it. "Economic growth without job creation" is not a temporary friction, but the new normal. This pattern will continue every quarter: productivity rises, profits rise, employment falls. The key lies in this divergence. Why This Time Is Different: The Relentless Competitor

Listen to 100 podcasts about artificial intelligence and the workforce, and you'll hear the same cliché: "Will AI replace all jobs?" This is followed by, "No, new jobs will always be created, just like with every technological revolution."

Stop. This is fundamentally wrong.

We have never had a machine that is smarter than a human, can walk like a human, can work around the clock without getting tired, and can improve its intelligence every six months. This is not Industry 2.0, nor is it even a replacement of jobs. This represents the emergence of a completely new competitor to the workforce, operating under rules drastically different from any workforce in human history. When machines surpass human capabilities, they not only replace workers but also dismantle the ten-thousand-year-old contract between capital and labor, forcing affected voters to demand that governments cease regulating the market and instead guide the transition to a post-labor era. The claim that "artificial intelligence is replacing jobs" ignores the actual psychological impact of AI. AI has not replaced jobs; instead, it has spawned wave after wave of competitors—people who have just graduated from digital universities, working day and night, learning at a speed far exceeding that of humans. 2025 marks the transition of artificial intelligence from a tool to a workforce: 2023-2024: Models and Experiments; 2025: Large-Scale Product Deployment; 2026 and Beyond: Large-Scale Labor Competition, Ultimately Forming a Human Form. This is not automation in the traditional sense, but rather the saturation of the labor market. When a million digital analysts can simultaneously perform financial modeling, human analysts will not be "replaced," but rather superseded by entities that require no sleep, no negotiation, and whose capabilities grow far faster than human learning. Yes, people will still have jobs. But optimists are reluctant to mention a disturbing fact: **Relying solely on a college degree will be insufficient for survival in the future.** A four-year degree, once a guarantee of a stable middle-class life, now puts you directly in competition with digital entities possessing the equivalent of ten thousand PhDs, working around the clock, and constantly improving with each software update. For those raised in an elite system, this psychological shock is devastating. From childhood, they are instilled with the idea that hard work, good grades, and striving to be number one will lead to success. This competitive gene, this drive for hard work, intelligence, and excellence, was once the engine of capitalism. It created the successful class, the striver, and the ambitious. Now, you face competitors whose information processing speed far surpasses yours, whose memories are superb, and who continue to improve exponentially while you sleep. You can't work harder than those tireless competitors, nor can you be smarter than those who become smarter with each update. When there's no ceiling to the competition, you can't become "number one." This isn't about whether you'll lose your job because of machines, but about realizing that the system you were once taught—"effort equals reward, competition creates opportunity, ability determines outcome"—is mathematically unsustainable. The game isn't over; the rules have simply changed, making human victory structurally impossible. When 98% of humanity stops farming, they become consumers of industrial goods. What will happen to unemployed workers when artificial intelligence floods the labor market with countless competitors? "Stable" jobs, such as elderly care, nursing, and childcare, will pay so low wages that survival will be a struggle, let alone investment gains. You can't save $30,000 a year for retirement while simultaneously paying $15,000 for childcare. This creates a vicious cycle: governments lose tax revenue because workers can't compete, businesses lose customers, and consumption collapses. What's the solution? Printing money stimulates demand, causing currency originally intended for intergenerational transfer to depreciate. The social contract promises: work hard, save wisely, and accumulate lasting wealth. Artificial intelligence makes this impossible. When you compete with entities that have near-zero marginal costs, no work can create surplus value. When governments print money to maintain consumption, no savings instrument can preserve value. Because the mechanism for wealth creation—labor scarcity—has disappeared, there is no wealth to transfer. Increased squeeze: Why the numbers lie. The officially published poverty line is about $32,000 a year for a family of four. Michael Green's widely circulated analysis reveals a fact known to all those living paycheck to paycheck: This number is merely a statistical fabrication designed to downplay the obvious crisis. Greene calculated that if the Olshansky poverty line method were updated using the modern consumption share, the true poverty line for a family of four would be $130,000 to $150,000, not $32,000—a significant difference. He called the current poverty line a "deception" and pointed out how the welfare cliff traps families in what he calls the "valley of death": even with an annual income between $40,000 and $100,000, their situation could be worse because subsidies are declining faster than wages are growing. Independent living wage calculators (EPI Family Budget Calculator, GOBankingRates, SmartAsset) confirm this predicament: even with an annual income of $70,000 to $90,000, it is often barely enough to make ends meet in many major U.S. cities, leaving no savings. Below this figure, you simply cannot accumulate wealth and remain stagnant. And most American families are deeply mired in this predicament. This is not merely a matter of measurement error. The question is, what happens when asset inflation, stocks, real estate, and Bitcoin grow faster than wages by decades? In many major cities, nurses earning $65,000 a year can't afford the median rent in the area where their hospital is located. Teachers with master's degrees need to apply for food stamps. The "middle class" is effectively impoverished, as any objective statistic suggests. This creates a perfect clash: digital competitors flood the knowledge-based labor market while most workers have no savings to cope with unemployment. The economy needs wage increases to create a consumer base to support its growth. Asset holders need to curb wage growth to maintain profit margins. And now, artificial intelligence offers capital an outlet: an unlimited supply of labor with near-zero marginal cost. Green's analysis spread rapidly not because he discovered new mathematical principles, but because 60% of Americans finally saw themselves reflected in these numbers. Before the advent of the digital employee, this system was already unable to generate investment surpluses for most people. Artificial intelligence doesn't destroy existing effective mechanisms; it merely accelerates the collapse of mechanisms already shaky due to their inherent contradictions. This is why consumer confidence hovers on the brink of recession, while GDP maintains a robust growth of 3% to 4%. Official statistics show a booming economy, but people's bank accounts show they are unable to participate in this prosperity. Unrestricted digital competition is about to make both of these scenarios a reality simultaneously. The Fourth Turning Point: System Integration, Not Replacement. Bitcoin has always been designed for those seeking alternatives to the financial system. As I documented in "The Silent IPO," the initial believers, the OG investors who bought in at $100, $1,000, or even $10,000, are now selling. Billions of dollars are shifting from a few to a decentralized ownership structure. If the system is failing, why are they selling? Regardless of their initial anger towards the system, **by definition, they are now part of the top tier of wealth distribution**. Some are ideologically angry, arguing that government acceptance of Bitcoin is not the purely alternative they envisioned. But the debates about labor and Bitcoin ultimately point to the same fact: **progress is not an either-or situation**. Just as not all workers will lose their jobs, systems don't simply end and start afresh. They merge, overlap, and create transitional zones, with the old and new coexisting in an unsettling tension. We are currently experiencing this merging, which some call the "Fourth Turning Point." Consider these colliding forces: **Demographic Wealth Transfer**: As the baby boomers age, the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history is underway. Political Restructuring: Young people who had never participated in the old system voted for governments to support cryptocurrencies, reduce intermediaries that extract wealth, and, crucially, protect them from the threat of robots taking their jobs. Wealth Redistribution: Billions of dollars flowed from Bitcoin's concentrated holders to millions of new participants. This is not the radical revolution envisioned by the OGs. Governments did not collapse, and fiat currencies did not disappear. Instead, systems are merging, and in this process, the original Bitcoin OG billionaires faced a choice: either remain in a purely alternative system and watch the world change outside of them, or return to the capitalist fiat currency system with billions of dollars in assets. These billions of dollars had to go somewhere. The paradox lies here: **once you leave Bitcoin, you return to the capitalist fiat currency system that relies on scarcity, while artificial intelligence will disrupt everything on the road to wealth.** You can control this transformation, or you can be disrupted by it, but you cannot remain both pure and relevant. Those OGs who have transitioned into AI haven't abandoned their ideals. They realize that this convergence creates the greatest opportunity for profit in human history: **controlling the technology while the old system is dismantled, and the new system they helped create absorbing the transferred value.** This is a strategic move to prepare for the future world, where systems won't simply replace each other but will merge in some way, creating asymmetrical opportunities for those who understand both. It's not contradictory for young voters to demand government support for cryptocurrencies while simultaneously demanding protection from AI replacement. They intuitively grasp what older generations rationally understood: **convergence is opportunity.** The flow of billions of dollars from Bitcoin whales to millions of users is not bad news. It's an inevitable diffusion process that occurs when an alternative system becomes mainstream. Those concentrated holders who cashed out when Bitcoin reached $100,000 understand something most people don't: these billions can now appreciate faster in AI infrastructure than in Bitcoin itself, but this is only for the next 3 to 5 years, only during the convergence period, and only if you understand that this bet on AI is fake gold disguised as genius. Just as AI will compete with workers, it will also compete with the most critical processes in the capitalist system—from idea to commercialization to building moats. The entire venture capital model relies on companies building defensible advantages through years of proprietary technology, network effects, brand loyalty, and regulatory capture. AI disrupts this timeline. When programming barriers disappear and development speed increases tenfold, fierce competition will occur faster than moats form. Yes, companies will rise faster, but they will also fall faster because competitors will roll out the same solutions within months, weeks, or even days (not years). This speed will disrupt those trying to chase the winners. By the time you find the "next AI giant," three competitors may already have emerged with superior implementations. The OGs betting on AI infrastructure understand that they are not building permanent moats, but riding a wave that will eventually collapse. The rewards are so high precisely because the window of opportunity is short. And then what? What happens when AI commoditizes software development and destroys the competitive advantage of entire industries? The only ones that will survive are those that did not rely on human innovation cycles, regulatory protection, or differentiated competitive advantages from the outset. Mathematics. Scarcity. Code. Then, after the chaos, after the integration, after the complete separation of capital and labor, Bitcoin became the only store of value to survive intact, because it was the only recognized asset unaffected by this systemic upheaval. This is not ideological purity, but rather a temporary arbitrage during a period of civilizational transition. Bitcoin: A pressure relief valve for a failing system. The rise in Bitcoin's price is not due to economic chaos, but rather to the collapse of the very mechanisms of capitalism. When governments devalue their currencies to provide security for workers unemployed due to endless digital competition, scarcity must be reflected in mathematics, not policy. When corporations reward shareholders while simultaneously injecting tireless competitors into the labor market, the store of value must exist outside their control. When the social contract becomes a lie to young people, they will write their own contract with immutable code. The 21 million Bitcoin cap is not a characteristic of Bitcoin, but rather a constitutional amendment to post-labor capitalism. In an AI-driven world of abundance and an unlimited labor supply, absolute scarcity becomes the only reliable store of value. Everything else, including fiat currency, bonds, and even real estate, depends on workers creating surplus value. This dependence has crumbled. The timing was perfect. Bitcoin gained widespread acceptance from US institutions between 2024 and 2025, when labor market data had not yet revealed the severity of the crisis. The early adoption of Bitcoin was driven by the widespread misconception that AI would enhance rather than replace the existing economy. Now, with the release of Q3 2025 data, the truth is gradually emerging, and institutional capital's exit strategy is becoming clear: shifting from assets denominated in depreciating currencies to mathematically scarce alternatives. Even if 2% of global pension assets ($59 trillion) were to shift to Bitcoin, that would represent an inflow of $1.2 trillion. This isn't speculation, but rather a matter of fiduciary duty, as the alternative is to hold government bonds backed by economies unable to provide employment for their citizens. Convergence: 2026 In 2026, three forces collide, making a divisive situation undeniable: Accelerated AI Deployment: Layoffs go from predictions to "labor optimization" metrics in quarterly reports; abstract concepts become layoffs; digital competitors move from prototype to mass production. Political Reckoning: When democratic socialists win elections with platforms that explicitly reject market solutions, such as Zoran Mamdani's victory in New York City, it indicates that voters believe the existing economic system cannot be fixed through gradual reforms. If this trend spreads during the US midterm elections, it means voters are demanding systemic change. Institutional Capital Rotation: When pension funds managing millions in retirement savings invest heavily in Bitcoin, they are effectively declaring a loss of faith in the system they've upheld for decades. The traditional financial system's admission that this contract has been broken undoubtedly permanently validates the rationale behind hedging strategies. 2026 will not break this contract. But in that year, the breakdown will become too obvious to deny. Choice: Building or Ruins? The question is not whether the old contract survives. Walk into any city: luxury buildings stand alongside homeless encampments, record profits coexist with record pessimism, and degrees only guarantee debt, not employment. The old contract is already dead in name only. The question is: What are we rebuilding from the ruins? Artificial intelligence delivers extraordinary returns because it acts like a demolition crew, ruthlessly and efficiently destroying the old system. Investors should hold this deal, as it represents the highest risk-adjusted return in human history. But demolition crews cannot design the future. Bitcoin is the blueprint for post-labor capitalism. It is the constitutional draft of a world where capital no longer needs labor; it was not written in blood and revolution, but in cold, unalterable mathematical logic. Those who are positioning themselves early are not merely preventing collapse. They are defining a completely new system: how it will evolve as an endless stream of digital competitors floods every labor market, forcing humanity to redesign the entire concept of value, ownership, and intergenerational wealth transfer. The plow freed humanity from the constraints of widespread agriculture. Artificial intelligence may just completely liberate capital from the constraints of labor shortages. Bitcoin is precisely how we encode scarcity (and value) in that new world. Conclusion: You are living in a fracture. The fracture will not come. The third quarter of 2025 has already proven this: **capitalism can now create wealth without labor.** All institutions built on the opposite assumptions—governments, pension systems, education systems, real estate markets—are now shaky. Those OG investors who sold Bitcoin were not wrong in their bullish stance on AI. They were right. AI is breaking the social contract, which is worth trillions of dollars. But they also understand what will happen after it's broken: money will flow to assets that don't rely on systems that AI is dismantling. When capital and labor are permanently separated, when digital competitors flood every market, when GDP soars while market sentiment collapses, what can store value for a prosperous future? Not currency backed by productive labor, not bonds issued by governments with declining tax revenue, and not stocks of companies that no longer need customers in fierce competition. Mathematics. Scarcity. Code. The greatest transfer of wealth is not measured in currency, but in rewriting a ten-thousand-year-old covenant of human civilization. You are not too early, but just in time. Act accordingly.