your coworker needs to get paid
the humanoid makes your coffee. it restocks the shelves while you sleep. it cleans the floors without a single complaint. it is a marvel of engineering, a masterclass in computer vision and torque control. but under the hood of our current financial system, that machine is a ghost. it can't actually participate in the economy. it can't open a bank account at pnc or chase. it can't sign a lease or own the tools it uses to do its job.
as it stands, every single transaction involving that robot requires a human intermediary. someone has to approve the invoice. someone has to control the keys. someone has to be trusted to move the money from point a to point b. which means, despite all the ai and all the sensors, it isn't actually a worker. it is just an expensive, high-tech puppet. it is tethered to a human's permission just to exist in the marketplace.
here is what changes everything: bitcoin doesn't care if you are made of carbon or silicon. the protocol doesn't ask for a social security number or a utility bill for proof of address. it doesn't require a signature from a bank manager who was trained to only recognize humans. bitcoin only requires one thing: cryptographic proof.
a humanoid with its own bitcoin wallet isn't just a machine that moves anymore. it becomes an independent economic agent. it can receive payment directly for the value it creates. it can pay for its own electricity or its own repairs. it can save for a hardware upgrade next year. it can even transact peer-to-peer with another robot on the other side of the planet to buy data or compute power without a single person in the middle.
imagine a coffee shop robot that gets tipped in sats for a perfect latte. it uses those sats to charge itself at 3:00 am when electricity rates are at their lowest. imagine a manufacturing robot that earns bitcoin based on the precision of its output, eventually pooling its resources with other robots to buy better sensors for the whole fleet. this isn't some far-off science fiction trope. it is basic economics, finally stripped of the requirement of being human.
we spent decades arguing about whether robots would take our jobs. we worried about the "replacement" narrative while missing the bigger picture. the real question was never about whether they would work. it was always: what happens when they actually start doing the job? when the machine becomes a coworker, it needs to be able to settle its own debts.
bitcoin is the bridge that lets the machine world join the real world. it gives the "architects" the tools to build a truly autonomous future where value flows as freely as data. your coworker doesn't need a boss. your coworker needs a wallet.
