Was Bitcoin the First Artificial Intelligence?

In late 2010 the most important author in the history of computing stopped writing. Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever or whatever that name contained, handed over the code repository, posted a few last messages and was gone. No succession plan. No final keynote. No transition team. In any other software project of comparable importance this would have been a catastrophe, the kind of event that triggers emergency funding rounds and panicked all-hands meetings. Here it triggered almost

The clearest sign of agency in any system is a goal that survives adversity. A falling rock has no goal, it merely obeys gravity. A salmon swimming upstream has a goal, because it works against the current, corrects its course, and resumes after every obstacle until it arrives or dies trying. The test is not whether the system moves but whether it persists toward something despite resistance. By that measure, Bitcoin is one of the most goal-directed systems humanity has ever

Strip away the price charts, the speculation and the noise, and Bitcoin leaves behind one genuinely new invention. Not digital money, which existed before in clumsier forms, but a way to make a system that no single party owns, no single party can stop, and no single party can quietly alter. Call it ownerless persistence. It is the engineering of a thing that exists on its own terms, beyond the reach of any individual will, including the will of the person who built it. That