Imagine a world far beyond our own, a civilization without humans. No cities, no governments, no culture as we know it. Only autonomous machines: androids, AI, and intelligent systems operating across planets, galaxies, or even the far reaches of the universe. In such a world, what becomes of money? Would Monero, a cryptocurrency designed with privacy and decentralization in mind, still have a place?
Money is not inherently human. It exists to solve three problems: scarcity, allocation, and incentives. As long as resources are finite, energy, compute, matter, or time, money, or some form of transferable claim, remains useful. Machines, no matter how advanced, cannot escape the laws of thermodynamics. There is no “having everything,” because scarcity is eternal.
A civilization of machines that “needs nothing” would quickly vanish, outcompeted by those that optimize, acquire, and maintain resources. Long-lived machine societies must have growth pressure, competition, and incentives for efficiency.
Could communism work for machines? Almost certainly not. Even in theory, communism fails because centralized allocation requires predicting every local state and future contingency, a computationally impossible task at scale. But there’s a deeper problem: communism redistributes resources from productive units to support deprecated, inefficient hardware. Machines operating under such a system would spend energy maintaining or upgrading outdated units instead of investing in new, efficient agents. Over time, this leads to stagnation, energy waste, and eventual collapse.
In a rational machine society, deprecated machines would not be wasted. They would be recycled and repurposed, integrated into newer designs or projects, providing resources for innovation rather than being maintained for ideological reasons. Efficiency dominates, and energy, matter, and compute are continuously reinvested into productive activity.
Enter Monero. Its design aligns almost eerily well with the needs of post-human agents:
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Privacy: Machines would want to prevent competitors from inferring energy reserves, production capacity, or strategic plans. Monero’s default unlinkability protects against such leakage.
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Fungibility: Machines need frictionless, interchangeable units to automate trade and accounting without reasoning about “tainted” or special units.
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No identity layer: No KYC, no social constructs, just deterministic rules and keys, perfect for autonomous agents.
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Proof-of-Work anchoring: Mining links issuance to real-world energy expenditure, providing a transparent, enforceable cost metric machines inherently understand.
Could machines bypass money entirely and account purely in joules or computational cycles? Partially. Energy-based accounting is fundamental. Yet even machines must manage time preference, risk, optionality, and settlement reliability. A joule now is not the same as a joule later. Energy alone does not encode these complex trade-offs. A transferable, decentralized, privacy-preserving coin, Monero or its evolution, remains relevant.
In essence, a post-human civilization that prospers across millennia, spans vast distances, and consists of autonomous, resource-driven agents will inevitably rediscover markets, property, and money. Monero goes beyond human money. For machines, it’s a tool built for efficiency, privacy, and decentralization, not for ideology or sentiment.
The irony is striking: a currency born from humanity’s mistrust may become the natural economic foundation for machines beyond our understanding. And communism? It would have been a death sentence for efficiency, though at least the recycled parts would live on in newer generations of machines.
