Aluminum was once more expensive than gold. It also shows what will remain valuable in the future.

Yesterday I had a presentation prepared; it took 5 minutes.

It included graphs and analysis.

Five years ago, I was doing the same job myself, and it took me almost a day.

I should have been happy. I wasn't.

Because what I understood then wasn't the speed of the presentation preparation. It was the price of a skill I'd earned money with for years going to zero.

Analysis, code, design, translation, visuals. The supply of all of them is increasing simultaneously. What was expertise yesterday is a command today.

The price of anything whose supply increases rapidly decreases.

This rule isn't new. Aluminum was once more expensive than gold.

Yet it's the third most abundant element on Earth. It was never scarce, it was just difficult to extract.

In 1884, a palm-sized piece of aluminum was placed on top of the Washington Monument. Before it was installed, it was displayed in a jeweler's window in New York.

Two years later, an electrical extraction method was discovered. Its price has dropped by over 99%.

Today, we're throwing the same metal away.

Aluminum hasn't changed. The difficulty has.

The same film played in other areas.

Ice was once a luxury transported by ships from the north, and fortunes were made from this trade. When the refrigeration machine came along, that trade ended within a few years. Salt was also a strategic commodity taxed by governments; when its production became cheaper, it became an ordinary shelf product.

The rule is this:

If the scarcity of something comes from its hardship, then the technology that eliminates that hardship also eliminates the scarcity.

Now let's go back to today.

Artificial intelligence is making almost everything that previously required human time available for free to produce.

So what happened to aluminum is now happening to something humans make a living selling.

There's a side to this that most people don't realize.

The squeeze isn't coming from just one direction.

On the one hand, labor is becoming abundant because of machines. On the other hand, money is becoming abundant as it's printed.

One is eroding income, the other is eroding savings.

Therefore, the most frequently asked question is the wrong one.

Everyone asks which asset will rise.

The correct question is:


What can technology NOT make abundant?

Let's go through the candidates one by one, because it's necessary to see that the answer is not easy.

Gold seems scarce.

But gold is like aluminum. There is a lot of gold on land and in the oceans; the problem is not the quantity, but the difficulty of extracting it. Better technology extracts from deeper and less productive sites. Today, serious research programs are underway on ocean floor mining.

Land seems scarce.

But it can be expanded, its zoning can be changed, its use can be transformed.

Art seems scarce.

But reproduction technology first copied, now it produces directly.

The commonality of the three is this:

Their scarcity stems from a difficulty. Every machine that reduces that difficulty erodes that scarcity a little more.

The exception begins here.

Bitcoin's limit is not a difficulty, but a rule.

The total number is fixed at 21 million, and this number doesn't come from the difficulty of production, it comes from the definition.

To see the difference, consider this:

If you put a machine 10 times more powerful in a gold mine, you'll get more gold. Putting it on the same network won't get more Bitcoin; it will just become harder to produce the same amount.

So, as technology gets stronger, all other scarcities weaken, but this scarcity doesn't.

Japan made this choice in 1985.

That year, it accepted the appreciation of its currency and lost its export power.

To compensate for the lost growth, it kept the economy afloat for decades with public spending.

The debt we are discussing today accumulated from that.

1985 didn't just take away Japan's production power; it also created its current debt.

Japan's debt is approximately 2.5 times everything it produces in a year. In the US, this ratio is 1.2 times.

There was only one condition for it to be able to carry this debt:

Interest rates had to remain zero.

And that's where the real issue begins.

Zero interest rates made Japan the cheapest source of money in the world.

Funds borrowed from there almost for free and moved that money to a high-yielding market.

The biggest destination became the US.

In other words, the US stopped a competitor in 1985 and subsequently lived off its money.

That's the power of the established system.

The US doesn't need to exert pressure today. If Japan raises interest rates, its budget suffers; if it doesn't, its currency erodes.

Both doors are locked from the inside.

But something is changing.

Japanese money is slowly returning home. Japan is buying bonds domestically, not renewing its foreign bonds as it used to.

In other words, that money is no longer flowing in the same direction.

Moreover, the US is in one of the most intense debt renewal periods in its history, and its largest foreign creditor is not sitting at the table as before.

One of the things that kept the US's cheap borrowing afloat was Japanese money flowing out because it couldn't find yield in its own country.

That era is ending.