# The Long Game: The Ultimate Resource

*October 2, 2026, Dennis W. Davis*

> The Ultimate Resource

*The Long Game is the Hashpoint's essay series: the ideas that play out over decades, not days. Bitcoin Hashpoint, October 2, 2026*

![Simon and Ehrlich's five metals, 1980 to 1990. All five fell in real terms, and Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07. Illustration.](https://bitcoinhashpoint.com/content/art/2026-10-02-long-game/ur-hero-the-wager-8117bde5-1600.jpg)

Simon and Ehrlich's five metals, 1980 to 1990. All five fell in real terms, and Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07. Illustration.

Here is the sentence this essay exists to defend: Bitcoin will cause an explosion of the most powerful force currently known in the universe, human creativity.

That is a large claim for a monetary network, so start with a smaller claim that already won a bet.

In the autumn of 1980, the economist Julian Simon made a bet with the biologist Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich believed a growing population would exhaust the planet's raw materials and drive their prices up. Simon believed the opposite. The two picked five metals, copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten, and staked $1,000 on where their inflation-adjusted prices would stand in ten years. In 1990 all five had fallen, and Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07.

Simon had already written down why he expected to win. His 1981 book gave the argument its name. "The ultimate resource is people," he wrote: minds that find substitutes and new sources whenever a price signals a shortage. Scarcity, in his account, is an invitation, and human ingenuity keeps accepting it.

This edition asks what happens to that ultimate resource when the money it works with gets better. The question matters over the next ten years because the doors are already open. None of what follows needs a new invention. It needs people walking through doors that exist today.

## What bad money taxes

Money is the tool creativity uses to reach across time. A potter saves for a better kiln. A family puts away a little every month so a daughter can go to school instead of to work. Every one of those plans rests on one assumption: the money saved today will still buy something tomorrow.

The Hashpoint covered the arithmetic of the dollar in "The House That Keeps Getting Cheaper." At the Federal Reserve's 2 percent target, a dollar loses half its purchasing power in about 35 years. That is the gentle version. In 2023, prices in Argentina rose 211 percent. A saver there does not plan a kiln. A saver there spends every week defending what she already has.

Weak money redirects human effort from making things to protecting things. It pushes savings into houses and stock indexes, not because people want to be landlords and fund managers, but because cash melts. It shortens horizons. When inflation taxes the future, people live in the present.

Sound money reverses that pull. When savings hold their value, time and capital flow back toward long projects: the book, the company, the research, the child's education. That is the mechanism behind the sentence at the top. Bitcoin does not create creativity. It removes a tax on it.

## Six doors already open

### The 1.3 billion

The World Bank's Global Findex, published in July 2025, found 79 percent of the world's adults with an account at a bank or mobile money provider, a record. The same survey counted 1.3 billion adults still outside the system. Around 900 million of those unbanked adults own a mobile phone, and more than 530 million own a smartphone.

That last figure is the door. A phone and a Bitcoin wallet make a bank account that no bank has to approve. In Africa, a service called Machankura goes further: it runs Bitcoin over USSD, the same short-code menus people already use to check airtime, so a basic feature phone with no internet can hold and send bitcoin. It reaches ten countries and about 39,000 phones today. The number is small. The pipe is real, and it fits in the pocket of a billion people.

Imagine the creative output of a billion people who can finally save and plan past next week.

### The remittance toll

Migrants sent an estimated $685 billion home to low- and middle-income countries in 2024, according to the World Bank. That money pays school fees and starts shops. It also pays a toll. In the third quarter of 2025, sending $200 cost an average of 6.36 percent. Through a bank, it cost 14.99 percent. Into Sub-Saharan Africa, the most expensive region, it cost 8.46 percent. The world's governments set a target of 3 percent by 2030.

At the average rate, the toll on $685 billion comes to more than $40 billion a year. The Lightning Network moves value in seconds for a fraction of a cent. Every dollar that stops leaking to an intermediary lands in a household that has already decided how to use it.

![The cost of sending $200 home in the third quarter of 2025, against the 3 percent target for 2030.](https://bitcoinhashpoint.com/content/art/2026-10-02-long-game/ur-remittance-toll-aabf7f3a-1600.jpg)

The cost of sending $200 home in the third quarter of 2025, against the 3 percent target for 2030.

### Paying the makers

Today a musician or a writer usually reaches an audience through a platform, and the platform takes its cut: 30 percent on a standard app store sale, 45 percent of the ad revenue on the largest video site. The algorithm decides who the audience sees, and the creator rents the relationship with her own fans.

Bitcoin's Lightning Network lets a fan pay a creator directly, in amounts as small as a single satoshi. On Nostr, an open social protocol, users send those tips as "zaps," and by May 2025 they had sent 5 million of them. Podcast apps built on the value-for-value model stream a few sats per minute from listener to host while an episode plays. Across the network, Lightning carried about 12 million payments a month by late 2025 and $1.17 billion in November 2025 alone.

A decade of that gives the artist a customer instead of an algorithm.

### Funding the commons

Bitcoin itself runs on open-source software that no company owns. OpenSats, a public charity that passes every donated dollar straight to developers, has now granted $36.6 million to 413 builders in more than 40 countries, about $1 million a month, with fees on its payouts under 0.001 percent. Its grantees in 2025 alone referenced more than 10,000 pull requests in their progress reports.

That is a new way to pay for public goods. A developer in Lagos or Buenos Aires can maintain software that the whole world uses, funded by people who value it, with no employer's permission and no border in the way.

### Energy looking for a buyer

![on chain network state hashrate over time panel](https://bitcoinhashpoint.com/content/panels/2026-10-02-long-game/on-chain-network-state-hashrate-over-time-93b92434.png)

Bitcoin's hashrate, the computing power securing the network, which crossed 1 zettahash per second in 2025.

Most leaps in human output have ridden cheaper energy. Bitcoin mining turns out to be the most flexible buyer of energy ever built. It can switch off in seconds and pay for power nobody else can use.

The numbers have moved fast. Cambridge's 2025 survey of the mining industry put sustainable sources at 52.4 percent of mining's power, up from 37.6 percent in 2022, while coal fell from 36.6 percent to 8.9 percent. One company alone, Crusoe, captured nearly 22 billion cubic feet of natural gas that oil fields would otherwise have flared and cut about 2.7 million metric tons of emissions. In Texas, mining load reached 4,288 megawatts by November 2025, and miners power down when the grid needs the electricity for homes. Riot Platforms earned $30.6 million in curtailment credits in a single quarter for doing exactly that. In Finland, MARA pipes the heat off its machines into district heating that warms about 80,000 residents.

A buyer that pays for stranded and surplus power makes it worth building more power. Over a decade, that means more generation and cheaper energy for everything else people want to make.

### Machines that pay

On February 12, 2026, Lightning Labs released open-source tools that let AI agents run Lightning nodes and pay for what they use under a standard called L402. An agent that hits a paywall pays a Lightning invoice, receives proof of payment and moves on. It needs no account and no API key.

That sounds like plumbing, and it is. It also opens markets too small to exist before: a fraction of a cent for one paragraph or one query. When software can earn and spend in tiny increments, every person with a useful dataset or a single good answer can sell it to the world. Creativity gets a price tag small enough for anyone to meet.

## A sketch of 2036

By 2036 the network will have issued about 99.2 percent of all the bitcoin there will ever be. The supply question will have its answer. The interesting question will be what people built on top of it.

Picture a young illustrator in Lagos who sells a commission to a studio in Seoul from a feature phone and has the money before she finishes her tea. Her savings still buy what they bought last year.

Picture a retired machinist in Ohio who streams a grant, a few dollars a day, to a developer in Manila maintaining open-source firmware for a low-cost medical monitor.

Picture a songwriter who owns her audience outright and earns from every listen, with the money coming from listeners rather than a platform.

Picture a town in the north heated by the computers that secure the world's savings, and an oil field in the Permian whose flare stack became a data hall.

Picture an AI agent that buys a weather dataset for 30 sats, pays a translator's model for one page and tips the writer whose essay it quoted.

None of these pictures requires a breakthrough. Each one exists today at small scale. The decade's work is scale.

## The work left

Optimism earns its keep by counting what remains. Lightning's public capacity stood near 4,898 bitcoin in May 2026, below its December 2025 record of 5,637. Machankura counts its phones in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of millions. Bitcoin's price still swings hard enough to keep many families from saving in it, and the Hashpoint's structural gauge has sat in Fear since January. Doors stand open. The crowd has not walked through most of them yet.

That is the good news, read the right way. The infrastructure arrived before the people did. Every figure in this essay has room to grow by orders of magnitude.

## What to watch

These markers would say the explosion has started. None of them needs a date.

1. The global average cost of sending $200 falling toward the 3 percent target, from 6.36 percent in the third quarter of 2025.

2. The next Global Findex counting fewer than 1.3 billion unbanked adults, with phone-based wallets doing the work.

3. Lightning's public capacity back above its record of 5,637 bitcoin, and monthly payments well past 12 million.

4. OpenSats grants past $50 million, with the list of grantee countries still growing.

5. The next Cambridge mining survey showing sustainable sources above 52.4 percent.

6. Agent payments over L402 showing up as a measurable share of Lightning traffic.

## The Hashpoint read

Julian Simon won his bet because people solve problems when prices tell the truth and the rewards reach the person who solved them. Bitcoin sharpens both halves of that. It gives savers a price that does not drift down by design, and it lets a reward cross any border in seconds, in amounts as small as a single satoshi.

Put that money in the hands of eight billion people, a billion of them banked for the first time, and Simon's ultimate resource gets its best tool yet.

Bitcoin will cause an explosion of the most powerful force currently known in the universe, human creativity. The next ten years are when we find out how loud it gets.

*Data: Simon-Ehrlich wager (September 29, 1980 to September 29, 1990; check for $576.07); Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource (1981); World Bank Global Findex 2025 (July 29, 2025; 79% of adults with an account, 1.3 billion unbanked, about 900 million unbanked with a mobile phone, 530 million with a smartphone); World Bank remittance estimates ($685 billion to low- and middle-income countries in 2024) and Remittance Prices Worldwide, Q3 2025 (6.36% global average for $200; banks 14.99%; Sub-Saharan Africa 8.46%); INDEC (Argentina 2023 inflation, 211%); TechCabal, March 4, 2026 (Machankura: ten countries, about 39,000 phones); Spark research, 2026 (Lightning public capacity 4,898 BTC in May 2026, record 5,637 BTC in December 2025, about 12 million monthly payments and $1.17 billion in November 2025, 5 million Nostr zaps by May 2025); OpenSats (2025 year in review; $36.6 million to 413 grantees as of September 2026); Cambridge Digital Mining Industry Report, April 2025; Crusoe and ERCOT figures via Spark research, 2026; Riot Platforms Q3 2025 curtailment credits; Mother Jones, January 2026 (MARA district heating in Finland); The Block, February 12, 2026 (Lightning Labs L402 agent tools). The remittance toll multiplies the $200 average rate by total flows as an illustration; larger transfers cost less. Issuance share for 2036 assumes the halving schedule at block 1,470,000. Structural reads, not forecasts. Nothing here is investment advice.*

---

Source: https://bitcoinhashpoint.com/the-hashpoint-for-2026-10-02-long-game/  
Feed: https://bitcoinhashpoint.com/rss.xml  
Numbers: https://bitcoinhashpoint.com/the-hashpoint-for-2026-10-02-long-game/numbers.json  
Dashboard: https://dashboard.bitcoinhashpoint.com/static/dashboard.html