Are Tokens Money?
Henry Kim ·
These days, people's interests ultimately converge on two things: War and money.
When war breaks out, people worry about tragedy. But at the same time, they check oil prices, interest rates, and stock prices first. It's cruel, but capital always moves first.
So, there's a question I hear frequently these days: Where will capital go next?
In my view, the core of the change isn't that currency will disappear immediately. Rather, it's that the criteria for what constitutes productivity and what generates profit are changing.
Recently, Jensen Huang called data centers not just server rooms, but "AI factories" that produce tokens. NVIDIA also explains inference infrastructure from the perspective of token productivity and profitability. This doesn't mean tokens are money. But it does mean that, at least in the AI era, computational power and inference capabilities are beginning to be treated as a new economic force. 
In fact, money was never inherently metal or paper itself. Modern money is closer to a promise that people believe others will accept. And most of it already operates on digital ledgers and credit. 
So, the question in the AI era is less "What will become money?" and more "What will people come to believe is more valuable in the future?"
In the past, those who owned factories were powerful. In the software era, those who controlled networks were powerful. Then, in the AI era, those who design computational power, data, and trust are likely to grasp the next flow of capital.
What do you think? Will the core asset of the next era still be currency, or computational power?