In April 2013, Google's head of search told Slate that the Star Trek computer was "the ideal that we're aiming to build." Thirteen years later I talk to one every day and it not only talks back, but helps me accomplish tasks and gather information just like in the show. As a lifelong Trek nerd, that's a thrill. It also made me rewatch the show with an older person's eyes, and notice the one part of Gene Roddenberry's future that still isn't here: a money that lets abundance actually reach people. This piece is about why Picard was wrong about money, and why bitcoin is closer to his future than a world without it.
The computer was the part I believed in#
I didn't watch Star Trek for the politics. Most of the politics went right over my head as a boy and young man in the 90s. I watched for the moral plays, and for a crew of competent people handling impossible situations calmly, at the highest level, without anyone screaming (mostly). A captain could lose an argument with his Klingon officer and come out of it better.
And the computer was always in the room. You said "Computer," Majel Barrett's voice answered, and it just knew things. Nobody typed. Nobody scrolled.
I wasn't the only kid who wanted one. Google's Amit Singhal told NPR in 2010 that some of his favorite childhood memories were "sitting in a room watching 'Star Trek'" and that the idea of someone talking to a computer "really piqued my interest in technology." By 2013 he was telling Slate that "Captain Kirk never pulled out a keyboard to ask a question," so speech became a design principle. At Amazon, Toni Reid, who oversaw the Amazon Echo, told the Wall Street Journal that "the original inspiration for the Amazon Echo was the Star Trek computer."
Now the thing exists, and it's getting cheap fast. In November 2024, Andreessen Horowitz tracked what it cost to run an AI model at a fixed level of ability. When GPT-3 opened to the public in November 2021, that level cost $60 per million tokens. Three years later, you could buy the same performance for $0.06. That's a thousandfold drop, roughly 10x a year, faster than computing power fell in the PC era.
So the computer arrived ahead of schedule. Which raises an obvious question for anyone who grew up on the show. If the technology is here, why doesn't life feel like the 24th century?
Then I noticed the money#
When I went back to the show as an adult, I finally heard what it was saying about money. It's said most famously in Star Trek: First Contact (1996). Lily, a woman from the 21st century, asks Picard how much the Enterprise cost to build. Picard answers:
"The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity."
Deep Space Nine played the same idea for laughs in "In the Cards." Nog wants Jake to bid on a baseball card. Jake says he's human and doesn't have money. When Nog needles him about it, Jake fires back with Picard's line: "We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity." Nog asks what that means. Jake: "It means... It means we don't need money!" Then he can't bid on the card.
This wasn't an accident. Ronald D. Moore, who wrote for The Next Generation, has recalled that Roddenberry didn't want "the concept of accumulating wealth" in his universe. The show's position is that money is a vice humanity grew out of, like war and hunger.
The show never pulled it off. Starfleet officers run tabs at Quark’s, the Federation bids 1.5 million credits in “The Price,” Sisko’s dad runs a restaurant in New Orleans, and Picard’s brother runs the family vineyard. Somebody owns that land. The fan site Ex Astris Scientia keeps the full list.
Cypherpunks happen to also be Star Trek nerds, and they noticed the contradictions. The day after First Contact opened, Bill Frantz posted to the cypherpunks mailing list, the group whose ideas on digital cash fed directly into bitcoin: "Picard states they don't have money in the 24th century... Nanotechnology must have made everything material possible, so the only reward left is status (aka reputation)." Lucky Green replied with "No money? Don't believe it." That was November 1996, twelve years before the bitcoin white paper.
What Picard's answer skips#
Lily asked a good question, and Picard dodged it. How much did the Enterprise cost? Not in dollars, in what it took. Dilithium, shipyard time, thousands of skilled people choosing to build a starship instead of a hospital or a hundred freighters. Somebody had to decide that trade was worth it.
Ludwig von Mises explained the problem in 1920, in an essay written to answer the socialists of his day: "Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation" (**Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth). Prices are how millions of strangers tell each other what's scarce and what's wanted, without a central committee having to know everything. Take them away and you haven't removed the choices. You've just made them blind, or handed them to whoever sits on the committee.
Replicators make a lot of things cheap, but they don't make everything cheap. They don't make more beachfront in New Orleans, more seats at Sisko's restaurant, more hours in a captain's day, or more bottles from the Picard vineyard. As long as anything is scarce, people need a way to decide who gets it.
Deep Space Nine knew this better than any other Trek. In "The Maquis, Part II," Sisko tells a Starfleet admiral: "On Earth, there is no poverty, no crime, no war. You look out the window of Starfleet headquarters and you see paradise. Well, it's easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Maquis do not live in paradise." Later, in "The Siege of AR-558," Quark tells Nog that humans are "a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working." Take away their creature comforts, he says, and they'll "become as nasty and violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon."
That's the most honest economics in the franchise, and it came from the Ferengi. Human virtue in Star Trek rests on abundance. The abundance doesn't come from nowhere.
AI is a replicator for thinking#
This is where the argument leaves the TV screen. AI does for a lot of 'knowledge work' what the replicator does for dinner. Drafting, translating, summarizing, coding, research: the cost is collapsing toward zero, and the thousandfold drop above is the receipt.
Falling costs from technology should mean falling prices. That's what a productive economy does when it gets better at making things. Jeff Booth built a whole book around this, The Price of Tomorrow (2020): technology pushes prices down by nature, and a money system built on debt is designed to push them back up, because falling prices make every debt heavier. Every gain gets offset with new currency.
Look at the same three years a16z measured. While the cost of that AI capability fell from $60 to six cents, the government's own consumer price index rose about 13.5%, from November 2021 to November 2024. This fall it's running at 3.7% a year, and as we argued in our recent inflation piece, that number probably understates what's happening to your dollars.
So the replicator shows up, and the grocery bill still goes up. That gap is the wedge between the Star Trek future and ours. It isn't a technology problem. It's a money problem. When the money supply expands to fight falling prices, the gains from cheap AI go first to the people closest to the new money (asset owners, borrowers, the government itself) and last to the person who saved. We've walked through how that squeezes ordinary earners in Why $100K Feels Broke in 2026.
The Star Trek future needs better money, not none#
Picard treated money as the problem. I don't think it ever was. Money is just how strangers who will never meet cooperate on things none of them could build alone. That includes starships. What goes wrong is money that someone can create at will, because then the person holding it is always the last one paid.
The fans figured this out on their own. Deep Space Nine's currency is gold-pressed latinum, and a long-running fan explanation, noted in The Making of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, is that latinum must be impossible to replicate, "given that if it could be replicated it would be worthless." In a universe where you can make anything from energy, the only thing that can work as money is the one thing nobody can make more of.
That's bitcoin. There will only ever be 21 million. A data center full of AI can't print it, a replicator couldn't, and neither can a central bank. Every coin that exists traces back through a public record anyone can check. It's the first money we've had that stays scarce no matter how cheap everything else gets.
Now run the Star Trek future on that. As AI pushes costs down, prices in bitcoin fall with them, and the savings land in the pocket of whoever holds the money, instead of being printed away. You don't have to chase returns to keep up. You can save, and saving gets you more over time, which is about as close as an economy gets to Jake's line about working "to better ourselves." Low prices from abundance, kept by the people who earned them, and earned them the honest way: by making something another person wanted badly enough to hand over money that was itself growing more valuable every year.
Back to the bridge#
What I loved about the show as a kid is still what I love about it. Competent people, hard choices, moral seriousness, overcoming all odds in a seemingly impossible situation. The crew didn't get to that future by wishing away scarcity. They got there by being the kind of people who could be trusted with abundance.
We have the computer now. We have it years ahead of Roddenberry's schedule. The piece that's still missing is the money, and the honest version of the Star Trek future doesn't abolish money. It fixes it. If you want to start holding the hard money that future needs, Bitcoin Well sends every purchase straight to a wallet you control.
Sources**#
The Star Trek computer. Amit Singhal on NPR's Weekend Edition, "Sci-Fi Inspires Engineers To Build Our Future" (2010). Singhal to Farhad Manjoo, Slate, April 11, 2013. Toni Reid's Echo quote is via the Wall Street Journal (2017), as reported by Redshirts Always Die (September 4, 2023).
AI costs. Guido Appenzeller, "Welcome to LLMflation: LLM inference cost is going down fast," Andreessen Horowitz, November 2024 ($60 per million tokens for GPT-3-level MMLU performance in November 2021, $0.06 three years later).
Prices. CPI-U, not seasonally adjusted, U.S. city average (BLS): 277.948 in November 2021, 315.493 in November 2024 (+13.5%). September 2026 CPI of 3.7% year over year (BLS release of October 14, 2026).
Star Trek dialogue. ***Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and DS9 "In the Cards" (1997) via Memory Alpha's "Money" article. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) via Memory Alpha and StarTrek.com (April 15, 2011). DS9 "The Maquis, Part II" (1994) via TrekCore and Memory Alpha. DS9 "The Siege of AR-558" (1998) via Memory Alpha. On-screen money examples via Ex Astris Scientia, "The Economy of the Federation." Latinum note via Memory Alpha's "Latinum" article, citing The Making of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine*. Ronald D. Moore on Roddenberry via CoinDesk, "Is Bitcoin science fiction come to life?"**
Cypherpunks. Bill Frantz, "Star Trek: First Contact," cypherpunks list, November 23, 1996, and Lucky Green's reply, via the venona.com archive.
Mises. ***Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth* (1920), trans. S. Adler, Mises Institute.**
Booth.** Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future (2020), paraphrased.
Originally published at bitcoinwell.com/blog
Comments
No comments yet. Start the conversation.