Traditional crypto (Bitcoin, Ethereum) is bottlenecked by blockchain constraints: slow finality (minutes to hours), high energy per transaction, limited throughput. In contrast, AI systems (especially large-scale inference from providers like Anthropic) handle billions of micro-transactions or value transfers daily via API calls, tokens, credits, or internal metering — at millisecond latencies, fractions of a cent per operation, and massive scale. See the viral February 2026 article titled “Anthropic is Killing Bitcoin” by Jose Crespo, PhD, published on Medium .