Before today’s article, I want to briefly introduce a Substack author whose perspective I find increasingly interesting.
Most discussions in crypto focus on price cycles or short-term market signals. His work approaches the market from a different angle. Instead of asking which asset might perform best in the next ten months, he focuses on a deeper question: where real-world scarcity is emerging in the global economy.
His framework looks at structural bottlenecks across multiple layers of the system. That includes energy, infrastructure, commodities, and digital networks. In his view, the most resilient investments in the coming decades will be those that sit directly on top of these constraints.
This perspective often leads him to areas such as AI infrastructure, energy production, commodities like gold, and digital scarcity networks like Bitcoin.
Even if your primary focus is crypto, this way of thinking can be extremely useful. Crypto markets do not exist in isolation. They are increasingly connected to broader technological and macroeconomic shifts.
Below is one of his recent pieces outlining how investors can build a portfolio around the structural bottlenecks of the modern economy.
If you spend enough time in traditional financial circles, you will eventually hit a conceptual wall. The establishment loves to divide the world into two buckets. On one side, you have “productive” assets like equities, bonds, and real estate that generate cash flows. On the other side, you have assets like gold or Bitcoin, which are often dismissed as purely speculative because they do not produce a quarterly dividend or coupon.
This is one of the most persistent and misleading myths in modern finance.
Value does not originate from cash flows. Cash flows are simply the observable realization of scarcity over time. A firm or equity has value because it provides goods and services that are economically scarce, meaning they are both highly desirable and strictly limited. Take Nvidia, for example. Its processors are desperately needed to train the world’s AI models, providing immense utility. Yet, it generates astronomical margins because it has built a severe constraint around its GPU hardware and CUDA software ecosystem that prevents competitors from easily replicating that utility. Physical real estate is universally desired for shelter and commerce, but it derives its financial premium from strict geographic limits and zoning laws. Gold is coveted for its aesthetic and industrial properties, but its value relies on the extreme friction of geological extraction. Bitcoin provides a globally accessible, censorship-resistant settlement network, but its monetary premium is anchored by a rigid algorithmic supply cap backed by decentralized consensus.
They are all playing the exact same game. Every single asset is simply a mechanism for monetizing economic scarcity. For an item, product, or service to be economically scarce, it must possess two intersecting qualities: it must be highly desirable because it provides real utility, and it must be physically or structurally constrained. If it lacks utility, it is just a useless rock. If it lacks a constraint, any value it creates will eventually be competed away to zero.
Once you view the market through this lens, the artificial wall between a dividend-paying stock and a digital network collapses. The only questions that matter are whether the asset provides real utility and whether it is anchored to a credible, enduring constraint.
The Digital Epitome of Scarcity
This is exactly why the right digital assets are so crucial to understand. Crypto networks that offer real utility are the absolute epitome of economic scarcity. Blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Bittensor (TAO) provide strictly constrained access to highly desirable block space and compute coordination.
They are not just isolated speculative tokens. They are omnipresent architectural layers for the digital age. When millions of autonomous AI agents inevitably need to transact, access data, or pay for compute, they will not use legacy banking systems. They will use cryptographically secure, permissionless networks where scarcity and rules are mathematically guaranteed.
The Migration of Scarcity
This brings us to the most critical economic event of our time. We are entering the age of Artificial Intelligence, and the dominant narrative is that AI will usher in an era of post-scarcity. We are told that as AI and robotics scale, the marginal cost of intelligence, coding, design, and routine labor will plummet toward zero.
The optimists believe this technological abundance will make everything cheap and plentiful. But here is the secret to technological revolutions: abundance in one domain does not eliminate scarcity. It reorganizes it.
Think of the invention of mechanical refrigeration. A century ago, refrigeration made cold storage abundant and conquered the local scarcity of perishable food. But scarcity did not vanish. It just moved. It migrated to the complements required to run the cold chain, creating massive new bottlenecks in grid power, refrigerated transport, and specialized infrastructure.
AI is triggering the exact same structural shift on a global scale. As cognitive work experiences massive cost compression, the economy will scale up, and demand will violently shift toward the inputs that cannot be easily replicated by software.
When the cost of intelligence approaches zero, the bottlenecks migrate downward into the physical and infrastructural layers. We are already seeing this play out in the intense competition for power grid capacity, data center real estate, advanced semiconductor fabrication, and critical minerals.
But the migration of scarcity is also highly nuanced. While generating lines of code might become virtually free, big software providers will remain incredibly scarce. The massive platform gatekeepers that orchestrate those codes, hold proprietary data, and control distribution will become even more entrenched. Coding becomes an abundant commodity, but the high-trust capabilities and institutional rule-makers that govern the ecosystems capture the surplus.
Investing in Bottlenecks
As an investor navigating the coming decade, your job is not to chase the abundance. Your job is to find the choke points across every layer of the economy.
A truly resilient portfolio must sit directly on top of these structural constraints. This means owning the physical reality that powers the digital expansion. It requires investing in the base layer of physical resources and space, such as critical commodities like copper and silver, and the sheer energy generation required to train the next frontier models.
It means owning the hard infrastructure. Data centers, power grid capacity, and advanced semiconductor supply chains cannot be spun up overnight with a few lines of code.
Moving up the stack, it means holding the platform gatekeepers. These are the entities with entrenched capabilities, proprietary data, and institutional trust that control distribution. And finally, it means holding the decentralized networks that provide the secure, mathematically scarce settlement layer for the broader economy.
The most successful portfolios will not belong to those who pick the best AI software wrapper. They will belong to those who own the new bottlenecks. Do not look at what technology is making cheap. Look at what technology desperately needs but cannot easily replicate. Find out where the constraint is binding, and own it.
Agisilaos Papadogiannis writes The Scarcity Thinker, a newsletter dedicated to identifying where economic scarcity is migrating across macro, tech, and digital assets.
This is not financial advice. These are my personal views and positions. Do your own research. The world is genuinely uncertain right now, which, if you have read this far, is precisely the point.