THE THIRD RUSH: Where is the “Bitcoin” of the Ai Goldrush?

After months of deep thinking & a lot of discussions with some very smart people, I’ve decided to write an article for the first time in years to break this down.

Gold. Coins. Intelligence. Three manias, one repeating pattern: the people digging rarely get rich — the people supplying the diggers almost always do.

The Asset

• Gold itself. Finite, in the ground, anyone with a pan could theoretically get some.
• Bitcoin & tokens. The one rush where you could just buy the asset and hold. Early holders won enormously.
• There’s no “AI coin.” The closest proxy is equity — NVIDIA, hyperscalers, model labs (mostly private). Retail can’t buy OpenAI or Anthropic directly.

There IS NO ASSET. And that’s a good thing. Read on.

The Prospectors

• Gold: The crowd doing the actual, literal, digging.
• ~300,000 people came; most barely broke even. Claims got crowded fast and easy surface gold vanished within two years.
• Bitcoin & Crypto: Retail traders, GPU miners, NFT flippers. A visible minority got rich; the majority bought tops and sold bottoms.
• Ai: Thin “GPT-wrapper” app builders, prompt sellers, AI-influencer course hawkers. Crowded claims, no moat — the next model release washes them away.

Picks & Shovels

• Gold: Tools every digger must buy.
• Levi Strauss (workwear), Collins & Co (axes/picks), shovel merchants. Sold to every miner, win or lose.
• Bitcoin: Coinbase & Binance (exchanges), Bitmain (mining rigs), Ledger (wallets). Fees on every trade, profit on every rig.
• Ai: NVIDIA (the Levi Strauss of this rush), cloud GPU providers, vector DBs, eval & observability tools, dev platforms.

Infrastructure

• Gold: The rails everything runs on.
• Wells Fargo express & banking, steamship lines, and eventually the railroads. San Francisco itself — 1,000 people to 25,000 in two years.
• Bitcoin: The chains themselves (ETH validators), custody, stablecoin issuers — Tether/Circle quietly became money printers on float.
• Ai: Data centres, power generation, fibre, the model labs’ APIs. Capital-intensive — a game for giants and sovereign funds, not for small operators.

Merchants & Services

• Gold: Selling to the miners, near the mine.
• Samuel Brannan — bought every shovel in SF, then announced the gold strike. First millionaire of the rush without panning once. Laundries, saloons, boarding houses, eggs at $90/dozen (today’s money).
• Bitcoin: OTC desks, crypto tax software, compliance & KYC/AML services, audit firms, media (CoinDesk). Boring, recurring. Survived the winters.
• Ai: Consultancies, integrators, vertical solutions for businesses that must adopt AI but can’t build it. Training, deployment, compliance-grade systems. This layer is still forming — the Brannan seat is open.

The Financiers

• Gold: Capital placed on other people’s digging.
• Bankers buying gold dust at discount; merchants extending credit at frontier interest rates.
• Bitcoin: VCs, ICO whales, early funds (a16z crypto). Asymmetric upside — when they picked the right exchange, not the right coin.
• Ai: Mega-VCs and sovereign funds writing billion-dollar cheques into labs and data centres. Minimum ticket is far beyond ordinary reach.

The Grifters

Every rush has them — know the costume.

• Gold: Salted mines, fake claims sold to newcomers fresh off the boat.
• Bitcoin: Rug pulls, ICO vapor, FTX. The grift wore the costume of innovation.
• Ai: “AI-powered” vapor-ware, agencies reselling a thin prompt as a platform. Useful signal: their existence means buyers are desperate for trustworthy operators — trust becomes the moat

The Scoreboard

• Gold: Where the durable money landed.
• Merchants, suppliers, bankers, landowners. Almost no famous fortunes came from panning.
• Bitcoin: Exchanges, early holders, miners-turned-infrastructure, stablecoin issuers. Note: The Stablecoin & RWA sector is still pre-global adoption and has years of growth ahead)
• Ai: So far; chipmakers and clouds. Still undecided: the application & services layer — which is exactly the layer small, fast operators can own.

This is my main Thesis:

In 1849 you could not buy “gold exposure” from your sofa. In 2013 you could — that’s why crypto’s lazy play worked. In 2026 you can’t again: so the Brannan play is back. Don’t pan. Don’t speculate. Stand next to the mine and sell what every miner needs

The AI equivalent of “just buy Bitcoin” doesn’t exist for retail. But the AI equivalent of Brannan’s store absolutely does: every regional business, law firm, mine, and payments company is a miner who must dig and doesn’t know how. They need outfitters.

Every rush casts the same characters. The question is never “should I join the rush?” — it’s “which role am I playing?”

ARCHETYPE 01 • THE TOOLSMITH

Builds what the miners can’t.

Historical Examples:

• Gold Rush 1849: the blacksmith forging picks; the assayer whose stamp tells you which gold is real.
• Crypto era: the exchange engineer, the wallet maker.
• AI era: the builder of tools, integrations, and verification systems.

What was the Tool smith’s Edge?

Technical skill applied to the diggers’ problems rather than to digging. The toolsmith is paid every day of the rush, whether or not any individual miner strikes gold. In trust-starved markets, the assayer’s stamp — verification, audit, quality — is worth more than the gold itself.

The Risk for the toolsmith: Drifting into panning: building speculative products in crowded claims, or trying to compete with the giants who own the mountain. The mountain is a supplier, not a rival.

ARCHETYPE 02 • THE MERCHANT

Owns the store, spreads the word.

Historical Examples:

• Gold Rush 1849: Samuel Brannan — cornered the shovel supply, then announced the gold strike in his newspaper. First millionaire of the rush without panning once.
• Crypto era: the exchange founder, the dealmaker who aggregates demand and packages capability into offers.
• AI era: the dealmaker who aggregates demand and packages capability into offers.

The Edge:

Connections, sales, and operating ability — converting excitement into contracts. Miners don’t buy the best shovel; they buy from the merchant they trust who’s standing right there. Distribution beats invention in every rush.

The Risk for the Merchant is selling vapor to ride the hype. Brannan’s store thrived because the goods were real. One overpromised sale burns the trust moat that is the entire strategy.

For anyone who isn’t a chipmaker, a cloud, or a sovereign fund, the open layer is services and applications — outfitting the miners. Three storefronts, in order of how fast they pay:

PLAY 01 • CASH NOW

Outfitting expeditions.

Done-for-you builds, integrations, and deployments for businesses that must adopt AI but can’t build it themselves. Sell the expedition kit, not the nails — outcome-priced engagements over hourly billing.

PLAY 02 • RECURRING

The assay office.

Vertical, trust-grade products for niches with real stakes — compliance, verification, audit trails, regulated industries. Small markets with zero tourist competition and recurring revenue that survives the bust.

PLAY 03 • LEVERAGE

The miner’s school.

Training and enablement: teach organizations’ own people to use the tools. Low delivery cost, scales through reputation, and builds the funnel for Plays 01-02 — positioning as the trusted name when bigger budgets arrive.

Every boom has a winter. Brannan survived 1855 because miners still needed dry goods. The durable position is one where revenue survives a hype pullback — recurring contracts with customers whose need is operational, not fashionable.

There is also the MASSIVE gap between those few who chose to upskill over the past few years ahead of “The 3rd Rush”, to REALLY understand Ai – not in theory but in practice with a highly commercial problem-solving approach- VS the 99.999% that haven’t, but know they need to ‘do something’ or be left behind.

I have seen things in Ai that will look like miracles to many people.

The Tech is far more advanced today than most realize. The misconception is that ‘it will disrupt in 3-5 years’. No it’s RIGHT NOW and the industry feels like 2016 crypto again in terms of funding, experimentation, startup fever – except this time it’s the professionals doing real, sustainable work.

If you have a large complex problem to solve or want to quickly develop an Ai Strategy for your Business – drop me a note on [email protected] & I can refer you to close friends performing miracles in Ai at scale.