From ATP to Bitcoin: Shared Currencies, Languages and the Evolution of Mergers

The two largest increases in complexity in the history of life came through mergers that depended on shared currencies and languages. The first was the origin of life itself, some four billion years ago, when electron flow and hydrogen bonds joined energy and information — adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and DNA — in a single self-sustaining system. The most consequential merger of organisms came roughly two billion years later, halfway through the history of life to date, when the engulfment of an oxygen-respiring bacterium by an archaeal host formed the mitochondrion and the eukaryotic cell. I propose that mergers between unrelated partners, which Queller termed egalitarian transitions, depend on an energy currency that both partners already share and that neither can forge. The fact that information and thermodynamic entropy share units suggests that such a currency is also a language, and its energetic proof-of-work makes it unforgeable, a form of costly signalling. Both host and guest in the eukaryotic merger already traded in ATP, so the energy the guest produced was spendable by the host from the start; the later chloroplast merger ran on the same currency. I place this within a five-phase model of five evolutionary waves (water, life, vertebrates, culture and a carbon–silicon wave now beginning), in which the shared currency arrives before the merger it enables. I then apply the hypothesis to the emerging merger of humans and artificial intelligence into a single socio-technical organism, for which I adopt de Rosnay's term the cybiont. Bitcoin, minted from energy, verifiable by anyone and issued by no one, is the leading candidate for the cybiont's ATP — its shared energy currency. The cybiont's shared language already exists: natural language, which machines now read and write. Furthermore, the fact that mitochondria retained the genes for respiration, which require local control, and remain central to signalling, alarm, heat and cell fate suggests that humans may remain essential to the cybiont through a similar arrangement described by ten capacities in five pairs: desire and consent, embodiment and touch, attention and pain, meaning and valuation, and holding the keys and co-regulation. This offers an evolutionary alternative to accounts in which more capable AI displaces humanity: in life's precedent, the engulfed partner was not replaced but became indispensable, for as long as it kept its essential functions. The hypothesis yields testable predictions for biology and for emerging economies of AI agents.