The Coroner and the Closed Door
- The Doors Are Being Closed
- Indiana Closed One of Them
- Who Actually Uses Bitcoin ATMs
- Crossing to the Other Side
- What Walking Toward Them Might Look Like
- Further Reading
There is a line making its way through certain economic circles that deserves more than a passing read: AI is not the killer — it is the coroner. The observation belongs to Roman Kireev, writing recently for the Mises Institute, and it cuts closer to the bone than most commentary on artificial intelligence and employment.
His argument is not primarily about technology. It is about what the technology reveals. For decades, vast portions of the workforce were sustained not by genuine value creation — not by service rendered, goods produced, need met — but by the architecture of state intervention: subsidized credit, regulatory capture, government contracts, and legal privilege. Compliance roles, DEI bureaucracies, layers of supervisory theater. These persisted because they were politically entrenched, not economically justified. AI did not destroy them. It simply made their hollowness impossible to ignore any longer.
The Doors Are Being Closed
But Kireev’s more unsettling claim is what comes next. Even as artificial employment collapses, the conditions for genuine replacement are being systematically foreclosed. The state does not merely prop up the old — it actively prevents the new. Regulatory burdens strangle small business formation. Licensing barriers exclude the productive. Labor law complexity deters hiring. The exits, in other words, are being quietly locked even as the building empties.
Indiana Closed One of Them
I want to apply that framework to something that happened recently, close to home.
Indiana — the state where I live, on the north side of Indianapolis, in a city that prides itself on small business culture and individual liberty — has joined Tennessee in fully banning Bitcoin ATMs.
Indiana committee advances crypto ATM ban, weakened pension investment bill
The stated justification is fraud prevention, and the concern is not entirely without merit. The FBI recorded over $333 million in losses tied to crypto kiosks in 2025 alone, primarily through scams targeting elderly and vulnerable people. Satoshi Action Fund, one of the more serious Bitcoin policy organizations, has been clear that they support sensible regulation to address this. Dozens of states pursued exactly that — reform rather than prohibition.
Indiana chose prohibition.
A man walks into a gas station with $40 in cash.
He doesn’t have a bank account. He doesn’t trust one.
Last week, he could turn that into Bitcoin.
This week, he cannot.
This matters because of who Bitcoin ATMs actually serve. Not sophisticated investors. Not people with brokerage accounts and cold storage wallets. The primary users of Bitcoin ATMs are people operating at the margins of the formal financial system — people for whom a $20 cash-to-Bitcoin transaction at a gas station kiosk represents the only accessible entry point into sound money.
The distribution is not random.
And it aligns closely with the communities most often excluded from financial infrastructure.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s 2023 National Survey gives us the portrait of that population with some precision. 4.2% of American households — 5.6 million households — are fully unbanked, holding no checking or savings account at any bank or credit union. Two-thirds of them rely entirely on cash. A further 14.2% — 19 million households — are underbanked, meaning they have an account in name but regularly depend on nonbank services to meet their actual financial needs. Combined, roughly one in five American households operates outside or at the margins of the banking system.
Not metaphorically. Statistically.
Who Actually Uses Bitcoin ATMs
The demographic breakdown does not allow for comfortable abstraction. Black households are unbanked at 10.6%. Hispanic households at 9.5%. American Indian and Alaska Native households at 12.2%. White households at 1.9%. The unbanked population is not randomly distributed across society. It maps almost precisely onto the communities that have had the most reason, historically and practically, to distrust the institutions now being protected by the ban.
And the reasons people give for being unbanked are telling. The most common: insufficient funds to meet minimum balance requirements. The second most common: they do not trust banks.
Bitcoin ATMs were, for this population, a partial but real answer to both problems. No minimum balance. No account required. No trust in a bank necessary. Small purchases — $20, $50 — with only a phone number. High fees, yes. Imperfect, certainly. But accessible in a way that almost no other on-ramp to sound money is.
Indiana just closed that door.
For many, this is what that door looked like:
And now that door is gone.
This is Kireev’s second claim, made visible. The artificial economy is collapsing — AI is accelerating that reckoning across industries, exposing the subsidized and the hollow. But rather than allow genuine alternatives to take root, the state tightens its grip. Fraud prevention is a legitimate concern deployed as a pretext for a far broader foreclosure. And the people who pay the price are not the ones the system was ostensibly trying to protect.
Crossing to the Other Side
There is a word for this pattern in the tradition I am trying to think within. It is not a technical word. It is the word neighbor. And the question, “Who is my neighbor?” is as old as the Gospel itself. In Jesus’ parable, in Luke 10: 29-37, a man was left beaten and half-dead on the road, and when a priest came by, “he passed by on the other side.” Then a Levite came, and “he too passed by on the other side.” The neighbor, it turned out, was not the one with status or office, but the one who stopped to show mercy.
The prohibition of Bitcoin ATMs in Indiana feels like another crossing to the other side of the road — dressed as consumer protection, yet leaving the unbanked lying where they are, unseen and unaided.
What Walking Toward Them Might Look Like
So what might it look like to actually walk toward them instead?
A Bitcoin circular economy offers a partial—but genuinely promising—answer. It does not wait for regulatory permission, because it does not require a bank, an ATM, or any formal financial intermediary at all.
The model already exists.
In El Salvador, what became known as Bitcoin Beach—now formalized through Hope House—began with a single community in a small fishing village with no banking infrastructure. Rather than connecting the unbanked to the existing financial system, it created a parallel one.
Merchants accepted Bitcoin.
Workers received wages in Bitcoin.
Savings were held in Bitcoin.
Money circulated locally among people who had agreed, in practice, to treat it as money.
The usual problem—how to move between dollars and Bitcoin—quietly disappears when there is no need to move back at all.
I had the chance to meet Michael Peterson briefly a few weeks ago at an event alongside TGFB and BitBlockBoom. What stood out was not a grand strategy, but the simplicity of how it began—and the patience required to let it grow.
However, the bootstrap challenge is real. Circular economies require critical mass, and critical mass requires community trust, and community trust takes time. Peterson did not build Bitcoin Beach by distributing a white paper. He built it by showing up, earning relationships, and starting small.
In the American context, the institution with the deepest existing infrastructure of community trust — particularly in the neighborhoods where the unbanked are concentrated — is the church. Not the church as an abstraction, but local congregations with existing networks, existing relationships with the economically marginalized, existing theological commitments to justice and neighbor-love that map directly onto the problem.
A Bitcoin-literate church community could, in principle, do something Bitcoin Beach did: create the conditions for a circular economy to grow organically from within an existing network of trust. Merchants in the congregation accepting Bitcoin. Wages for church staff or contractors offered in part in Bitcoin. A community savings culture built around hard money rather than dollar-denominated accounts subject to inflation and minimum balance requirements.
This is not a proposal dressed as an essay. It is more preliminary than that — a direction of thought, an emerging conviction. But the data and the moment seem to be pointing somewhere specific: away from waiting for the state to solve what the state is actively making worse, and toward building, locally and relationally, the alternatives the excluded actually need.
AI is the coroner, Kireev says. It is exposing what was always hollow. The Indiana ATM ban is a smaller but structurally identical move:
the state closing exits, protecting incumbents, leaving the most vulnerable to manage without.
The question that remains is not whether the reckoning is coming. It is whether, in the space the old structures are vacating, something genuinely human gets built — or whether the door simply stays closed.
I know which one I want to work toward.
I’d like to start working toward it here.
If that resonates, let’s talk.
Further Reading
On artificial employment & AI disruption
• Kireev’s other Mises piece — “The Essence of Action and Liberty” (Jan 2026)
On the unbanked & financial exclusion
• The full 2023 FDIC Household Survey
On Bitcoin as financial inclusion
• Alex Gladstein, Check Your Financial Privilege
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