Price is merely a facade; the energy flow and information density behind it are the essence.
Article author: XinGPT
Source: PANews
Many people observing the performance of Bitcoin in 2025 will fall into a simple price comparison, not understanding why it has underperformed compared to the US stocks led by Nvidia, and even underperformed traditional safe-haven asset gold.
If viewed from a high-dimensional perspective, this is actually a problem of physics and information theory. Price is merely a facade; the energy flow and information density behind it are the essence.
1. The crowding effect of energy arbitrage: the shift of computing power hegemony
In Musk's logic, value is often linked to the efficiency of energy conversion. Over the past decade, Bitcoin is the only machine capable of converting energy on a large scale into a digitally scarce asset, which is a thermodynamically based value anchoring.
But between 2024 and 2025, an extremely strong competitor emerged: generative artificial intelligence.
The core driving force of the US stock market is not fiat currency inflation, but the exponential explosion of total factor productivity (TFP) brought about by AI. When tech giants invest hundreds of billions of dollars in building data centers, they are essentially competing for the world's electricity quota.
At this current stage, the economic added value generated by each kilowatt-hour used to train the next generation of large models or drive high-performance computing chips temporarily exceeds the returns from hashing collisions to produce Bitcoin. The difference in marginal returns forms the choice of price and capital; just look at how many Bitcoin mining farms have been transformed into AI computing centers.
Capital is profit-seeking and sensitive. When the growth curve of silicon-based intelligence is steeper than the scarcity curve of 'digital reserves', global excess liquidity will preferentially flow to productivity assets with non-linear growth potential rather than purely digital assets.
2. The 'atomic properties' of gold and the 'code consensus' of Bitcoin.
This year's strong performance of gold is essentially a result of the global geopolitical entropy increase.
In the face of de-globalization and systemic uncertainty, sovereign-level players need an asset that does not require network connectivity and does not rely on any clearing system. In this extreme system fault-tolerance logic, ancient gold provides atomic-level certainty.
Although Bitcoin is hailed as digital gold, it still heavily relies on internet infrastructure and centralized liquidity channels. When the system faces risks of physical disconnection, atomic-level certainty temporarily overcomes the consensus of bits; physical gold can at least be held in hand or stored in a cave.
Gold hedges against systemic collapse, while Bitcoin is currently viewed more by the market as an overflow of system liquidity.
3. The 'volatility dampening' brought by ETFs.
Tools determine behavior. The popularity of Bitcoin spot ETFs marks the formal taming of this beast.
Once Bitcoin enters traditional asset allocation portfolios, it begins to follow traditional financial risk control models. While this brings long-term capital support, it also greatly smoothes its volatility, stifling its explosive potential.
Bitcoin is increasingly resembling a high-beta tech index. As the Federal Reserve maintains high interest rates longer than the market expected, this 'long tail asset', which is extremely sensitive to liquidity, will naturally be suppressed.
4. The siphoning of the productivity singularity compared to Bitcoin narrative.
Charlie Munger emphasizes opportunity cost.
If holding a monopolistic AI leader can achieve high certainty non-linear growth, then holding Bitcoin, which does not generate cash flow, becomes extremely costly in terms of opportunity cost.
The year 2025 is one of the rare nights before a productivity singularity in human history, where all capital is chasing that node which may produce superintelligence. As a 'challenger to the monetary system', Bitcoin's appeal has been diluted in the short term in the face of the productivity revolution narrative.
5. Phase adjustment period in fractal structures.
From the perspective of complex systems, the US stock market is in an AI-driven parabolic acceleration phase.
In fractal geometry, tiny structures continuously self-replicate and amplify through simple iterative formulas. AI plays the role of this iterative operator. From the underlying Nvidia computing power, to the middle-layer cloud services, to the top-layer software applications, each layer replicates the logic of 'productivity explosion'. This structure is extremely grand, but it also means the system is approaching the physical limits of that local dimension.
Gold's performance during the collapse of the old order can be understood through the construction process of the Cantor Set, which involves continuously eliminating the middle third. In the current global financial fractal, what has been eliminated are 'credit expansion', 'unfulfillable promises', and 'high-entropy debt'.
As the old order is continuously shattered by debt crises and geopolitical turbulence, the last remaining set of unconnected but unbreakable points is gold. This is a value density generated by 'subtraction', the most stable physical foundation in fractal structures.
The current state of Bitcoin is essentially a hedge result of forces of different scales: the profit-taking pressure from early participants offsets the continuous buying from sovereign nations and long-term funds over time, keeping the price compressed within a long-term low-volatility range.
This long period of low volatility oscillation is dynamically referred to as the reconstruction of 'attractors'.
This fractal system completes accumulation over time, reserving space for the next scale change.
Ultimately, Bitcoin in 2025 is not being falsified but rather being repriced. It temporarily gives way to the two ends of the productivity singularity and geopolitical defense needs, bearing the cost of time rather than direction.
When the marginal efficiency of AI declines and liquidity continues to overflow, Bitcoin will return to its true role as a cross-cycle liquidity value carrier.
