2025 Asset Review: Why Did Bitcoin Significantly Underperform Gold and U.S. Stocks?
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2025 Asset Review: Why Did Bitcoin Significantly Underperform Gold and U.S. Stocks?
Price is merely a surface phenomenon; the underlying flow of energy and information density are the essence.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: XinGPT
Many people observing Bitcoin's performance in 2025 fall into the trap of simple price comparisons, failing to understand why it has underperformed not only U.S. equities led by NVIDIA, but even traditional safe-haven assets like gold.
From a higher-dimensional perspective, this is actually a question of physics and information theory. Price is merely superficial; the underlying flow of energy and density of information constitute the essence.
1. Congestion in Energy Arbitrage: The Shift of Compute Dominance
In Musk’s logic, value often correlates with energy conversion efficiency. Over the past decade, Bitcoin was the only machine capable of transforming large-scale energy into digitally scarce assets—a thermodynamics-based value anchor.
But from 2024 to 2025, an extremely powerful competitor has emerged: generative artificial intelligence.
The current driving force behind U.S. equities isn't fiat inflation, but the exponential explosion in total factor productivity (TFP) brought by AI. When tech giants invest hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers, they are essentially competing for global electricity quotas.
At this stage, the economic value generated per kilowatt-hour used to train next-generation large models or power high-performance computing chips temporarily exceeds the returns from hash collisions that produce Bitcoin. This marginal return differential shapes price movements and capital allocation—just look at how many Bitcoin mining facilities have been converted into AI compute centers.
Capital is profit-seeking and sensitive. When the growth curve of silicon-based intelligence becomes steeper than the scarcity curve of "digital reserves," excess global liquidity will prioritize productive assets with nonlinear growth potential over pure digital assets.
2. Gold’s “Atomic Property” vs. Bitcoin’s “Code Consensus”
Gold’s strong performance this year is fundamentally a result of increasing geopolitical entropy.
Faced with deglobalization and systemic uncertainty, sovereign-level actors require an asset that needs no network connection and relies on no clearing system. Under this extreme system-fault tolerance logic, ancient gold provides atomic-level certainty.
Although Bitcoin is hailed as digital gold, it still heavily depends on internet infrastructure and centralized liquidity channels. When the system faces risks of physical disconnection, atomic certainty triumphs in the short term over bit-level consensus—physical gold can at least be held in hand or stored in a cave.
Gold hedges against systemic collapse, whereas Bitcoin is currently viewed more as an overflow of systemic liquidity.
3. Volatility Blunting from ETFs
Tools shape behavior. The rise of Bitcoin spot ETFs marks the formal taming of this beast.
Once Bitcoin enters traditional asset allocation portfolios, it begins to follow conventional financial risk control models. While this brings long-term capital support, it also significantly smooths volatility, suppressing its explosive potential.
Today’s Bitcoin increasingly resembles a high-beta tech index. As the Fed maintains higher interest rates longer than expected, this highly liquidity-sensitive "long-tail asset" naturally faces downward pressure.
4. Productivity Singularity Draining Bitcoin’s Narrative
Charlie Munger emphasizes opportunity cost.
If holding dominant AI leaders offers highly certain nonlinear growth, then holding non-cash-flow-generating Bitcoin incurs an extremely high opportunity cost.
2025 is one of the rare historical moments on the brink of a productivity singularity, where all capital chases the node that could generate superintelligence. As a "challenger to the monetary system," Bitcoin’s appeal is temporarily diluted in the face of the productivity revolution narrative.
5. Phase Adjustment Within Fractal Structures
From the perspective of complex systems, U.S. equities are in a parabolic acceleration phase driven by AI.
In fractal geometry, small structures self-replicate and amplify through simple iterative formulas. AI is now playing the role of this iterator. From foundational NVIDIA compute, to mid-tier cloud services, to upper-layer software applications, each layer replicates the logic of "productivity explosion." This structure is magnificent, yet implies the system is approaching physical limits within its local dimension.
Gold’s performance during the breakdown of the old order can be understood through the construction of the Cantor Set—where the middle third is repeatedly removed. In today’s global financial fractal, what is being eliminated is "credit expansion," "unfulfillable promises," and "high-entropy debt."
As the old order is continuously shattered by debt crises and geopolitical turmoil, the remaining set of disconnected yet indestructible points is gold. This is a density of value created through subtraction—the most stable physical foundation within the fractal structure.
Bitcoin’s current state is essentially the hedging outcome of forces across different scales: profit-taking pressure from early participants counterbalanced by continuous buying from sovereign nations and long-term capital, compressing price within a prolonged low-volatility range.
This extended period of low-volatility oscillation is dynamically known as the reconstruction of an "attractor."
The fractal system accumulates over time, reserving space for the next scale transition.
In the final analysis, Bitcoin in 2025 is not being falsified, but re-priced. It temporarily yields to the dual demands of productivity singularity and geopolitical defense, bearing a cost of time rather than direction.
Only when AI's marginal efficiency declines and capital liquidity continues to spill over will Bitcoin return to its true strength: a cross-cycle vehicle of liquidity value.
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