#加密市场观察 Gold Frenzy, Bitcoin Playing Dead: An Ongoing "Blood Exchange" Coup

That wild youth has been pacified
As gold prices surge like a runaway horse, breaking through the $5,200 mark, Bitcoin, once dubbed "Digital Gold," remains as quiet as a sleeping elder. This is a suffocating silence, even sending chills down the spines of seasoned investors who have endured multiple bull and bear cycles. According to the old script, whenever chaos erupts worldwide and gunfire rings out, gold rises, and Bitcoin follows suit with a wild surge, even more fierce and rapid. But this time, the script has been torn apart. You might be staring at the K-line chart in the dead of night, cigarette ash burning your fingers without noticing, puzzled why the legendary "big surge" hasn't arrived yet. In fact, it's not that the market is sick, but that Bitcoin's "soul" has been replaced.
We must face a brutal reality: the Bitcoin that once roamed freely in offshore havens, symbolizing rebellion and freedom, is now being forcibly dressed in a tailored suit by Wall Street elites. It's like a street-fighting genius wielding nunchucks with deadly precision, suddenly signed into the official UFC ring. Though he's still himself—muscular, sharp-eyed—the rules have changed, the referee has changed, and even the audience has shifted from passionate punk youths to fund managers calmly calculating odds over champagne. This "pacification" is the fundamental reason why Bitcoin is currently in a deep sleep.
With the approval of spot ETFs, Bitcoin's pricing power has quietly undergone a staggering shift—from early large holders (OGs) and rugged miners to Wall Street giants led by BlackRock. What does this transfer of power mean? It signifies that Bitcoin is no longer just a "hedge asset." On Wall Street's balance sheets, Bitcoin has been labeled as a "High Beta (High Volatility) USD risk asset." This term sounds academic, but we can understand it with a vivid analogy: Bitcoin now resembles a heavily modified supercar, with especially sensitive throttle and brakes, full of power. However, the steering wheel is firmly in Wall Street's hands, and it must strictly follow the Federal Reserve's monetary policy track. When the dollar floods the market, Bitcoin accelerates rapidly; when the dollar tightens, it brakes hard. It is no longer a rebel but has become the most obedient and sensitive amplifier of dollar hegemony in the digital world. If Bitcoin was once used to oppose dollar dominance, now it is being transformed into a new weapon within the dollar system.
Miner defection: selling faith, embracing AI
If Wall Street's involvement has fundamentally changed the game from the demand side, then the miners' "rebellion" has delivered a heavy blow from the supply side. This is perhaps the most awkward and ironic moment in Bitcoin history: those who once swore to defend network security and shouted "Hashpower is power" are now selling their "assets" on a large scale and switching to AI. Imagine you're a gold mine owner, painstakingly digging underground for years, face covered in coal dust. Suddenly, you discover that the neighboring AI data center operator, even just renting out empty server racks, earns ten times your mining income. Moreover, this income is a guaranteed cash flow, with no worries about gold prices halving tomorrow. What would you do? The most rational business decision is to sell all the mined gold and even abandon the mining shovels, switching to become a landlord.
This is not alarmist talk but a real happening. Take Core Scientific, one of the largest Bitcoin mining companies in the US, which recently signed a $3.5 billion 12-year contract with cloud service provider CoreWeave. What does this mean? It means they can free up the electricity and space used for mining, and even without running miners, just providing hosting services for high-performance AI computing, earns much more than mining during halving cycles. Due to the halving mechanism, mining rewards have been cut in half, while the total network hash rate remains at historic highs. For many small and medium miners, the cost of mining each coin now approaches or even exceeds the coin’s market price. This is no longer printing money; it’s burning money. Thus, a tragic "hash rate migration" has begun. Miners realize that their most valuable assets are not the buzzing ASIC miners but the pre-established power permits, transformers, and cooling systems—precisely the most sought-after and scarce resources for AI computing clusters. To pivot, they buy expensive Nvidia H100 GPUs and retrofit data centers for high-density AI computing, acting as the market's "largest short." They continuously sell Bitcoin on the secondary market to fund this transformation. The selling pressure from "their own people" is like a boulder crushing the price. Some argue this is natural selection, market cleansing bubbles, but for steadfast holders, watching former comrades switch to chasing AI hot money is a psychological blow more despairing than price drops. It drains market liquidity and undermines the "faith" confidence.
The awkward middle ground: neither gold nor Nvidia
Now, Bitcoin is stuck in an awkward "identity crisis"—caught between two worlds. At this crossroads of the old and new cycles, Bitcoin's attributes have become highly schizophrenic. Some precise quantitative analyses have concluded that Bitcoin now roughly equals "70% tech stocks + 30% gold." This formula sounds like a blend of strengths, but in practice, it’s a disastrous combination. When you seek safe-haven assets, such as during tensions in the Middle East or geopolitical crises, the funds that would have flooded into Bitcoin in 2020 now prefer physical gold or US Treasuries. Why? Because in the eyes of non-US countries (like BRICS nations), Bitcoin, priced by Wall Street and locked in ETFs, is no longer an absolute "neutral asset." It appears more like a derivative of the dollar or a potential tool for sanctions, with long-arm jurisdiction. So, when chaos truly erupts, gold rises, but Bitcoin may not follow or even fall due to stock market panic. Conversely, when seeking high risk and high return, buying Nvidia or other tech giants with strong cash flows seems more profitable than Bitcoin. After all, tech stocks have solid earnings reports, grand narratives of the AI revolution, and real profits. Bitcoin, as a "tech stock without cash flow," tends to crash faster than profitable US stocks when dollar liquidity tightens. This is Bitcoin’s current dilemma:
It loses to physical gold in safe-haven attributes and faces the aggressive "bloodsucking" of AI tech stocks in growth potential. It is caught in the middle, left with no good options. This awkward positioning has led to what’s called "garbage time"—prices stagnate, volatility diminishes daily, and the price chart flattens into a straight line. For speculators used to turbulent waves, this boredom is like slow suicide.
Narrative folding: from wealth myth to national reserves
However, if we can suppress our impatience and shift our focus away from short-term K-line charts, we will see a more interesting phenomenon: Bitcoin is undergoing a "folding." Outside the spotlight of Wall Street, in failed countries with soaring inflation due to excessive money printing—such as Nigeria, Argentina, Turkey—Bitcoin still plays the role of the "Noah’s Ark." To ordinary people there, Bitcoin is not for speculation but for survival. This bottom-up real demand has not disappeared with Wall Street’s involvement; instead, it has become more rigid amid global economic turmoil. This is the shadowed, rough, and vital side of Bitcoin. On the other hand, a new narrative is quietly brewing, likely surpassing the "Digital Gold" of the past: "Sovereign Reserve Asset." Note that this is no longer a pipe dream from cyberpunk novels. As the US political sphere seriously discusses including Bitcoin in national strategic reserves, and some sovereign wealth funds secretly accumulate in large transactions, Bitcoin’s mission is evolving from "opposing fiat" to "anchoring fiat." Just as gold experienced a long, doubted phase of civilian circulation before becoming central bank reserves, this stage involves declining volatility as an inevitable part of growth. A global reserve asset cannot always be rollercoastering. The "institutionalization" brought by Wall Street, while temporarily suppressing explosive growth, also encases Bitcoin in a thick layer of bulletproof glass—what’s called the "price bottom safety cushion." When the interest community shifts from retail investors to BlackRock, listed companies, and even governments, deliberately crashing Bitcoin would essentially be shorting the entire US dollar financial system. So, stop self-deluding with "garbage time"; that’s just short-sighted speculation. The wild frontier era is truly over, but a new great voyage has just begun. What we face now is a "midlife Bitcoin" undergoing painful blood exchange, trying to enter the global core asset club. For true believers, this is not garbage time but a rare "discount season." Every second of boredom you endure now is actually buying a ticket to the future global digital reserve asset at a discounted price. When a new consensus fully solidifies and national machinery begins to openly compete for this ticket, looking back, you’ll see that today’s "playing dead" is just the last calm before the storm.