With gold on the left and Wall Street on the right, Bitcoin stands at the crossroads of old and new cycles.

Author: Nancy, PANews

"With so many good assets in the world, Bitcoin is no longer that sexy."

While gold broke through $5,000 and embarked on a historic rally, Bitcoin remained dormant. A debate about Bitcoin is brewing in the crypto community, and people can't help but ask: can its "digital gold" story continue?

Recently, crypto KOL @BTCdayu shared the views of a Bitcoin OG who has sold over 80% of his Bitcoin holdings and stated that Bitcoin is facing a fundamental shift in its narrative. This viewpoint quickly sparked heated discussion within the crypto community.

New operators, new pricing logic

The first half of Bitcoin's history was a golden age of monetizing knowledge, with the stage largely belonging to a small number of early adopters and infrastructure builders.

But in the second half, the rules of the game changed fundamentally. With the approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs, large-scale allocations by companies like Strategy and other DAT firms, and the inclusion of Bitcoin in the US government's national strategic vision, Bitcoin was forced to don the "formal attire" customized by Wall Street.

In this cycle, Bitcoin quietly completed a large-scale change of ownership, with early holders gradually leaving the market and Wall Street institutions entering the fray in large numbers, transforming Bitcoin from a growth asset into an allocation asset.

This means that Bitcoin's pricing power is shifting from the offshore, informal market to the onshore financial system dominated by the US dollar. From trading channels and liquidity to regulatory frameworks, Bitcoin is converging towards the high volatility and high beta of dollar-denominated risk assets.

Solv Protoco co-founder and CEO Meng Yan stated bluntly that the world has now entered an era of imperial rivalry, and the most important question is who will win and who will lose. The purpose of US regulation is not only to dollarize crypto assets, but also to turn cryptocurrencies and RWAs (Real-World Assets) into tools for the continued expansion of dollar hegemony in the digital age. If Bitcoin is merely another mediocre dollar asset, then its prospects are indeed worrying. However, if crypto becomes the nuclear weapon system of the dollar's digital economy, then BTC, as its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, still has a promising future. For the US, the main problem now is that its control over Bitcoin is not yet high enough.

According to crypto KOL @Joshua.D, although Bitcoin has become a "dollar asset" highly correlated with US stocks, its impact on price is more supportive than depressing. The stakeholders behind this are ETFs, listed companies, and even national strategies. This "institutionalization" has actually added a safety cushion to Bitcoin, effectively raising the price floor.

However, while the entry of mainstream players has expanded the pool of funds through compliant channels, Bitcoin is currently facing an awkward asset positioning dilemma.

Some argue that if one is bullish on the dollar system, buying US stocks, bonds, or tech giants offers better liquidity, real cash flow, and greater certainty. In contrast, Bitcoin at this time resembles a high-risk tech stock with no cash flow, raising questions about its cost-effectiveness. Conversely, if one is bearish on the dollar system, logically one should seek assets negatively correlated with the dollar. Bitcoin, "modified" by mainstream institutions, has a very high correlation with US stocks; when dollar liquidity contracts, it often crashes before US stocks, rather than hedging against risk.

In other words, Bitcoin is caught between being a safe haven and a risk; it's neither a safe haven like gold nor a growth stock like tech stocks. Some even cite historical data suggesting that Bitcoin currently possesses the characteristics of 70% tech stocks and 30% gold.

This new identity is also beginning to influence Bitcoin's neutrality premium in geopolitics.

Amid escalating global geopolitical risks and an out-of-control US debt deficit, non-US countries are accelerating their de-dollarization efforts. Gold, with its millennia-old credit history and political neutrality, has returned to the forefront, with its price repeatedly hitting new highs. Meanwhile, in the eyes of non-US countries, Bitcoin is no longer seen as a borderless currency, but rather as a dollar derivative influenced by Wall Street's pricing power.

As a result, we have seen traditional hard currencies such as gold return to the center stage, while Bitcoin has fallen into a long period of sideways trading and dull fluctuations, which continues to erode investors' confidence in holding the stock.

Even so, according to crypto KOL @Pickle Cat , everyone has their own interpretation of Hamlet, and crypto-punk is a core need for Bitcoin, only weakened by "mainstreaming and traditional financialization." But where there is weakness, there must also be strength. It's like democracy; its allure lies in its self-correcting mechanism, but this correction often only occurs when the system has reached some extreme state, at which point the public truly realizes it.

The massive migration of computing power: Bitcoin mining companies' "defection"

In addition to the wavering narrative on the demand side, changes on the supply side have also exacerbated market pessimism. As a crucial player in the Bitcoin network, miners are undergoing a massive capital migration, "abandoning Bitcoin for AI."

According to the latest data from the Hashrate Index, the 7-day moving average of Bitcoin's total network hashrate has fallen to 993 EH/s, a drop of nearly 15% from its all-time high in October last year. Meanwhile, according to JPMorgan analysts, the average daily block reward per EH/s for Bitcoin miners is projected to fall to $38,700 in December 2025, a record low.

The direct cause of the decline in computing power lies in the continued deterioration of the Bitcoin mining economy. The halving cycle has led to a 50% reduction in block rewards, coupled with historically high mining difficulty, causing many mining rigs to approach or even fall below their shutdown price. Miners' profit margins have been severely squeezed, with some forced to shut down to cut losses, while others have alleviated cash flow pressure by selling Bitcoin.

The deeper crisis lies in the fact that computing power has become the "oil" of the new era, changing the flow of computing power.

Many mining companies believe that compared to the highly cyclical, volatile, and unreliable business model of Bitcoin mining, AI data centers offer long-term, certain demand and higher returns. More importantly, their accumulated large-scale power infrastructure, site resources, and operational experience are precisely the most scarce resources for AI computing clusters, making the transformation more realistic and feasible.

As a result, Bitcoin mining companies such as Core Scientific, Hut 8, Bitfarms, HIVE, TeraWulf, and Cipher Miner have collectively "defected." According to CoinShares' prediction, by the end of 2026, mining companies' revenue from mining may drop from 85% to below 20%, shifting their reliance to AI infrastructure.

However, this transformation is extremely expensive. On the one hand, upgrading traditional mining farms into AI data centers requires large-scale infrastructure renovations, which are costly. On the other hand, the price of high-performance GPU servers remains high, and the initial capital investment is huge if a large-scale computing power cluster is to be formed.

For mining companies urgently needing to transform, Bitcoin, the most liquid asset, naturally became the most direct and efficient financing tool, leading them to continuously sell Bitcoin on the secondary market. This continuous selling from the supply side not only suppressed the price of Bitcoin but also further squeezed the profit margins of remaining miners, forcing more to shut down or transform their operations.

This "defection" of selling coins to buy shovels has, to some extent, drained liquidity and undermined market confidence.

However, Meng Yan pointed out that the idea of ​​Bitcoin miners transitioning to AI computing infrastructure is actually a false proposition, more of a story fabricated by US-listed mining companies to stabilize their stock prices amid shrinking profits. Aside from the reusability of electricity, there is almost nothing in common between the two, from equipment hardware and network architecture to operational skills and software ecosystem, and they offer no additional advantages compared to dedicated AI data centers.

Joshua.D further pointed out that the main Bitcoin mining machines currently used are ASIC miners. These machines can only mine; the only things that can be transformed are the facilities and power infrastructure. Therefore, the decline in hashrate is more of a natural selection process within the industry. Historically, a decline in hashrate has often been a sign of the market "squeezing out the bubble," reducing future selling pressure, rather than a trigger for a collapse. As long as the Bitcoin network can still produce blocks normally, hashrate fluctuations are simply a market adjustment mechanism.

Folded Bitcoin stands at the crossroads of old and new cycles.

Now that Bitcoin has officially entered the mainstream, it is not only telling the old story of "digital gold," but also writing a new script for mainstream financial assets.

Bitcoin is shedding its purely speculative image and evolving into a reservoir of global liquidity, with mainstream acceptance opening the floodgates to compliant funds. This financial access significantly enhances Bitcoin's survivability and resilience.

Beyond the Wall Street spotlight, in countries with severe inflation such as Nigeria, Argentina, and Turkey, Bitcoin usage is experiencing explosive growth. There, Bitcoin is not merely an asset, but a lifeline against the rampant issuance of fiat currency and a safeguard for family wealth. This bottom-up, genuine demand proves that it remains a shield in the hands of ordinary people.

There is no doubt that a folded Bitcoin is now presented to us.

It bids farewell to the get-rich-quick myths of the Western frontier era and sheds the idealistic cyberpunk aesthetic, instead presenting a more stable, even somewhat dull, mature asset characteristic.

This is not the end of digital gold, but rather a sign of its maturation. Just as gold underwent a long process of value consensus reconstruction before becoming a central bank reserve, Bitcoin today may be standing at a similar historical turning point.

Looking back at the development of Bitcoin, its narrative has been constantly evolving. From the peer-to-peer electronic cash system initially envisioned in Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper, enabling small, instant payments; to being seen as a non-sovereign currency to combat fiat currency inflation; then evolving into "digital gold," becoming a tool for storing value and combating inflation; and now, with Wall Street's involvement, Bitcoin's next potential narrative may point to sovereign nation reserve assets. Of course, this process is destined to be quite lengthy, but it is no longer a pipe dream.

However, everything has its cycles, and assets are no exception. According to the Merrill Lynch clock's asset rotation pattern, the global economic indicator is turning towards a period favorable for commodities. Bitcoin has increased tens of millions of times over the past decade and is entering a new macroeconomic cycle. Its long-term value should not be easily denied simply because of temporary price consolidation or a period of underperformance compared to gold and silver.

At this crossroads of old and new cycles, both departing established players and entering institutions are casting their votes for the future with real money. Time will provide the final answer.