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

That wild youth has been tamed
As gold prices soared like a runaway horse, breaking through the $5,200 mark, Bitcoin, once dubbed "digital gold," remained as quiet as a sleeping elder. This suffocating silence even sent 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 frenzy, often more violently. But this time, the script was completely torn apart. You might be staring at the K-line chart in the dead of night, cigarette ash burning your fingers unnoticed, puzzled why the legendary "big surge" hasn't arrived yet. In fact, it's not that the market is sick; rather, 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 a formal UFC ring. Though he's still himself—muscular, sharp-eyed—the rules have changed, the referee has changed, and even the audience from passionate punk youths to calm, champagne-sipping fund managers calculating odds. This "taming" 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 shocking shift—transferred from early large holders (OGs) and rough miners to Wall Street giants led by BlackRock. What does this transfer of power mean? It signifies that Bitcoin is no longer just a "safe haven asset." On Wall Street's balance sheets, Bitcoin is now labeled as a "High Beta (High Volatility) dollar risk asset." This term sounds academic, but we can understand it with a vivid metaphor: Bitcoin now resembles a heavily modified supercar, with highly sensitive accelerator and brake pedals, 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 is pumped, 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's 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 safeguard network security and shouted "hash power equals 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 operators, even just renting out empty server cabinets, are earning 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, even abandon the mining tools, and 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 is now approaching or even exceeding the coin’s market price. This is no longer printing money; it's burning cash. Thus, a tragic "hash rate migration" has begun. Miners realize that their most valuable assets are not the buzzing ASIC machines but the existing power permits, transformers, and cooling systems—precisely the most scarce resources for AI computing clusters. To pivot, they buy expensive Nvidia H100 GPUs and retrofit data centers for high-density AI calculations, becoming the market's "biggest short." They continuously sell Bitcoin on the secondary market to fund this transition. 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 money is a psychological blow worse than price drops. It drains market liquidity and undermines "faith" itself.

The Dilemma in the Cracks: Neither Gold nor Nvidia
Now, Bitcoin is painfully stuck in an "identity crisis"—caught in a dilemma. At this crossroads of 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 various strengths, but in practice, it’s a disastrous combination. When seeking safe havens—such as during tensions in the Middle East or geopolitical crises—funds that should flow into Bitcoin are now more inclined to go into physical gold or US Treasuries. Why? Because in 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 an alternative derivative of the dollar, or even a potential tool for sanctions with long reach. 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 predicament:
It loses to physical gold in safe-haven attributes and faces the aggressive "bloodsucking" of AI tech stocks in growth. It is caught in the middle, left with no good options. This awkward positioning has led to what is 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 from short-term K-line charts, we will notice a more interesting phenomenon: Bitcoin is undergoing a "folding." Outside Wall Street's spotlight, in those failed countries with soaring inflation due to excessive money issuance—such as Nigeria, Argentina, Turkey—Bitcoin still plays the role of the "Noah's Ark." In the eyes of 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 side of Bitcoin—rough, real, and full of vitality. On the shiny surface, although Bitcoin has been domesticated in the short term, a new narrative is quietly brewing, likely surpassing the "digital gold" of the past. That is "sovereign national reserve assets." 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 build positions in large transactions, Bitcoin's mission is evolving from "countering fiat" to "anchoring fiat." It’s akin to gold's journey before becoming central bank reserves—long, doubted, and circulating among the people. During this phase, the decline in volatility is an inevitable cost of growth. Something aspiring to be a global reserve asset cannot always fluctuate like a roller coaster. Wall Street's "institutionalization," while suppressing short-term surges, also encases Bitcoin in a thick layer of bulletproof glass—so-called "price bottom safety cushion." When the interests shift from retail investors to BlackRock, listed companies, or even national machinery, deliberately crashing Bitcoin would essentially be betting against the entire US dollar financial system. So, stop self-deluding with "garbage time"; that’s just short-sighted speculation. The wild era is truly over, but a new great voyage has just begun. What we face now is a "middle-aged Bitcoin" undergoing painful blood exchange, trying to enter the core global assets club. For true believers, this is not garbage time but a rare "discount season." Every second of boredom you endure now is, in fact, 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 calm before the storm.