2025 Asset Review: Why Did Bitcoin Significantly Underperform Gold and US Stocks?

Original Article Title: "2025 Asset Retrospective: The Value Discrepancy Between the AI Singularity and Entropy Increase, Why Bitcoin Will Significantly Underperform Gold and US Stocks"

Original Article Author: XinGPT, Cryptocurrency KOL

Many people, when observing Bitcoin's performance in 2025, fall into a simple price comparison trap, failing to understand why it has underperformed the US stock market led by Nvidia, and even lagged behind the traditional safe-haven asset gold.

From a high-dimensional perspective, this is actually a problem rooted in physics and information theory. Price is merely a facade; the underlying energy flow and information density are what truly matter.

1. The Crowding Effect of Energy Arbitrage: The Shift of Compute Power Hegemony

In Musk's logic, value is often tied to energy conversion efficiency. Over the past decade, Bitcoin has been the only machine capable of massively converting energy into a digital scarce asset, which is a form of thermodynamically anchored value.

However, in 2024 and 2025, an extremely dominant competitor emerged: Generative Artificial Intelligence.

The core driver of the US stock market now is not fiat currency inflation but the exponential increase in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) brought about by AI. When tech giants invest billions of dollars in building data centers, they are essentially seizing global electricity quotas.

At the current stage, the economic value added by each unit of electricity used to train the next generation of large models or drive high-performance computing chips temporarily surpasses the revenue generated by Bitcoin mining through hash collisions. The difference in marginal returns shapes price and capital allocation. Don't believe it? Go see how many Bitcoin mining facilities have been converted into AI compute centers.

Capital is opportunistic and sensitive. When the growth curve of silicon-based intelligence steepens faster than the scarcity curve of "digital reserves," global surplus liquidity will flow preferentially to productive assets with nonlinear growth potential, rather than purely digital assets.

2. Gold's "Atomic Properties" vs. Bitcoin's "Code Consensus"

This year, gold's strong performance is fundamentally the result of global geopolitical entropy increase.

Facing deglobalization and systemic uncertainty, sovereign-level players need an asset that does not require network connectivity and does not depend on any clearing system. Under this extreme anti-fragility logic, ancient gold offers 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 physical disconnection risks, atomic-level certainty temporarily prevails over Bitcoin's consensus, as physical gold can at least be held in hand or stored in a cave.

Gold hedging is a system collapse, while Bitcoin is currently more seen by the market as a liquidity overflow of the system.

3. "Volatility Dulling" Brought by ETF

Tools determine behavior. The proliferation of Bitcoin spot ETFs signifies the taming of this beast.

Once Bitcoin entered traditional asset allocation portfolios, it began to follow the risk management model of traditional finance. While this brought long-term fund support, it also greatly smoothed out its volatility, stifling its explosiveness.

Bitcoin now increasingly resembles a high-beta tech index. As the Fed's maintenance of high interest rates exceeded market expectations, this "long-tail asset," extremely sensitive to liquidity, naturally will be suppressed.

4. The Productivity Singularity's Siphoning of the Bitcoin Narrative

Charlie Munger emphasizes opportunity cost.

If holding AI-leading companies with monopolistic positions can achieve high certainty of nonlinear growth, then holding Bitcoin, which does not generate cash flow, incurs a very high opportunity cost.

2025 is the eve of one of the rare productivity singularities in human history, where all capital is chasing the node that might birth superintelligence. Bitcoin, as a "challenger to the monetary system," has had its appeal diluted in the face of the productivity revolution narrative in the short term.

5. Phase Transition in Fractal Structures

From the perspective of complex systems, the U.S. stock market is in an AI-driven parabolic acceleration phase.

In fractal geometry, tiny structures replicate and magnify themselves through simple iterative formulas. AI is playing this iterative operator role. From the foundational Nvidia computing power, to the middle layer of cloud services, all the way to the top layer of software applications, each layer is replicating the logic of "productivity explosion." This structure is grandiose, but it also means the system is approaching the physical limits of that local dimension.

The performance of gold in the collapse of the old order can be understood through the construction process of the Cantor Set, continuously removing one-third of the middle. In the current global financial fractal, what is being removed is "credit expansion," "unrealizable commitments," and "high-entropy debt."

As the old order is continually shattered by debt crises and geopolitical turmoil, the final group of disconnected yet indestructible points remaining is gold. This is a value density created by "subtraction," the most stable physical bottom layer in the fractal structure.

The current state of Bitcoin is essentially the result of a hedging of forces at different scales: the profit-taking sell pressure from early participants, counteracted over time by the continuous buying from sovereign states and long-term holders, compressing the price into a long-term low volatility range.

This prolonged period of low-volatility oscillation is dynamically known as a reorganization of the "Attractor."

This fractal system, accumulating over time, paves the way for the next scale transformation.

Ultimately, the Bitcoin of 2025 is not falsified but repriced. It momentarily yields at the ends of the productivity singularity and geopolitical defense demand, bearing the cost of time rather than direction.

Only when AI's marginal efficiency declines and liquidity overflow continues will Bitcoin return to its true forte as a cross-cycle liquidity value carrier.

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