China banned bitcoin (mining) for the nth time this week. Here’s just a handful of the previous times they’ve done so: 2009, 2013, 2014, 2017, twice in 2021, and now again in 2025. The moral of the story is that you cannot ban bitcoin, you can only ban yourself or your country from participating in bitcoin.
Wall Street continues to miss the mark. Bitcoin is money without a centralized issuer or trusted third party. This is the only innovation of blockchain. “Crypto” and “tokenization” are at best inefficient ways to pretend to introduce “decentralization” to a system that, at the end of the day, is fundamentally required to be centralized. It doesn’t matter how much crypto marketing spin is applied, at the end of the day, the enforcement of your claim on a security is centralized to the legal framework and judiciary, police, and military, in the jurisdiction where the security was issued. There is no magical internet protocol that changes that fact. If you want an asset that removes counterparty risk, the answer is bitcoin, not “tokenizing” securities.
This is an interesting trend that I believe will age poorly. Some bitcoin mining businesses are pivoting their business model to suit the rampant growth and demand for high power compute focused on the AI industry. The build-out of a facility focused on bitcoin mining is massively different (cheaper) than a data center focused on AI. The difference in infrastructure needs reminds me of the post-COVID trend of large commercial real estate claiming they would modify office space to become apartments. The cost of conversion destroys any remaining unit economics unless the insane demand for AI compute holds steady for the next decade. I may be wrong, but I think we will watch many of these businesses that pivoted to AI pivot back when the AI bubble pops, and the bitcoin price runs.