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

Many people, when observing the performance of Bitcoin in 2025, fall into simple price comparisons, not understanding why it underperformed compared to Nvidia-led US stocks and even traditional safe-haven assets like gold.

If viewed from a high-dimensional perspective, this is actually a problem of physics and information theory. Price is merely a surface appearance; the flow of energy and the density of information behind it are the essence.

1. The crowded effect of energy arbitrage: the transfer of computing power hegemony

In Musk's logic, value is often linked to the efficiency of energy conversion. Over the past decade, Bitcoin has been the only machine capable of converting energy on a large scale into a digital scarce asset, which is a value anchoring based on thermodynamics.

But in 2024 to 2025, an extremely strong competitor emerged: generative artificial intelligence.

The core driving force of the US stock market is not fiat currency inflation, but the exponential explosion of total factor productivity (TFP) brought about by AI. When tech giants invest hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers, they are essentially competing for global electricity quotas.

At the current stage, the economic added value generated by each kilowatt-hour used to train the next generation of large models or drive high-performance computing chips temporarily exceeds the revenue from Bitcoin generated by hash collisions. The difference in marginal returns forms the choices of price and capital. Don't believe it? Just take a look at how many Bitcoin mining farms have been converted into AI computing centers.

Capital is driven by profit and is sensitive. When the growth curve of silicon-based intelligence is steeper than the scarcity curve of “digital reserves,” global excess liquidity will prioritize flowing towards productive assets with nonlinear growth potential, rather than purely digital assets.

2. The “atomic properties” of gold and the “code consensus” of Bitcoin

This year's strong performance of gold is essentially a result of the increase in global geopolitical entropy.

In the face of de-globalization and systemic uncertainty, sovereign-level players need an asset that does not require network connectivity and is not dependent on any clearing system. In this extreme system fault-tolerance logic, ancient gold provides atomic-level certainty.

Although Bitcoin is hailed as digital gold, it still relies heavily on internet infrastructure and centralized liquidity channels. When the system faces the risk of physical disconnection, atomic-level certainty overcomes Bit's consensus in the short term, and physical gold can at least be held in hand or stored in a cave.

Gold hedges against systemic collapse, while Bitcoin is currently viewed more by the market as an overflow of system liquidity.

3. The “volatility dampening” brought by ETFs

Tools determine behavior. The popularity of Bitcoin spot ETFs marks the official taming of this beast.

After Bitcoin enters traditional asset allocation portfolios, it begins to follow the risk control models of traditional finance. While this brings long-term funding support, it also greatly smooths out its volatility and stifles its explosive potential.

Bitcoin now increasingly resembles a high-beta technology index. Due to the Federal Reserve maintaining high interest rates longer than the market anticipated, this “long-tail asset,” which is extremely sensitive to liquidity, is naturally being suppressed.

4. The Singularity of Productivity and the Siphon of the Bitcoin Narrative

Charlie Munger emphasizes opportunity cost.

If holding a leading AI company with a monopoly position can achieve highly certain non-linear growth, then holding Bitcoin, which does not generate cash flow, becomes extremely costly in terms of opportunity cost.

The year 2025 is a rare prelude to a productivity singularity in human history, where all the funds are chasing that node which could produce superintelligence. As a “challenger of the monetary system”, Bitcoin's allure has been diluted in the face of the narrative of the productivity revolution in the short term.

5. Phase Transition Adjustment Period in Fractal Structures

From the perspective of complex systems, the US stock market is in a parabolic acceleration phase driven by AI.

In fractal geometry, tiny structures continuously self-replicate and amplify through simple iterative formulas. AI plays the role of this iterative operator. From the underlying Nvidia computing power, to the mid-level cloud services, and up to the upper layer of software applications, each layer replicates the logic of “productivity explosion.” This structure is immensely grand, but it also means that the system is approaching the physical limits of this local dimension.

The performance of gold in the collapse of the old order can be understood through the construction process of the Cantor Set, which involves continuously removing the middle third. In the current global financial fractal, what is being removed are “credit expansion,” “unenforceable promises,” and “high-entropy debt.”

As the old order is continuously shattered by debt crises and geopolitical turmoil, the last set of unconnected yet unbreakable points is gold. This is a value density produced by “subtraction”, the most stable physical foundation in a fractal structure.

The current state of Bitcoin is essentially the result of a hedge between forces of different scales: the profit-taking pressure from early participants is offset in time by the continuous buying from sovereign nations and long-term funds, keeping the price compressed within a long-term low volatility range.

This prolonged low volatility oscillation is dynamically referred to as the reconstruction of an “Attractor.”

This fractal system accumulates over time, leaving space for the next scale change.

Ultimately, Bitcoin in 2025 is not being debunked, but rather repriced. It temporarily yields to the two ends of the productivity singularity and geopolitical defense demands, bearing the cost of time rather than direction.

When the marginal efficiency of AI declines and capital liquidity continues to overflow, Bitcoin will once again return to its true role as a cross-cycle liquidity value carrier.