2025 Asset Review: Why is Bitcoin significantly underperforming gold and US stocks?

Original author: XinGPT (X: @xingpt)

When observing Bitcoin's performance in 2025, many people get caught up in simple price comparisons and don't understand why it underperformed the US stock market led by Nvidia, or even the traditional safe-haven asset gold.

From a higher-dimensional perspective, this is actually a problem of physics and information theory. Price is just the surface; the underlying energy flow and information density are the essence.

1. The congestion effect of energy arbitrage: the shift in 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 into scarce digital assets on a large scale, a value anchored based on thermodynamics.

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

The core driver of the US stock market right now is not fiat currency inflation, but the exponential surge in total factor productivity (TFP) brought about by AI. When tech giants invest hundreds of billions of dollars in building data centers, they are essentially vying for global electricity quotas.

At the current stage, the economic value generated by each kilowatt-hour of electricity used to train the next generation of large models or drive high-performance computing chips temporarily exceeds the revenue generated by hash collisions to produce Bitcoin. The difference in marginal revenue leads to the choice of price and capital. If you don't believe me, just look at how many Bitcoin mining farms have been converted into AI computing power centers.

Capital is profit-driven and sensitive. When the growth curve of silicon-based intelligence is steeper than the scarcity curve of "digital reserves," the excess global liquidity will preferentially flow to productive assets with non-linear growth potential, rather than simply digital assets.

2. Gold's "atomic properties" and Bitcoin's "code consensus"

Gold's strong performance this year is essentially a result of increased global geopolitical entropy.

Faced with deglobalization and systemic uncertainty, sovereign players need an asset that does not require network connectivity and does not rely on any clearing system. Under this extreme logic of systemic failure prevention, ancient gold provides certainty at the atomic level.

While Bitcoin is hailed as digital gold, it still heavily relies on internet infrastructure and centralized liquidity channels. When the system faces the risk of physical disconnection, atomic-level determinism triumphs over bit consensus in the short term; physical gold, at least, can be held in hand or stored away in a cave.

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

3. The "volatility mitigation" brought about by ETFs

Tools determine behavior. The widespread adoption of Bitcoin spot ETFs marks the formal taming of this beast.

Once Bitcoin is incorporated into traditional asset allocation portfolios, it begins to follow traditional financial risk control models. While this provides long-term financial support, it also significantly smooths out its volatility, stifling its explosive potential.

Bitcoin is increasingly resembling a high-beta technology index. As the Federal Reserve maintains high interest rates for longer than the market expected, this highly liquidity-sensitive "long-tail asset" will naturally be suppressed.

4. The Siphon Effect of the Productivity Singularity on the Bitcoin Narrative

Charlie Munger emphasizes opportunity cost.

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

2025 marks the eve of a rare productivity singularity in human history, with all the capital chasing that node that could potentially generate superintelligence. Bitcoin, as a "challenger to the monetary system," has seen its appeal diminished in the short term in the face of this narrative of a productivity revolution.

5. Phase transition adjustment period in fractal structures

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

In fractal geometry, tiny structures continuously replicate and amplify themselves through simple iterative formulas. AI is playing the role of this iterative operator. From the underlying NVIDIA computing power to the mid-layer cloud services and the upper-layer software applications, each layer is replicating the logic of "productivity explosion." This structure is extremely grand, but it also means that the system is approaching the physical limits of that local dimension.

Gold's role in the collapse of the old order can be understood through the construction process of a Cantor set, which involves continuously eliminating the middle third. In the current global financial fractal, what is being eliminated are "credit expansion," "unfulfilled promises," and "high-entropy debt."

As the old order is continuously shattered by debt crises and geopolitical turmoil, the last remaining set of unconnected but indestructible points is gold. This is a value density generated by "subtraction," the most stable physical foundation in fractal structures.

Bitcoin's current state is essentially the result of the hedging of forces at different scales: the profit-taking pressure from early participants offsets the continuous buying by sovereign nations and long-term funds over time, compressing the price into a long-term low-volatility range.

This prolonged period of low-frequency oscillation is dynamically known as the reconstruction of the "attractor".

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

Ultimately, Bitcoin in 2025 is not being disproven, but rather being repriced. It is temporarily giving way to the dual demands of a productivity singularity and geopolitical defense needs, bearing the cost of time rather than direction.

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

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