Bitcoin Doesn’t Need Its Speculative Monopoly Back

In the first part, I argued that AI did not take Bitcoin’s investment case away. What it took was one job Bitcoin used to do exceptionally well, making investors feel that they had spotted the future early. Crypto seems much more bothered by losing that job than Bitcoin needs to be.

Crypto has become too sensitive to losing attention

Working in crypto makes it dangerously easy to treat attention as proof of strength, because this industry has been rewarded for attention again and again. When Bitcoin is doing well, you can feel the effect almost everywhere. Search interest grows, companies that were cautious six months ago suddenly want to talk about partnerships, and investors rediscover businesses they had stopped paying attention to.

I would be foolish to pretend those cycles do not matter. Anyone making strategic decisions in crypto has to plan around them. The mistake is assuming that attention itself tells you what Bitcoin is becoming.

Over time, though, crypto seems to have talked itself into a bad habit. Whenever another technology captures the market’s imagination, we start acting as if crypto has to steal the spotlight back. We have seen this anxiety before, but AI has made it much harder to ignore because the comparison is simply too neat.