Boom or Bust, Bitcoin Wins the AI Trade, Bitwise CIO Says

In brief

• Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan argued in an investor note that Bitcoin benefits across nearly every macro scenario, framing it like the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books where different paths reach the same ending.
• If AI delivers “superabundance,” value flows to scarce assets like Bitcoin; if the AI bubble bursts, he sees a near-certain government bailout and money-printing that Bitcoin “was built for.”
• He hedged—citing Bitcoin’s 50% COVID drop and risks like a crackdown or quantum computing, but concluded macro “matters less than most people think.”

No matter how the AI story ends, Bitwise’s chief investment officer argues, the trade leads to the same place: Bitcoin higher.

In a note to investors published Wednesday, Matt Hougan laid out his case using the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books of his childhood, where wildly different choices often funneled readers to the same ending.

He said the range of macro outcomes facing investors today is the widest he’s seen in his career, with pundits split between AI doubling GDP and AI causing human extinction. His answer was to walk down each path and see where it leads.

If AI delivers “superabundance,” Hougan wrote, productivity explodes and intelligence-based work gets cheap, but that abundance becomes a tailwind for genuinely scarce assets, as value migrates to things that can’t be reproduced, like waterfront land, gold, and Bitcoin.