Arthur Firstov, Chief Business Officer at Mercuryo, describes the setup as Bitcoin competing with the flow into AI technology, explaining that “AI is increasingly being presented not simply as a technology bet, but as an infrastructure opportunity capable of generating long-term revenues.”
“That creates an interesting challenge for Bitcoin. Some of the companies and investors that helped give crypto institutional credibility are now finding opportunities in AI more compelling. Bitcoin miners are repurposing power capacity and data-center infrastructure for AI and high-performance computing, while institutional investors can increasingly access AI exposure through conventional infrastructure financing structures,” said Firstov.
He believes this is not about replacing Bitcoin but about a rotation of capital, as both represent a changing digital economy that offers investors different propositions. While Bitcoin offers scarcity, AI offers productive assets with growing demand.
“Bitcoin requires a conviction that a scarce, decentralized digital asset will continue to accrue monetary value. AI infrastructure can increasingly be assessed through more familiar measures such as utilization, contracted demand, revenue and return on invested capital. That does not, by definition, make the Bitcoin thesis weaker. In fact, it may ultimately sharpen the distinction between the two. Bitcoin is not trying to become another piece of productive infrastructure; its proposition is that digital scarcity and decentralized money have value in their own right.”
Firstov sees a situation in which the question remains whether Bitcoin can continue to attract institutional capital.
“This decade could witness two compelling trades: Bitcoin as the ultra-sound money of the digital age and AI as the infrastructure of a new form of computing.”
