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.

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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.

If the AI bubble bursts instead, triggering a 2008-style recession, Bitcoin initially sells off with other risk assets, but Hougan argued a government bailout would follow, and given that the AI buildout is “the biggest infrastructure investment in the history of America,” the resulting money-printing would be enormous.

“This is exactly the environment bitcoin was built for,” he wrote, putting the odds of a bailout at “nearly 100%.”

BitcoinBTC · USD$82,455+0.83%Oct 8Oct 10Oct 12Oct 14Oct 15$84.2k$82.9k$81.5k$80.2k24h HighHigh$82,50824h LowLow$79,806VolVol$1.8BMarket projectionsOdds by MyriadThis weekAbove $82,000Above $82k62% chance→Buy Bitcoin with USDTPowered by JupiterPrice data by CoinGeckoCoinGeckoMore Bitcoin news and projections →The third path, a muddle-through of roughly 3% growth and 4% rates, simply lets Bitcoin keep doing what it’s been doing: drawing ETF flows, advisor adoption and corporate and sovereign balance-sheet allocations as government debt mounts. “Bitcoin wins by showing up,” he wrote.

The memo lands amid exactly the kind of macro anxiety Hougan is addressing. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink warned this week that a halt to data center construction could tip the U.S. into recession, underscoring how tightly AI infrastructure and the broader economy have become intertwined.