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

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.

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%.”

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.

Hougan was careful to hedge. He stressed Bitcoin won’t rise in a straight line, noting it fell 50% in days during the 2020 COVID panic before rebounding roughly 20-fold, and acknowledged the thesis could break for non-macro reasons. Among them: a global government crackdown or the quantum-computing threat to older wallets, a rising risk even as researchers debate whether AI could break crypto’s encryption before quantum computers arrive.

Still, his conclusion was unequivocal: for long-term investors, the big macro questions “matter less than most people think,” because nearly every path still ends with Bitcoin.