According to foreign media, Chief Executive Officer Coinbase Brian Armstrong publicly contradicts a recent popular view that the AI hot tide will suck out bitcoin miners and trigger a bitcoin structural crisis. In his view, that statement confused the cost of mining, the change in computing power and the price of bitcoin, ignoring the regulatory mechanisms of the network itself.
The controversy came from the miners turning to AI.
The discussion was based on a judgement of the investor Chamath Palihapitiya. According to the latter, with the rapid increase in the demand for computing power in AI operations, miners may turn to the more profitable AI area on a large scale, as the associated calculated resources are said to yield between 10 and 20 times the return on mining in bitcoin.
Under this logic, the Bitcoin network may face a loss of computing power, and the market may be under pressure. Armstrong made it clear that the cost of energy did not determine the market value of bitcoin, which was the core error in such an exercise.
Hardness adjustment weakens the calculus shock
The key reason given by Armstrong is the automatic difficulty adjustment mechanism for the Bitcoin network. Even when some miners leave the site, the network adjusts the difficulty of mining to maintain the basic rhythm of block output.
This means that the decline in arithmetic will affect the pattern of competition among miners, but does not necessarily determine the direction of Bitcoin prices. According to him, to equate “how much electricity is used for mining” directly with “how much bitcoin is worth” is in itself a false premise.
Long-term demand still depends on inflation expectations
According to the article, Armstrong is more focused on sources of demand at the macro level. In his view, as long as Governments continued to expand their fiscal deficits and increase their currency investment, market demand for scarce digital assets would not disappear as a result of changes in the scale of electricity used for mining.
In other words, he attributed more to global inflation concerns than to short-term profit swaps at the mining end of the country, driven by the long-term price of bitcoin. The attractiveness of AI to the calculus market may lead to a phased disturbance, but it is not sufficient to rephrase the pricing logic of bitcoin alone.
This statement also perpetuates the recent and consistent market view of Armstrong. It was mentioned that he had reminded investors in mid-June of the fall of the market to observe bitcoin over a longer period of time and had used a four-year cycle map to show that the fall was part of the operation of the asset.
At that time, he also stated that bitcoin might have touched the cyclical bottom in the vicinity of $60,000 and stated that he was still optimistic about the post-market judgment.