Today’s letter features a guest post from Phil Rosen, the co-founder of Opening Bell Daily, an independent financial media company. He wrote about his observations from attending the Bitcoin Investor Week conference in New York City.

Bitcoin is falling but industry insiders don’t care.

The cryptocurrency is down 16% over the last five days. Early Friday it dipped below $80,000 for the first time since the week of the November election, and it’s down more than 27% from its all-time high of $109,000.

At Bitcoin Investor Week, I’ve spent the last few days surrounded by people who you’d think would be most rattled — miners, fund managers, crypto evangelists — and yet the recent price correction has barely registered.

When I’ve brought it up myself, attendees’ responses have been the same: shrugs, laughs, and a sense of the inevitable.

“Nothing bad about buying bitcoin at a discount,” one independent investor told me.

Another guest, a Big Tech product manager who plows most of his paychecks into bitcoin and MicroStrategy, said he has increased his dollar-cost-averages into bitcoin from $20 a day to $50 over the last two weeks.

Recent headlines have pointed to the asset’s decline as evidence of misplaced optimism or exuberance. That doesn’t reflect at all the mood here. Price action — what most of the media focuses on — is noise to those playing the long game.

My guess is that it isn’t a stretch to say that this conference brought together one of the highest-conviction groups of bitcoiners in the world.

As Charlie Bilello pointed out on X, the recent pullback is nothing new historically.

The difference now is that the tailwinds today look more promising than any other year prior — none of which featured a crypto-friendly White House, lighter regulatory touch, and institutional adoption.

AI versus bitcoin mining

The most interesting conversations I had this week centered on how the rise of artificial intelligence could disrupt bitcoin miners. Several mining executives told me that AI’s increasing energy requirements could reshape bitcoin’s decentralization.

Data centers and AI training models have been devouring energy at an extreme pace while taking up more and more space in the general zeitgeist. Smaller and medium-sized bitcoin miners — which already compete for scarce energy resources with larger competitors — could get priced out, according to those in the industry I spoke with.

Smaller mining operations could vanish, leaving only the largest, most well-capitalized miners in their place. Should mining become more centralized, bitcoin itself becomes more controlled and, potentially, more vulnerable.

To be clear, no one positioned this scenario as existential. Yet the AI boom and tech companies’ massive capital commitment to it will make the energy question more relevant in the years to come.

So the rise of AI, I learned this week, is an energy story masquerading as a technology story. And bitcoin is caught in the middle. Should the broader computing arms race accelerate (I think it will), the bitcoin miners working to secure the network could be unintentional casualties, resulting in fewer hands on the steering wheel.

And for the asset that popularized the word “decentralized,” that’s a far more daunting prospect than a 27% price correction.

Phil Rosen is the co-founder of Opening Bell Daily, an independent financial media company. Sign up for the free newsletter he writes every morning to 190,000 investors.

How Bitcoin Hits $1,000,000

Adam Back is the Co-Founder & CEO of Blocksteam, and has been involved with bitcoin since the very early days. In this conversation we discuss what is going on with bitcoin, how institutional adoption is going, the potential bitcoin strategic reserve, Satoshi, and much more.

Enjoy!

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