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Community is still psychologically operating inside narratives that made sense 5-10 years ago but no longer accurately describe the industries today. I am saying this as somebody who has spent years deeply immersed in both spaces, and I want to save you before you waste YEARS of your life and your hard earned fiat here.
The important thing is this is not a “crypto is fake” or “AI is fake” argument as the technology itself is absolutely real, Bitcoin solved digital scarcity and Transformers/Large language models are genuine breakthroughs. What has massively changed is the ownership structure around the tech. Early crypto discourse revolved around decentralisation, self-custody, p2p value transfer and escaping institutional finance. Early AI revolved around democratised intelligence, open research and empowering people with access to knowledge and tools.
Over time both these industries have undergone almost the exact same structural transition:
protocol breakthrough -> infrastructure dependence -> institutional consolidation -> platform capture
That pattern is VERY visible if you stop looking at slogans and start looking at where the money, infra and control actually sit.
Take crypto first. Bitcoin genuinely introduced something historically important which was digitally scarce assets secured by decentralised consensus. That mattered but the surrounding ecosystem gradually centralised around liquidity, custody and regulatory infrastructure. The average person today does not interact with crypto the way early cypherpunks imagined. Every day market participants are not running nodes, transacting peer-to-peer or even self-custodying.
They are buying ETF exposure through brokerage accounts, holding assets on regulated exchanges, trading perpetuals routed through market makers, and relying on dollar backed stablecoins deeply integrated into the existing financial system. You know, that system it was designed to move us away from...
The Jan 2024 spot Bitcoin ETF approval was probably one of the clearest signals of this transition. Technology originally designed to reduce reliance on financial intermediaries became successfully wrapped inside traditional financial infrastructure. Within months BlackRock’s IBIT became the largest Bitcoin fund in the world while Coinbase became the dominant ETF custodian. That is not decentralisation replacing Wall Street it's actually Wall Street absorbing Bitcoin into its existing machinery.
Stablecoins reveal the same pattern even more clearly.
People still talk about them as if they are somehow outside the system but the dominant stablecoins are fundamentally extensions of dollar liquidity. Their reserves sit inside Treasury markets/ banking relationships and regulated financial rails. The irony is Bitcoin technically worked but the system adapted around it.
Now we look at AI.
The exact same structural transition is happening again. At first the narrative was that AI would democratise intelligence and empower individuals but now frontier AI increasingly depends on resources only a tiny number of organisations can realistically control:
- data centres;
- energy consumption;
- GPU supply chains;
- semiconductor manufacturing;
- cloud infrastructure;
- enterprise distribution;
- training data;
- regulatory relationships;
- state partnerships.
The cost of training models has exploded so much that the frontier itself is consolidating around a small cluster of hyperscalers, governments and elite labs. Thats why the real winners look less like independent devs and more like:
Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, cloud providers, data centre operators, and chip manufacturers.
The economics shifted toward the infrastructure. Many emotionally struggle to accept this because both industries still market themselves using the older revolutionary language even after the economics changed.
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