In 20 Months, Bitcoin Will Be 20 Years Old. Is It Ready Yet?

Update (April 9, 2026): This article was written on April 8. At the time, I had not yet read the Financial Times reporting that Iran is asking tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz to pay in cryptocurrency.

This morning, catching up on the news, I saw that this is, in fact, what’s being proposed.

Not weighing in on the legitimacy of the toll itself (I’ve also seen Britain’s position that tankers in open waters should not be charged), but this may be the kind of geopolitical moment that tests Bitcoin’s transactional legitimacy in a real way.

This is (now) a developing story.

Source:https://www.ft.com/content/02aefac4-ea62-48db-9326-c0da373b11b8?syn-25a6b1a6=1

April 8, 2026 - I was listening to the latest episode of Diary of a CEO featuring Professor Steve Keen when a comment stopped me mid-thought. Keen suggested that Bitcoin could ultimately go to zero, not because of regulation, not because of competition, but because of energy. Specifically, because Bitcoin and artificial intelligence may eventually compete for the same finite power infrastructure. It’s the kind of statement that sounds Jamie Dimon back in the day extreme until you realize it shifts the conversation away from belief and toward something less negotiable: capacity.

Short Clip: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxuP3seJ4OFa_6jC6zZUHrnvwgzCKtAteW?si=m_Nme-T3rW2ltLI1

The real question isn’t whether Bitcoin works in theory versus whether AI will transform the economy. The real question is what happens when both demand more from physical systems than those systems can provide. We’ve grown comfortable evaluating technologies based on narrative, valuation, and the potential of adoption. But infrastructure doesn’t respond to potential.  It responds to load and transactional value.  At some point, load and validated transactional value forces decisions.

I want to be clear about what I have not done. I have not conducted a comparative analysis of the energy consumption of Bitcoin versus artificial intelligence. I have not fully evaluated the scale or implications of Bitcoin following the Genius Act. Bitcoin’s role in real geopolitical transactions remains, from what I can see, largely unsubstantiated. But uncertainty in data does not invalidate the question. If anything, it sharpens it. Even without precise measurements, we know enough to recognize that both systems are energy-intensive, and that the grid they depend on isn’t infinite.

Part of the reason this question resonates with me is personal. I grew up around men who understood infrastructure not as an abstraction, but as a skill. My grandfather, a police sergeant and a World War II veteran, and "the father that raised me," a Vietnam veteran who later worked as a bus driver, were both trained in electrical work through the military. That training didn’t just serve them in uniform, it translated into everyday life.  It made our household more resilient, more efficient, more cost-effective.   I’ve seen firsthand what it looks like when people are trained to build and maintain the systems everything else depends on. So when I think about national infrastructure, I don’t think in policy language. I think in terms of capability, labor, and execution. At a minimum, I think we should think about trying to scale technologies that demand enormous amounts of energy on top of an infrastructure that has not kept pace (especially in comparison to China, yes, I'm always looking at what the 5000 year old society is doing and how).

Artificial intelligence is being positioned as essential. It sits at the center of conversations about productivity, competitiveness, and future GDP growth. Governments are aligning behind it. Capital is flowing into it. There is very little ambiguity about its perceived necessity.  Bitcoin, on the other hand, occupies a more ambiguous position (I think in comparison). It has achieved cultural awareness, financial significance, and political attention. The level of lobbying from the crypto industry during the most recent general election made that clear, and policy developments like the Genius Act suggest that institutional legitimacy has taken shape. But legitimacy is not the same as reliance.

For all of Bitcoin’s valuation and visibility, its real-world usage, particularly at the geopolitical level, remains difficult to point to.  Over the past two years alone, we’ve seen enough global instability to test any system (or instrument) claiming to function as a decentralized alternative to traditional finance. Wars, sanctions, commodity shocks, and shifting alliances have all created moments where new forms of currency or settlement could have emerged.  And yet, in those moments, traditional assets reasserted themselves. Gold, oil, and other tangible resources (even the consideration of fertilizer and helium) continued to anchor value and influence.  Bitcoin rises in price at times, yes, but price movement is not the same as functional adoption.

This is where my skepticism comes into sharper focus. I’ve always approached investing from a fundamentalist, "Peter Lynchian perspective," grounded in fundamentals, financial transparency, and leadership accountability. The idea of allocating capital to something that cannot be evaluated through those lenses has always felt, at minimum, incomplete. I fully acknowledge that this bias shapes how I see cryptocurrency (I currently hold $50 in Doge coin for fun). At the same time, I also recognize that Bitcoin and blockchain technology have expanded the conversation in meaningful ways. They’ve introduced concepts like tokenization, fractional ownership, and the possibility of digital-native financial systems. Those contributions matter. But contributing to a conversation is not the same as becoming embedded in the systems that govern real-world exchange.

Which brings me to what I’ll admit is a slightly unfiltered take: from where I sit, Bitcoin increasingly behaves like an “S&P prop.” When traditional markets come under pressure, Bitcoin often moves in ways that feel less like an independent monetary system and more like a reactive financial asset within the same ecosystem it was meant to disrupt.  That doesn’t make it useless, but it does raise a critical question about what role it is actually playing. A currency and a volatility instrument are not interchangeable.

All of this becomes more pressing when you return to Keen’s constraint: energy. If both AI and Bitcoin continue to scale, and if infrastructure does not expand at the same pace, then prioritization becomes inevitable. And when that happens, decisions will not be made based on ideology or even innovation. They will be made based on perceived necessity. Which systems are indispensable? Which ones justify their resource consumption not just in theory, but in practice?

That is the question I find myself at: which of these systems, when put under real constraint, proves that they're for real and can't be turned off.

Which leads to a set of questions that I don’t think we’ve answered clearly. What will determine which technology gets priority in constrained infrastructure systems? Can Bitcoin survive purely as a store of value without meaningful transactional relevance?  What would real geopolitical adoption of Bitcoin actually look like, not in theory, but in execution?  Are we overestimating the power of decentralization while underestimating the importance of physical infrastructure? When does legitimacy come from actual usage rather than narrative or policy support? And if Bitcoin has been in existence for nearly two decades without fully realizing its most ambitious use cases, what exactly is the catalyst that changes that trajectory?

I don’t have definitive answers to these questions. But I am increasingly convinced that they matter more than the debates we’ve been having.

In systems under pressure, belief doesn’t allocate resources.