Author: Yang Haipo, Founder of CoinEx

This article was written on April 10

I. Bitcoin is a Pure Consensus Asset

Bitcoin has no productive value, no consumption value, and no real currency functions. Historically, there are very few examples of pure consensus assets surviving for a long time.

The analogy with gold does not hold. Gold has nearly half of its demand from physical consumption (jewelry, industry), has had sovereign currency functions for thousands of years, and incurs zero maintenance costs— a gold bar can sit in a safe for a hundred years without anyone maintaining it. Bitcoin does not possess any of these three points. In the era of fiat currencies, between sovereign states, gold remains the most rigid currency—it is the only material discovered by humanity that can accomplish value storage without relying on any third party. Bitcoin depends on the power grid, the internet, miners, and exchanges; any one link being severed will lead to paralysis.

Bitcoin once had a bit of real currency functionality—dark web transactions, cross-border transfers, micro-payments. This could have become its value anchor. But in the scaling war, the Core faction won, choosing the small block route and actively abandoning the payment functionality. At that moment, Bitcoin degraded from being a "flawed currency" to a "pure consensus speculative product." The subsequent entry of institutions and ETFs were merely extending the life of a functionless asset.

The security budget is a self-destruct mechanism. Block rewards will continuously halve and trend towards zero, with network security ultimately relying entirely on transaction fees. However, the narrative of "hold and do nothing" contradicts the security model of "trading is necessary to generate fees," which is unsolvable.

The price of Bitcoin successfully obscures all of this. Price is the strongest signal in the market, and the vast majority of people cannot resist it. Price creates path dependency—because it has risen, there are ETFs, there are institutional holdings, and there is the "too big to fail" narrative. But the foundation of this chain is consensus, and once the price trend reverses, the same chain will accelerate in the opposite direction.

Cryptocurrencies will not completely fall to zero—free trade, anti-censorship, and permissionless transfers still have certain value, providing a bottom far below current prices. But a significant collapse from the current trillion-dollar market capitalization is inevitable.

II. The First Principles of a Negative-Sum System

Understanding this system requires only one equation:

Net Inflow = Historical Consumption + Margin Balance

Once money enters the system, there are only two destinations: it is either consumed (electricity, salaries, rent, legal fees, personal extravagance), permanently leaving the system; or it remains in the system (stablecoins + fiat balances, that is, margin). There is no third place to go. All the numerical derivations in this article essentially fill in the variables in this equation from different paths.

The entire system has a rigid consumption of about $35-50 billion annually; it may be higher during boom periods: mining is about $10-15 billion (electricity, mining machines, facilities), exchange operations are about $15-25 billion (labor, cloud services, compliance, marketing), project operations are several billion, and other peripherals a few billion.

Verifying this scale can also be done by inferring from the number of employees. The global cryptocurrency industry broadly employs about 1.6 million people (by 2025), but many of these are part-time participants, KOLs, and professional traders, not full-time positions. The core professionals who rely on the crypto market for their livelihood are about 100-200 thousand: exchanges 50-100 thousand, project teams 30-50 thousand, mining 20-50 thousand, service providers (law firms, compliance, media, VCs, market makers, etc.) 10-30 thousand. Estimating an annual full-cost per capita of $200,000 (including salaries, office, infrastructure, compliance, marketing, etc.), the personnel and associated costs are about $20-40 billion/year; adding the mining costs of $10-15 billion, the total consumption aligns with the estimated $30-55 billion.

The real external income of the system is extremely weak. Stablecoin payments, cross-border transfers, and some on-chain settlements have indeed generated some external demand, but relative to the total market capitalization of the entire crypto market and the industry costs, this revenue is far from sufficient to support the current scale. Transaction fees are essentially an internal循。" user: "to/from the user.

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