作者|CoinEx、ViaBTC创始人杨海坡编译|吴区块链原文链接：https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/zWv8f9vGn8FvbUxokh1B3w1。比特币是一种注定会大规模崩溃的纯粹共识资产比特币是非生产性的，缺乏消费者价值，并且没有真正的货币效用。从历史上看，纯共识资产长期生存的先例很少。与黄金的类比是无效的。黄金的实物消费需求占其供应量的近一半，具有跨越千年的跨主权货币功能，且维护成本为零。比特币缺乏这三个属性。即使在法定时代，黄金仍然是主权国家中最硬通货——它是人类发现的唯一能够在不依赖任何第三方的情况下储存价值的物质。相比之下，比特币依赖于电网、互联网、矿工和交易所；切断任何一个链接都会使整个网络瘫痪。比特币曾经具有一定程度的实际货币效用——暗网交易、跨境转账和小额支付。这可以作为其价值锚。然而，随着比特币核心赢得区块大小战争并选择
小块路线图，它自愿放弃其支付功能。在那一刻，比特币从一种有缺陷的货币转变为一种纯粹由共识驱动的投机工具。随后的机构入场和现货ETF只是延长了已经失去基础效用的资产的寿命。其安全预算充当了自毁机制。随着区块奖励继续减半至零，网络安全最终将完全依赖于交易费用。然而，HODL 的价值叙述本质上与需要持续交易才能产生费用的安全模型相矛盾。这是一个无法解决的悖论。比特币的价格成功掩盖了所有这些潜在问题。价格是最强的市场信号，绝大多数人都无法理解。
Author |Yang Haipo, Founder of CoinEx and ViaBTC
Complied by | WuBlockchain
Original Link：
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/zWv8f9vGn8FvbUxokh1B3w
1. Bitcoin Is a Pure Consensus Asset Destined for a Massive Collapse
Bitcoin is non-productive, lacks consumer value, and has no genuine monetary utility. Historically, there are few precedents for the long-term survival of pure consensus assets.
The analogy to gold is invalid. Gold has physical consumption demand accounting for nearly half of its supply, possesses a cross-sovereign monetary function spanning millennia, and has zero maintenance costs. Bitcoin lacks all three of these attributes. Even in the fiat era, gold remains the hardest money among sovereign nations — it is the only substance discovered by humanity capable of storing value without relying on any third party. In contrast, Bitcoin depends on power grids, the internet, miners, and exchanges; severing any single link will paralyze the entire network.
Bitcoin once had a degree of real monetary utility — dark web transactions, cross-border transfers, and micropayments. This could have served as its value anchor. However, with Bitcoin Core winning the block size war and opting for the small-block roadmap, it voluntarily abandoned its payment functionality. At that moment, Bitcoin devolved from a flawed currency into a purely consensus-driven speculative vehicle. The subsequent institutional entry and spot ETFs are merely prolonging the life of an asset that has lost its underlying utility.
Its security budget acts as a self-destruct mechanism. As block rewards continue to halve toward zero, network security will ultimately rely entirely on transaction fees. However, the value narrative of HODL inherently contradicts the security model that requires continuous transactions to generate fees. This is an unsolvable paradox.
Bitcoin’s price has successfully masked all of these underlying issues. Price is the strongest market signal, and the vast majority of people are unable to resist it. Price has created path dependence — because it surged, we now have ETFs, institutional holdings, and the “too big to fail” narrative. Yet, the foundation of this chain is purely consensus; once the price trend reverses, the exact same chain will trigger a self-reinforcing downward spiral.
Cryptocurrencies will not completely go to zero — free trading, censorship resistance, and permissionless transfers inherently hold some value, which will establish a price floor far below current levels. Nevertheless, a massive collapse from its current trillion-dollar valuation is inevitable.
2. The Crypto Industry Is a Negative-Sum System with Astronomical Costs but No Genuine Revenue
The entire ecosystem incurs a rigid annual operational cost of approximately $35 to $50 billion — and likely much higher during bull markets. This includes roughly $10–15 billion for mining (electricity, hardware, and facilities), $15–25 billion for exchange operations, billions more for project teams, and hundreds of millions for peripheral services.
From another angle, this can be cross-verified by reverse-engineering the workforce data. The global crypto industry broadly employs about 1.6 million people (as of 2025), though a significant portion consists of part-time participants, KOLs, professional traders, and other non-full-time roles. The core full-time workforce relying directly on the crypto market is estimated at 100,000 to 200,000. This breaks down to 50,000–100,000 at exchanges, 30,000–50,000 at project teams, 20,000–50,000 in the mining sector, and 10,000–30,000 across service providers (law firms, compliance, media, VCs, market makers, etc.). Assuming an average fully loaded annual cost of $200,000 per employee (amortizing salaries, office space, infrastructure, compliance, and marketing), the workforce and associated overhead amount to $20–40 billion annually. Adding the $10–15 billion in mining costs brings the total systemic drain to $30–55 billion, perfectly aligning with the initial $35–50 billion estimate.
Conversely, the ecosystem’s actual external revenue is exceptionally weak. While stablecoin payments, cross-border remittances, and certain on-chain settlements do generate genuine external demand, this revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to the total market capitalization and the industry’s massive operating costs, making it wildly insufficient to sustain the current scale. Trading fees and newly mined tokens are fundamentally part of an internal circulation loop. The only viable source for massive capital replenishment is the influx of new investors. Once the net inflow falls below the tens of billions required to cover annual expenses, the ecosystem inevitably bleeds capital.
This stands in stark contrast to traditional finance. The underlying companies in the stock market generate real profits — Apple alone nets over $90 billion annually, and the aggregate profits of the S&P 500 are measured in the trillions of dollars. The friction costs are negligible compared to this massive profit pool. Therefore, the long-term growth of the stock market relies not on a continuous influx of new capital, but on the sustained profitability of its underlying enterprises. In contrast, no sector within the crypto industry actually extracts profit from the external world, rendering it a purely negative-sum game.
These rigid operating costs act as a financial gravity, serving as the fundamental reason why bear markets are an absolute certainty. A bull market is merely an illusion created when the influx of new capital temporarily outpaces the industry’s exorbitant burn rate.
3. The Industry’s Cumulative Capital Drain Has Reached the Trillion-Dollar Mark
Cumulative operational costs across the industry have reached approximately $500 billion. Historically, mining accounts for about $150 billion, exchange operations have consumed roughly $200 billion, and other investments and project teams account for the remaining $150–200 billion (with VC funding alone amounting to $100–120 billion, supplemented by direct financing mechanisms like ICOs and the project teams’ internal operational expenditures).
The $200 billion exchange expenditure can be further broken down. Looking at Coinbase alone, its cumulative operating expenses (including the cost of revenue) from 2021 to 2025 reached approximately $24 billion; factoring in early investments from 2012 to 2020, its total historical cost stands at $25–27 billion. Although Binance does not publicly disclose its financial reports, extrapolating from its headcount and global compliance expenditures suggests a cumulative cost of a similar magnitude. These two giants alone have burned through an estimated $50–60 billion. When factoring in the hundreds of exchanges that have existed throughout the industry’s history — such as Huobi, OKX, FTX, Bitfinex, Kraken, Bybit, Mt. Gox, and FCoin — the $200 billion figure is arguably a conservative estimate.
The $150 billion mining cost is not exclusive to Bitcoin. Over the past 15 years, Bitcoin’s cumulative electricity and hardware expenses have amounted to roughly $100 billion — ultimately transforming into spent power and scrap metal. During Ethereum’s seven-year Proof-of-Work (PoW) cycle, cumulative miner revenue reached about $30–40 billion, with corresponding hardware and electricity investments on a similar scale. On the day Ethereum transitioned to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) in 2022, approximately $19 billion in hardware assets went to zero overnight. Filecoin (FIL) presents an even more extreme case, trapping participants in a triple-layered squeeze of hardware costs, staking requirements, and installment debt. In the Chinese market alone, hardware sales prior to the mainnet launch exceeded 30 billion RMB, while the price of FIL subsequently plummeted from a peak of $237 to under $4. Miners of other PoW coins, such as LTC and DOGE, face similar predicaments, with their actual holding costs far exceeding current market prices.
However, this $500 billion represents only enterprise-level operational drain. The most significantly underestimated chunk is the consumption spillover at the individual participant level. Among the hundreds of millions of crypto users globally, tens of millions have experienced at least one bull market. A substantial proportion of them genuinely made real money — cashing out their tokens and splurging on luxury cars, mansions, high-end watches, nightclubs, casinos, and luxury goods. During major conferences like Token2049, host cities transform into consumer frenzies fueled by the crypto industry. The total scale of this individual consumption spillover likely rivals enterprise operational expenditures, yet it can never be accurately quantified.
Adding an estimated $30–50 billion in cumulative hacks, exploits, and regulatory fines, the industry’s total deadweight loss has reached the trillion-dollar mark, continuing to grow at a rate of tens of billions annually. Furthermore, all these figures suffer from systemic underestimation: the sunk costs of numerous small-to-medium exchanges and defunct projects remain untracked, and the consumption by peripheral industries spawned during bull markets falls completely outside any statistical metrics.
4. The Casino Analogy: Strikingly Similar Structures
The structure of the crypto industry bears a striking resemblance to the casino business. Exchanges are the casinos, miners are the infrastructure maintainers, project teams operate the various gaming tables, and a complete ecosystem of parasitic industries has grown around them — media outlets, KOLs, conferences, investment firms, law practices, and compliance agencies.
Taking Las Vegas as an example, non-gaming revenue (hotels, dining, entertainment, etc.) has long constituted the lion’s share of total casino revenue; gambling itself has become merely a loss leader to drive traffic. The crypto industry operates on a similar model: trading is the traffic driver, while the true capital consumption occurs across the entire supply chain.
The crucial difference, however, lies here: casino patrons know they are gambling. The crypto industry has packaged its casino as a “revolution,” “the financial infrastructure of the future,” or “digital gold.” It convinces gamblers that they are investing, or even participating in a grand, world-changing endeavor. This narrative allows capital inflows to far exceed those of any traditional casino and sets the psychological barrier to exit much higher. Furthermore, just like a casino, the only guaranteed winners are the harvesters operating on the periphery: power companies, chip manufacturers, cloud service providers, landlords, and luxury goods retailers.
5. Total Industry Investment and Where the Money Goes
The current cost basis (realized market capitalization) for all crypto asset holders is approximately $1.5 to $2 trillion — with Bitcoin alone accounting for about $1.1 trillion, alongside Ethereum and various altcoins. However, this money is not actually sitting in the system. The vast majority has permanently exited through channels such as seller cash-outs, miner operational costs, and fee extraction. A small minority of winners have walked away with a fraction of genuine profit, leaving a few hundred billion dollars deposited within the system to act as margin.
In other words, most of the invested capital has permanently vanished. A select few have taken a small portion, and the remaining margin props up an illusion of market capitalization that far exceeds its actual scale.
The concept of “wealth evaporation” for the most part never actually existed — market capitalization is an illusion created by marginal pricing and cannot be realized by all participants simultaneously. Real capital flow has only two destinations: it is either transferred into someone else’s pocket (redistribution) or consumed (deadweight loss). Deadweight loss constitutes the absolute majority.
6. The System’s True Margin and Leverage Ratio
The most accurate proxy for the system’s margin is the aggregate stablecoin balance. As of early 2026, the total global market capitalization of stablecoins stands at approximately $320 billion. However, a significant portion of this is utilized for cross-border payments, remittances, corporate settlements, and other non-speculative purposes. A rough estimate suggests the portion genuinely acting as margin for the crypto market is around $200-$250 billion. When combined with fiat balances held on fiat-to-crypto exchanges, the total margin pool sits between $250 billion and $300 billion.
This $250-$300 billion in real money is propping up a market capitalization exceeding $2 trillion, implying an effective leverage ratio of 8 to 10 times. The system is far more fragile than it appears on the surface. If merely 5–10% of holders simultaneously attempted to cash out into fiat, liquidity would evaporate, and prices would collapse.
The tens of billions in annual operational costs continuously drain this margin. Without a steady influx of new capital, the margin pool will inevitably shrink. The essence of a bull market is the growth of stablecoin balances — new money enters to mint stablecoins, the margin pool expands, and the leverage effect magnifies this into a surge in market capitalization. Conversely, in a bear market, stablecoins are redeemed, margin shrinks, and market capitalization collapses at an accelerated rate.
This structural dynamic is continually deteriorating: the proportion of actual margin continues to decline while the leverage ratio climbs, building toward an inevitable breaking point.
7. The Peak of Net Inflows May Have Passed
Historically, capital inflows into the crypto industry have been highly concentrated in a few bull market windows: the 2017 ICO boom, the 2020–2021 DeFi and institutional entry wave, and the 2024 ETF surge. Each bull market essentially draws in a new cohort of investors, whose massive short-term capital influx creates the illusion of skyrocketing prices.
However, the number of new participants drawn in during each cycle is diminishing. 2017 marked the retail awakening, 2021 saw institutional entry, and 2024 opened the floodgates for the final batch of traditional investors via spot ETFs. With hundreds of millions of crypto users globally, regulatory frameworks established in major economies, and mainstream financial institutions having already taken a stance or entered the market, anyone who should know about Bitcoin already does, and most who would buy have already bought. The accessible mainstream investor base has largely been covered, and the pool of future incremental capital is shrinking drastically.
The 2028 halving might trigger another market run, but where will the marginal buyers come from? Retail investors have been harvested across multiple cycles, institutions are already in, and ETFs are live. Previous bull markets relied on unlocking new investor demographics, but now, no major untapped groups remain.
Meanwhile, the system’s rigid annual drain of tens of billions of dollars will not stop. It is like a reservoir where the inlet is shrinking while the outlet expands. The most crucial variable in determining the timeline for the crypto industry’s endgame is not when Bitcoin encounters a technical failure, but rather when new capital inflows consistently fall below the system’s burn rate.
From a temporal perspective, the answer may be closer than most people think. The industry’s massive capital consumption has been concentrated in the eight or nine years since 2017, with total dissipation exceeding a trillion dollars — averaging around a hundred billion annually. Given that the current margin pool is only $250 billion to $300 billion, a significant reduction in capital inflows could see it drained within four to five years. The next bull market (if there is one) might delay this process, but the incremental capital brought by each cycle is decreasing, while the consumption engine only spins faster. The trajectory is certain; only the pace remains unknown.
8. Most People Overestimate Their Win Rate
In a negative-sum system, the collective return of all participants is inevitably negative — money consumed by the system does not magically return. However, the distribution at the individual level is highly uneven.
A small minority do indeed make real money and exit, but they represent a minuscule fraction of all participants.
The dilemma facing the majority is structural. Breaking it down by roles: Novices tend to enter during the late stages of a bull market and exit at the bottom of a bear market, inherently positioning themselves against the odds; however, because they lose early, their damage is relatively contained. Professional gamblers make profits only to lose them again; after a few cycles, their principal goes to zero. Their issue lies not in technical skills but in the gambler’s mindset. Believers capture Bitcoin’s upside because of their faith, but this same faith ensures they never sell — their conviction is the source of their success, yet it may also be the cause of their ruin.
Exchange operators and project founders may look like the “house,” but most reinvest their profits into hoarding tokens or funding new projects, meaning their capital never truly leaves the system. Some industry titans have established family offices claiming to pivot to U.S. equities, yet their entire portfolio consists of IBIT — merely moving Bitcoin from cold wallets into an ETF. It’s a change of attire, but the underlying exposure remains exactly the same.
As long as prices hold, everything appears respectable. But the moment the price trend reverses, their true vulnerabilities will be exposed batch by batch.
9. The Believers’ Trap and the Rare Winners
The crypto industry presents an elegant paradox: the prerequisite for making massive profits on Bitcoin is buying early and holding long-term. Those capable of this are inevitably the true believers — non-believers simply cannot hold on. However, after realizing profits, the brain attributes the price surge to “my faith was right,” creating a positive feedback loop that permanently locks in that belief.
This is a perfect filtering trap: the mechanism ensures that only believers make money, while the process of making money guarantees that these believers will never exit. Anyone who can break this cycle requires an incredibly rare ability: to logically repudiate their own conviction even while the market continuously validates it. This is practically counter to human nature.
Those who genuinely walk away with massive wealth are exceedingly rare. Their common trait is not visionary foresight, but knowing exactly when to leave the table. They generate returns by building actual businesses rather than purely betting on the market; during industry booms, they transfer the vast majority of their assets into the real economy, cognitively stepping entirely outside the crypto narrative. Out of hundreds of millions of participants, those who manage all of the above likely represent less than one in a thousand. The vast majority of believers will ride the entire rollercoaster — they are there for the ascent, and they will be there for the descent.
10. Clarity and Ambiguity from a Macro Perspective
From a macro perspective, the entire logical chain is glaringly clear: a high-consumption system with negligible actual external revenue, draining tens of billions in rigid costs annually, against limited net inflows, makes a massive collapse the inevitable endgame. This deduction does not rely on any single specific metric; even if every figure had a 50% margin of error, the conclusion would remain unchanged.
Nevertheless, precise data is indeed unattainable, and the reasons are structural: the majority of crypto industry participants operate opaquely. The capital burned by thousands of defunct projects will never be known, OTC transactions leave no public records, and personal extravagance is impossible to quantify. All numerical estimates are judgments of magnitude, not precise calculations.
But that is sufficient. Investment decisions and strategic judgments never need to be accurate to the decimal point; they only require the direction to be correct and the magnitude to be credible.
Conclusion
Cryptocurrency is a bubble-fueled boom born from a collective illusion, with a structure strikingly similar to that of the casino industry. The industry’s historical cumulative net investment has reached the trillion-dollar mark. The vast majority of this capital has already morphed into deadweight loss, vanishing permanently. A few hundred billion dollars of genuine margin is propping up an illusory market capitalization of over two trillion dollars through massive leverage — and this margin is bleeding out daily to cover operational costs.
The industry will not vanish entirely, but it will face a severe contraction. The demands for censorship-resistant transfers and free trading are genuine and will persist long-term, albeit at a scale far smaller than today’s. Ultimately, the industry will shrink to a size proportionate to the actual influx of new capital. The ecosystem will reach a state of equilibrium only when the inflow of fresh money exactly offsets its operational burn rate. In that equilibrium state, its total market capitalization will likely be a mere fraction of what it is today.
This stands as the most expensive social experiment in peacetime human history testing whether “consensus can replace value.” The answer is already glaringly obvious; it is simply that the vast majority of participants are not yet willing to admit it.
Follow us
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain
Telegram: https://t.me/wublockchainenglish