Bitcoin

The end of free scaling means the marginal cost of compute is now rising, which structurally favors vertically integrated players (Nvidia, hyperscalers, large miners with cheap power) and penalizes anyone who assumed deflationary hardware. For crypto, this cuts both ways: it validates the 'digital commodity / scarce compute-adjacent asset' thesis for BTC, but it also means the AI capex boom is the dominant capital magnet, and crypto is a secondary beneficiary at best in the near term.

MIT Technology Review article discusses the slowing of historical computing scaling laws (Moore's, Dennard's, Koomey's, Kryder's, Keck's) and the shift toward brute-force data center buildouts, while noting fundamental physical limits remain far below current systems.