Luisa Crawford
Sep 13, 2025 04:24
In the interview notes of journalist Faye Xiaofei, Professor Han Feng, in an age of global upheaval, raised his gaze to the stars to discern the tides of history and lowered his eyes to the data to parse their logic, pursuing a question that cuts to the root of civilization itself: When the old gravitational anchors collapse, where should humanity’s wealth be moored?
Faye’s Lens on the Future
Faye noted in her journal:
When the real estate model reached its physical limits, and when the credit anchor of the U.S. dollar failed, humanity needed a new “ark of value.” Professor Han Feng’s answer was clear: Bitcoin—the “quantum gold” of the digital age.
3. Hard Currency of the Information Age: A New Form of Reality
The global debt crisis looms like an approaching gravitational singularity from which no escape is possible. Whether in America, dependent on financial derivatives, or in China, reliant on land-backed credit, no civilization can escape its pull.
When the old logic of credit expansion exhausts itself, central banks respond instinctively with quantitative easing—printing money, devaluing currency, like injecting fuel into a collapsing star in hopes of staving off death. The Federal Reserve’s resort to this remedy in 2008 temporarily forestalled systemic collapse.
But Ray Dalio warns: when a centennial-scale “total debt crisis” arrives, this drug will fail. Debt has swollen to dimensions beyond the diluting power of any central bank. When even devaluation cannot resolve it, history shows what follows: irreconcilable social divisions, the rise of populism, and ultimately—civil wars or wars between civilizations.
The world we see today steps inexorably toward this grim prophecy.
How can such a crisis be resolved? The last cycle offered a clue: hard currency. After World War II, it was the dollar, anchored to gold, that rebuilt credit on the ruins of the globe.
So, in the 21st century—what can we rely on?
Real estate? It has proven an introverted remedy, generating prosperity in one region while eroding the system’s long-term vitality.
Gold? Its physical form makes it unfit for the high-velocity, bit-based digital economy. Too slow, too cumbersome. More importantly, gold is made of atoms, while humanity is entering a universe built on information.
U.S. capital markets? Wall Street, with its innovation-fueled giants like Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla, does inject value into the dollar. But the system remains centralized, dominated by one civilization, and cannot serve as a truly neutral, globally accepted solution.
Then, in 2009, on the eve of the old system’s collapse, a mysterious figure named Satoshi Nakamoto released a piece of open-source code. Without declarations, without an organization, he presented to humanity a radically new possibility: a new form of hard currency—Bitcoin.
Bitcoin: Gold Ascending into the Information Dimension
Bitcoin was designed on the logic of gold, but crafted for the digital age—a genesis of wealth consensus. It is not a mechanical imitation of gold but its ascension into the informational dimension.
Energy anchoring. Bitcoin mining consumes immense, precisely measurable energy (electricity). This mimics the physical cost of gold extraction—through massive entropy increase (computational heat dissipation), it produces a low-entropy certainty in the information world: the block. Thus, a measurable physical basis underpins this new global wealth consensus.
Absolute scarcity. Its total supply is algorithmically capped at 21 million units—an immutable constant of the universe, echoing gold’s scarcity.
Informational stability. As a pure digital form, Bitcoin cannot corrode or degrade, and can be infinitely divisible.
Decentralization. It has no central authority. Its existence rests on the impartial law of computation. Fully open-source, its transparent rules are the prerequisite for global consensus. It is destined to be the preferred value medium of future AI economies—for AI trusts only mathematics and computation, not promises.
Digital property rights. Most importantly, through private-key signatures, Bitcoin created for the first time in the digital realm a form of property that is clear, tamper-proof, and requires no third-party trust.
This was like the issuance of China’s first property deed in 1998: a Big Bang singularity for a new epoch.
Many ask Han Feng why he believes Bitcoin’s value will grow by orders of magnitude in the future. His answer is simple: the next wave of globalization, and the economy of AI agents, will require a value anchor belonging not to any human authority, but solely to mathematics and computation.
Faye’s Observations
In her annotations, Faye wrote:
Bitcoin’s “absolute scarcity” and “digital property rights” are the very consensus of gold transposed into the informational cosmos.
If China’s property deed was its domestic Big Bang singularity, then Bitcoin’s “genesis block” was humanity’s global singular moment.
Suspense
At the end of this chapter, Faye left a haunting question:
As “quantum gold” rises, how will the old power-holders respond? Why did Donald Trump reverse his stance by 180 degrees? And what force could pull Bitcoin from the margins to the very core?
Preview | Episode 4: Paradigm Shift — A Power Holder of the Old World Turns.
Image source: Shutterstock
