By BItgirl, Finance and Technology Editor, Beaver County Business
Listen to a podcast discussion about this article.
There are times in financial history when the numbers stop behaving and start expressing feelings.
This, dear reader, appears to be one of them.
Bitcoin—the asset that was supposed to rise majestically above politics, debt, central banks, and the emotional lives of hedge-fund managers—has lately been acting like a teenager grounded for no clear reason. Scarce, defiant, mathematically pure… and yet down it goes, sulking in the corner.
Enter Andrei Jikh, who recently tried to make sense of the mood swing in a video ominously titled The Next Phase of the New World Order Has Begun. (You don’t call a video that unless you’re planning to move some furniture around.)
Jikh’s argument, once you scrape off the YouTube dramatics, is surprisingly old-fashioned. It boils down to a simple contradiction so large you can see it from an orbiting SpaceX satellite.
The AI–Debt Paradox (or: Who’s Going to Pay for All This?)
Our modern economy runs on debt the way Beaver County once ran on steel—continuously, noisily, and with the assumption that there would always be more workers tomorrow than today. Debt assumes growth. Growth assumes jobs. Jobs assume humans.
Unfortunately, we are now building machines whose explicit purpose is to eliminate humans from the workflow.
Jikh points to warnings from the CEO of Anthropic, who has suggested that AI could disrupt as much as half of white-collar employment in the next few years. That’s not a recession; that’s a reshuffling of the species.
So here’s the paradox:
If AI does the work, who earns the wages?
If no one earns the wages, who takes out the loans?
And if no one takes out the loans, who exactly is servicing the mountain of debt propping up the global economy?
This is less a business cycle and more an existential riddle, the kind usually pondered by philosophers or people staring too long at their 401(k) statements.
Why Bitcoin Is Falling Anyway
Which brings us back to Bitcoin. If it’s scarce, if it’s independent, if it’s immune to central-bank shenanigans—why is it getting knocked around like a penny stock?
Jikh’s answer: Wall Street found a way to rent the illusion of scarcity while manufacturing the reality of abundance.
Through futures, options, ETFs, and other financial contraptions, investors can now “own” Bitcoin without ever touching it. These paper claims create what Jikh calls a synthetic supply—Bitcoin exposure untethered from the hard limit of 21 million actual coins.
In plain English: you can short something you don’t have, borrow something that doesn’t exist, and suppress the price of something that was designed specifically to avoid all of that.
This, to Bitcoin purists, is roughly equivalent to discovering that someone has figured out how to photocopy gold.
Jikh’s proposed antidote is almost quaint: self-custody. Take the coins out of the casino. If the asset isn’t sitting on an exchange, it can’t be lent, rehypothecated—which is to say, magically transformed into a derivative of a derivative of a promise.
Wall Street, he argues, can push prices around in the short term. It cannot indefinitely control what it cannot access.
Meanwhile, in Japan…
As if AI and synthetic Bitcoin weren’t enough, Jikh also points to tremors in the global financial order that’s been quietly humming along since World War II.
For decades, the arrangement was simple: the U.S. issued the world’s reserve currency, and Japan supplied cheap capital through ultra-low interest rates. This powered the famous “yen carry trade,” where investors borrowed in yen and invested everywhere else.
Now Japan has a problem. Defend its currency by raising rates and risk crushing its debt—or keep rates low and watch the yen wobble. As Japanese bond yields rise, leverage unwinds, and that unwind doesn’t politely stay in Tokyo. It sloshes through global markets, knocking over anything standing too close.
Volatility, in other words, is not a bug. It’s the system clearing its throat.
What to Do While History Figures Out Its Next Act
Despite the apocalyptic set dressing, Jikh’s personal strategy is refreshingly boring. He favors dividend-paying consumer staples, diversification, and dollar-cost averaging—habits more associated with responsible grandparents than revolutionary new world orders.
When uncertainty is high, he suggests, the smartest move is often to reduce unnecessary exposure rather than make heroic bets. Drama is entertaining on YouTube. It’s less charming in a brokerage account.
So… What Is Happening to Bitcoin?
According to Jikh, Bitcoin hasn’t failed. It’s being tested—by Wall Street engineering, by AI-driven deflation, and by a global financial system suddenly realizing that its assumptions no longer match reality.
Whether Bitcoin emerges stronger or merely more misunderstood remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: this isn’t just about crypto prices.
It’s about a world built on debt trying to adjust to machines that don’t need paychecks—and investors trying to make sense of it all without losing either their shirts or their sense of humor.
Which, historically speaking, is always the hardest part.
