Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan has laid out the case that Bitcoin comes out ahead in nearly every macro scenario that could emerge from the current AI-driven moment, likening the range of possible outcomes to the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books of his childhood, in which wildly different choices often funneled readers to the same ending.

In a memo to investors published Wednesday, Hougan argued that no matter how the AI story ends, the trade leads to the same place: Bitcoin higher. The spread of macro outcomes facing investors today, he wrote, is the widest he has seen in his career, with pundits split between forecasts that AI will double GDP and warnings that it could cause human extinction. His answer was to walk down each path and see where it leads. Bitwise, for context, is one of the sponsors of the spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds that U.S. regulators approved in January 2024—the products underpinning the ETF flows and advisor adoption Hougan points to.

Path one: AI superabundance. If AI delivers “superabundance,” Hougan wrote, productivity explodes and intelligence-based work becomes cheap. But that abundance becomes a tailwind for genuinely scarce assets, as value migrates to things that cannot be reproduced, such as waterfront land, gold, and Bitcoin.

Path two: the bubble bursts. If the AI bubble pops and triggers a 2008-style recession, Bitcoin would initially sell off alongside other risk assets, Hougan acknowledged. He argued, however, that a government bailout would follow—and given that the AI buildout is “the biggest infrastructure investment in the history of America,” the resulting money-printing would be enormous. “This is exactly the environment bitcoin was built for,” he wrote, putting the odds of a bailout at “nearly 100%.”

Path three: muddling through. A third scenario, of roughly 3% growth and 4% rates, would simply let Bitcoin keep doing what it has been doing: drawing ETF flows, advisor adoption, and corporate and sovereign balance-sheet allocations as government debt mounts. “Bitcoin wins by showing up,” he wrote.

The memo arrives amid exactly the kind of macro anxiety Hougan is addressing. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink warned this week that a halt to data center construction could tip the U.S. into recession, underscoring how tightly AI infrastructure and the broader economy have become intertwined. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is also the issuer of the iShares Bitcoin Trust, the largest U.S. spot bitcoin ETF by assets—placing the firm behind Fink’s warning at the center of bitcoin’s institutional market as well.

Hougan was careful to hedge, stressing that Bitcoin will not rise in a straight line. He noted that the asset fell 50% in days during the 2020 COVID panic before rebounding roughly 20-fold. He also acknowledged that his thesis could break for reasons unrelated to the macro picture, citing a global government crackdown on crypto or the quantum-computing threat to wallets—a risk he described as rising even as researchers debate whether AI could break crypto’s encryption before quantum computers arrive. Those two risks, rather than the macro cycle, are the variables he effectively flags for readers weighing whether the thesis holds.

Still, his conclusion was unequivocal: for long-term investors, the big macro questions “matter less than most people think,” because nearly every path still ends with Bitcoin.