China’s 2021 Bitcoin mining ban may have been the single greatest self-inflicted wound in a geopolitical era

by exiling an industry it once dominated,

China didn’t just reduce energy consumption = it severed its grip on the emergent nexus of decentralized infrastructure,

allowing the U.S. to absorb not just hashpower but the architecture for AI-aligned data centers, sovereign energy grids, and post-dollar monetary rails;

while China focused on top-down control and CBDCs,

the U.S. inadvertently gained a bottom-up, globally-adopted monetary protocol that can now be tied to energy policy, national defense, and digital trade routes; in this light,

Bitcoin mining was never just about coins = it was a digital Manhattan Project, and by vacating the field they may have lost the digital softwar.