# Bitcoin’s insurance role grows with AI hacking risks, but infrastructure boom raises holding costs

By Riza Dagoc

Canonical URL: https://www.tokenpost.com/news/insights/40554
Published: 2026-10-25T14:26:48.000Z
Updated: 2026-10-25T14:26:48.000Z
Section: Insights & Views

> Brett Winton sees Bitcoin as insurance against financial disruption from AI hacking. He says demand for AI infrastructure investment is also raising the opportunity cost of holding it.

AI-driven attacks on financial systems could strengthen Bitcoin’s role as an insurance asset. At the same time, the rush to build AI computing infrastructure is raising the opportunity cost of holding it as capital flows toward investments expected to generate more immediate returns.

In an interview on The Wolf of All Streets on October 25, Brett Winton, chief futurist at ARK Invest, described insurance as a useful but less widely accepted framework for understanding Bitcoin. He said Bitcoin and gold can serve similar purposes despite differences in how they can be moved and held.

Winton said Bitcoin’s central appeal is its function as digital gold that is easier to transport and harder to seize. It can offer an exit when holders face persecution, asset confiscation or severe inflation in their monetary system. Assets held on a centralized exchange can sometimes be withdrawn to a personal wallet, allowing holders to move outside the financial system governing that exchange, although that option is not guaranteed.

Because gold and Bitcoin provide similar functions with different strengths, Winton said their market capitalizations offer a useful comparison and argued that they could roughly share that market. He said the growth of stablecoins has reduced Bitcoin’s prospects of becoming a medium of exchange or unit of account during the current business cycle. Most of the value he anticipates for Bitcoin comes from its role as a gold substitute with established rules and portability.

Winton used the prospect of AI attacks corrupting bank records to illustrate the insurance argument. A major crypto exchange hack could cause severe losses by transferring assets to another address, but ownership through private keys and the location of those assets would remain relatively clear. Corrupted bank ledgers could instead obscure who owes money to whom, potentially freezing the local financial system and, depending on the bank’s size, disrupting global finance.

In that situation, Winton said, holders of Bitcoin or other digitally secured crypto assets would at least retain clarity about what they own. He also stressed the risks of self-custody: infrastructure supporting cold wallets has come under attack, while individuals may lack the time and capacity to keep track of every vulnerability.

The immediate competition for capital nevertheless makes holding Bitcoin more costly, he said. Winton described an urgent demand for available capital to fund AI computing infrastructure. With data-center construction offering the prospect of strong returns, assets that do not generate immediate returns become relatively less attractive.

Winton said this pull on capital extends beyond cryptocurrency to businesses worldwide. Although some investors still doubt data-center returns, he said he expects those returns to materialize and believes some are already evident. In his assessment, Bitcoin retains its insurance function, but the availability of AI infrastructure investments has increased the opportunity cost of holding that protection.