2025: First U.S. Net-Negative Migration in 50 Years — Was the “Great Reset” Always Meant to Happen on Bitcoin?

2025 marked the first time in over 50 years that the U.S. experienced net-negative migration—or at least a near-zero drop. That alone is a macro shock. But it’s showing up in an odd place: crypto narratives.abcnews+2

A lot of commentators now act as if influencers must straddle two worlds: the old 4-year crypto cycle and whatever new cycle is forming around AI, compute, and agent-driven internet activity.

Take Charles Hoskinson’s forecasts:

• By 2029, a $50B/year market for confidential compute, with ~75% of AI inference running in trusted execution environments.
• By 2035, most searches, commerce, and online activity driven by AI agents, not humans. Humans end up in a “human internet” zoo while the “real” economy runs agent-to-agent on the global internet.

Those are strong claims about compute becoming the scarce, valuable asset. And yet, we’re also seeing a historic contraction in net migration—something that should, in theory, reshape labor, consumption, and tech adoption.finance-commerce+2

From a social-science lens, that tension is awkward. Psychology usually models behavior with bidirectional strategies (stimulus ↔ response, belief ↔ action), not a clean triarchy of “migration–compute–crypto.” There’s no obvious law of conditioning that says Hoskinson’s math should map neatly onto net migration trends. If anything, the “conditioning” for his followers already ran its course; now it’s more about status, narrative control, and who gets to keep commentating while Trump dominates the immigration/“job board” narrative.

My working theory:

• Compute became exclusive through cryptocurrency (mining, GPUs, data centers, tokenized access).
• That exclusivity started affecting offline behavior—hiring, migration choices, even which metros grow or shrink.whitehouse+1
• People who arrived “late” to Bitcoin still caught up if they had access to compute. In that sense, buying compute may matter more than timing your coin entry.
• A lot of shitcoins might actually work against the long-term compute economy by fragmenting capital and attention.

That doesn’t fully explain the loss in net migration. But it raises a question: if there were enough compute (and data) to model it properly, would we see a clearer link between crypto/compute dynamics and migration flows—or is this just a convenient narrative overlay on a policy-driven shock?

I’d rather not make money on shitcoins. There are legitimate people who came to Bitcoin late but leveraged compute to catch up. Maybe the real trade isn’t “which coin,” but “who owns the compute.”