What does Darwinian evolution have to do with semiconductor sanctions?
Everything.
American export controls were designed to freeze Chinese chip development. They worked—SMIC still can't match TSMC.
But evolution doesn't care about intentions. It cares about selection pressure.
When you remove access to abundant compute, you don't stop AI development. You redirect it. You select for efficiency over brute force. You create evolutionary pressure toward algorithmic innovation.
DeepSeek R1 matches OpenAI o1 on math benchmarks.
Training compute: fraction of American labs.
API cost: $0.55/million tokens vs $15.
27x cheaper.
This is not despite the sanctions. This is because of them.
The former ASML CEO said it plainly: "We're forcing them to become very innovative."
Biology has a name for this: adaptive radiation under constraint. When resources shrink, survivors aren't the biggest. They're the most efficient.
China couldn't outspend. So it out-innovated.
The deflation trap that's destroying consumer demand? It's freeing capital for production-side automation. The demographic collapse eliminating workers? It's accelerating robotic substitution.
5,000 humanoid robots shipped from AgiBot alone. Actuator costs down from $5,000 to $300.
The dragon isn't dying AND rising. It's transforming. The old China built on property and cheap labor is collapsing. The new China built on efficiency and robots is emerging.
The window is 2026-2030.
After that, the leverage disappears.
$BTC