American factories have expanded for seven months in a row. The survey that measures it came in at 55.6, and anything above 50 means the sector is growing. Seven consecutive months is the strongest stretch since May 2022.

That reading is normally the cleanest piece of good news crypto gets. A growing industrial economy means confidence, and confidence is what moves money into things that pay nothing today and might be worth a great deal later. It is the backdrop people have spent the year waiting for.

It arrived. Bitcoin has spent roughly six months near $63,000, the last four weeks of it between $62,000 and $66,000, taking one piece of bad news after another without moving much either way.

The comfortable explanation is the Fed. Rates are high, the committee is in no hurry, and when that changes the money comes back. It is comfortable because it has a meeting date attached and a resolution you can wait for.

That story has one useful property. It is testable. If tight policy is the thing holding crypto down, a stretch where the real economy strengthens ought to leave some mark on the price, even a small one. Seven months is not a stretch anyone can wave away as noise.

The test already ran. The backdrop turned friendly and the price did not move. When good news lands and nothing happens, the useful question is where the money went instead.

It went into artificial intelligence. Equities are the most expensive on a long-run measure since 1999, and the earnings underneath them are real. Second-quarter margins hit a record 16.9 percent, the highest since 2009. Take two companies out of the count, Alphabet and Amazon, and the earnings growth behind that expensive market falls from 50 percent to about 30. The speculative money went to a handful of names.

So far that is a story about share prices, and you have read it elsewhere. Here is what the same industry started doing next. It has begun buying the one physical input bitcoin cannot do without.