Can Bitcoin be considered a "counter-culture" aesthetic expression, similar to Dadaism or Pop Art?

This is a very interesting idea, and the entry point is quite precise. You can understand it this way: Bitcoin, Dadaism, and Pop Art indeed share strong spiritual similarities in their core—they are all challenges and subversions of the mainstream order of their time.

The similarity lies in their "anti-mainstream" attitude:

Challenging Authority: Dadaism opposed the hypocritical bourgeois values and traditional art's "beauty" after World War I. Pop Art brought "unrefined" items like canned goods from supermarket shelves and comic strips into art galleries, challenging the definition of "high art." Bitcoin, on the other hand, challenges an even larger authority—the traditional financial system controlled by states and central banks. Its emergence against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis inherently carries a distrust of centralized institutions.
Redefining Rules: These movements all sought to establish their own new sets of rules. Dadaism declared, "Nothing is art, therefore everything can be art." Pop Art proclaimed, "What is popular is beautiful." Bitcoin, meanwhile, states, "Code is Law," using a system based on mathematics and cryptography to replace the decisions of bankers and government officials.

However, the difference lies in their "aesthetic expression":

Dadaism and Pop Art's expressions are outward, sensory; you can see a ready-made urinal signed (Duchamp's Fountain) or a silkscreen print of Marilyn Monroe. Their "beauty" or "anti-beauty" is visual.

Bitcoin's "aesthetics" are entirely different; it is a beauty of system, a beauty of logic. You cannot hang it on a wall to admire. Its aesthetic appeal is embodied in:

The concise elegance of its code: Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper is only nine pages long, describing a grand yet intricate system with very restrained language.
The ingenuity of its mechanism: The "mining" mechanism not only ensures the issuance of new coins but also maintains the security of the entire system through competitive ledger-keeping—a brilliant design.
The profundity of its philosophy: It embodies reflections on freedom, privacy, and ownership, more akin to a philosophy of technology.

So, to summarize:

If Dadaism and Pop Art were "artistic rebellions" against mainstream culture, then Bitcoin is more like a "technological rebellion."

It shares the same rebellious spirit with those art movements, but its medium of expression is not canvas and paint, but code and algorithms. It doesn't satirize reality in an art gallery; instead, it directly constructs an alternative, parallel system in the real world. From this perspective, it even goes further and more thoroughly than those art movements.