But as they say, past history is no indication of future performance.
Current economic conditions are anything but "normal" by recent historical standards. A good indication of this is the fact that "real gold" has risen just as dramatically and at the same time as "digital gold" has fallen.
It's expected for Tether to print when the crypto market cap is growing, because most crypto trades in USDT. So you cannot reliably say what is the cause and what is the consequence here.
Then, if the price was pumped and the liquidity didn't match it, it'd be a perfect target to squeeze (because the market is so highly leveraged), at least one trading firm should've attempted it.
It seems to have stabilized around $70k. Obviously after it had "stabilized" at $90k for two months, so it might drop further. But if I had to submit a bet I would guess it will fluctuate around the current level for another couple months before some random event catapults it to $150k, followed by the next "crash".
But with the current political volatility anything might happen
The anything includes gold continuing to rise and the dollar continuing to fall as countries continue to sell dollars and dollar denominated assets because of self enriching, petty policies. Why trust anything this administration says, especially as news is driven by an investigation into a cabal of pedophiles and things are decided as they are considered in real time, emotionally. This is what people wanted, I guess.
very broad extrapolation of the previous two 'cycles'. after a peak, it tends to crash to 20-30% of previous peak value, goes sideways for a year or two, then goes up to 2x its previous peak.
the 'four year cycle' is perhaps moreso the 'US presidential cycle'.
It’s my personal belief that btc has been the currency of foreign influence operations ie for paying media figures to influence popular opinion and sentiments. I believe this can be most readily seen in the US right and maga. The messaging is all very consistent across YouTube, x, fox, news nation etc across weeks, months and years.
Brexit was a proof of concept, certainly it has spread.
The Bitcoin genesis is certainly unclear; a FLOSS project is proudly published by those who create it and certainly don't want to remain anonymous, but the super-value of BTC over time has been driven by substantial criminal activities, not exactly US nor pro-US. The first ones were indeed US "ally", the D-Company that sold drugs for BTC to arm Al-Qaeda by selling BTC for weapons and explosives, which the sellers were happy to accept because they could sell them for various nations' fiat currencies to D-Company customers, laundering it well and without having to carry around pallets of unmarked bills, which are easy to seize during travel. Yes, Al-Qaeda was pro-US kleptocracy, certainly not pro-American people, see https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/c...
But then China also used them to smuggle Fentanyl into the US, and this late revenge against the East India companies that invaded it with opium so long ago, on the wrong subject (since it was the UK that started the Opium War and the US helped and was largely helped by China, which paid for e.g. the development of the railway networks in the US, a history forgotten by most), it proved that BTC as a tool is neutral. Its use by Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea confirms this.
So I suspend judgment, I don't trust the genesis, I read and encounter various problems https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html but I am not completely convinced by your analysis and honestly, I am very much in favor of the end of the banking system and the current financial model for the development of humanity, and it matters little who brings about this event; they are the enemy of my enemy in any case.
So a minus of about 45% from the all time high three months ago?
If this is it for this cycle, that would indicate the volatility of Bitcoin went down significantly.
Taking a look at the Bitcoin to USD price chart, I see roughly these numbers:
2013: $1,100 -> $238 = -78%
2017: $19,000 -> $3,500 = -82%
2021: $68,000 -> $16,000 = -76%
It will be interesting to watch if the volatility really stays this low suddenly. If so, one could point to the institutional adoption over the last years as the reason for this. When I ask Gemini for the number of public companies with Bitcoin on their balance sheets over the last years, I get:
2023: 67
2024: 79
2025: 190
And a similar trend for Bitcoin ETFs and ETPs. Twice as many in 2025 than in 2023.
As others have pointed out, it also runs up less in percentage terms during the resurgence. If, as you posit, Bitcoin is becoming less volatile, then the question will be what the demand looks like when it is no longer a way of getting exposure to potential large upside. In other words, a lot of people have bought it in the hope that it will double or more. How many will buy it in the hope that it doesn't go down? Perhaps it will happen, but it's not obvious.
In the limit, that would mean that Bitcoin's volatility reflects only the savings rate of people.
That would mean that Bitcoin is pure monetary value. In that case, it would suck out all the monetary premium from other assets like real estate, equities and gold. The monetary premium in those is probably a few hundred trillion. So by that time, Bitcoin's price should be 2 orders of magnitude higher than today.
XMR has dropped about 50%, which means it’s back to November prices. (If you ignore the unusual January spike, it’s not even down that much, price is usually rising slowly over time.)
Since the maturation of XMR, I really don’t understand the popularity of Bitcoin except as a speculative asset. XMR is everything that BTC promised and failed to be, with real anonymity baked in. I’m not big on crypto, but it’s strange to see the continued focus on one of the least interesting technologies in the space.
Remember that bitcoin miners have to pay for electricity with real currencies, so they have to sell bitcoin regularly.
Most other bitcoin uses are balanced -- ie user buys bitcoin gives to dealer who sells it. When the number of transactions per day is going up this is slight buy pressure because of the time lag between buy & sell, but in a steady state system this is neutral.
IOW, the natural direction of bitcoin prices during steady state is down.
The myth that bitcoin is an effective store of value (aka "digital gold") has just died. The proof is available in your crypto wallet.
Real gold bullion has now been fully "digitized". You can buy and hold real bullion without taking delivery, without transactions fees and without dealing with tbe schenanigans of unregulated markets and manipulators.
Over the past year of unprecedented marketplace turmoil and upheaval, "real gold" has risen just as dramatically as "digital gold" has fallen.
Only one myth left standing in the way of bitcoin's total demise --- the idea that PoW is a reasonable and effective basis for financial markets/transactions. Are you willing to put real money on it?
I’m a crypto skeptic but the benefit of bitcoin over gold has never been ease of transaction. The benefit is that regulators and governments are generally unable to confiscate bitcoin. The same is not true of gold, particularly if you do not take final delivery.
Government has lots of coercive tools at it's disposable. For example, search warrants and incarceration.
If you refuse to hand over your keys, government can easily nullify you or your relatives ability to make use of them and make your life really bad in the meantime.
Keepjng money from government is yet another crypto myth that doesn't hold up very well in many cases.
"the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has also seized almost 130,000 bitcoin worth around $15 billion at the time of the announcement—the largest US cryptocurrency seizure to date."
The answer is that "real gold" has a long, long history as a stable store of value and as a result, more people know it, trust it and are willing to buy it when the chips hit the fan.
Here is a chart showing the price of gold over the past decade.
But I would argue that the most important and telling part is what has ocurred recently, after a crypto fan assumed personal control over the world's largest economy.
You don't just want the best investment, you want several good investments that are uncorrelated with each other. Gold is better if you're looking for something to diversify your investments in the stock market, since it tends to do well when stocks are doing badly (though that's not guaranteed). Bitcoin of course has been better for really high returns, mostly when stocks are doing well. Whether that will continue is anyone's guess. Long-term returns for gold have basically matched the S&P500 total performance since the bottom of the dotcom crash.
Because they're not actually equivalents. Gold has unique properties as a material, unique properties that are useful. It'd be more widely used in industry if it wasn't such a scarce and expensive material. Bitcoin on the other hand, has no use other than for conducting trade. Because of this, they inherently carry different risks as an asset.
Having an app that tells you that you have a thing is not the same as physically having the thing. Owning gold in that sense is no different than owning bitcoin: They both rely on a societal fiction that you can actually get the value of the asset when you expect that you can. In other words: The presence of a reliable financial and legal system is what makes the myth real for both assets.
We forget that the idea that the gold could be “further away from”/“not actually in the physical possession of” the human who “owns” was not universally accepted at all points in history. In a weird way, bitcoin is more forthright in that it says out loud “trust me this is valuable because we all agree it just is” where non-custodial ownership of gold tries to imply that there’s less need for this trust because there’s an actual shiny rock on the planet somewhere and humans have a history of valuing shiny rocks.
Ultimately it seems like it’s the “trust” part that mostly matters. Bitcoin is certainly harder to trust at the moment. But gold is rallying because there is less trust overall. That’s not good for either asset.
Well the reason people buy bitcoin at 100k is because they think it will someday be worth a million. If it's never going to be worth a million, then it's not worth 100k either.
Unlike other goods with some real worth (like a tulip), you can apply your correct observation all the way to a cent if you exclude illicit uses of Bitcoin.
After trying to trade the cycles I gave up and stuck some key currencies on a hard wallet put it somewhere safe and told my wife. My kids will either thanks me or wonder what the heck I was thinking in the future. Worth it for pure asymmetric payoff scenario and just to have some skin in the game. All imho and not advice!
i used to think, well the 'serious' stuff is stocks, PMs, RE, etc., but crypto is a 'shitcoin', a 'gamble'.
but infact, it recently dawned on me, its (almost) the other way around. everything is a 'shitcoin'. your real estate is a 'shitcoin', and can get 'rugged' with crime rates, or tax band shifts, or legislative changes with the sole purpose of winning populist votes. stocks can (and have) been getting rugged. gold got rugged recently (although now recovered.) cash gets rugged with money printing (but everyone already knows that.)
for a long time i felt an implication that there's a 'safe house' for your resources, like in a video game, but at your choosing you can 'leave' the safe house for a risky win. but thinking about it more - that's a very 90s US-centric viewpoint of 'the end of history' - no, you can get absolutely screwed doing the 'right thing', playing 'smart'. you can do your homework and get deep fried anyway.
i'm actually not sure which is more risky: holding bitcoin or real estate. genuinely, which is more dangerous?
Well, it would depend greatly on which real estate you mean. There are empty cities in China which testify that real estate can, in fact, be very risky, but most real estate is not like that.
Lots of other places where it is certainly not safe, but in the end you can at least use it as a place to live (unlike the Chinese ghost cities), whereas Bitcoin does not have any intrinsic use (even T-bills can be used to pay government debt such as taxes).
> i'm actually not sure which is more risky: holding bitcoin or real estate. genuinely, which is more dangerous?
You can look at past statistics and volatility. The answer is clearly that Bitcoin is far more risky on average. This is an objective question with an objective answer.
rugged doesn't seem the right word. A rug pull represents the person creating and controlling a thing deciding to reveal it to be a scam and cash in at the expense of the suckers. Things like that tend to be illegal in the analogs you talk about.
Hasn’t bitcoin repeatedly dropped 70%+ from record highs and then surged over that high again within a year?
Yes. Many things which happened before are still noteworthy when they happen again.
Yes it has.
But as they say, past history is no indication of future performance.
Current economic conditions are anything but "normal" by recent historical standards. A good indication of this is the fact that "real gold" has risen just as dramatically and at the same time as "digital gold" has fallen.
Bitcoin has always traded more like tech stocks than gold.
The obvious difference being that tech stock value is based on some tangible product or service in a regulated marketplace.
Bitcoin value is based on --- pure speculation and manipulation in an unregulated marketplace
Yes, and such climbs coincide with Tether printing billions from unknown sources (most likely thin air)
You can’t pump bitcoin with monopoly money forever, because the liquidity becomes too small
It's expected for Tether to print when the crypto market cap is growing, because most crypto trades in USDT. So you cannot reliably say what is the cause and what is the consequence here.
Then, if the price was pumped and the liquidity didn't match it, it'd be a perfect target to squeeze (because the market is so highly leveraged), at least one trading firm should've attempted it.
But they rise by perfectly round numbers and mainly in response to falling prices
What do you get by squeezing bitcoin? Once the liquidity is exposed as non existent everyone loses their money. There’s no hedge
It has, tho the rate of new record highs have been reducing from peak to peak: 10x > 3x > 1.5x
Yes it's a totally safe bet you should put your life savings in there.
Last time I heard bitcoin was in free fall and doomed it was at $18K...
(I dont own any bitcoin and believe the world would be a better place without cryptocurrencies)
i reckon this time it will touch $30k before hitting new high of $200k
Could be, but we don't know what is driving this meme magic. Could be totally organic. Could be not.
It seems to have stabilized around $70k. Obviously after it had "stabilized" at $90k for two months, so it might drop further. But if I had to submit a bet I would guess it will fluctuate around the current level for another couple months before some random event catapults it to $150k, followed by the next "crash".
But with the current political volatility anything might happen
The anything includes gold continuing to rise and the dollar continuing to fall as countries continue to sell dollars and dollar denominated assets because of self enriching, petty policies. Why trust anything this administration says, especially as news is driven by an investigation into a cabal of pedophiles and things are decided as they are considered in real time, emotionally. This is what people wanted, I guess.
Can't tell if genuine or sarcasm ...
very broad extrapolation of the previous two 'cycles'. after a peak, it tends to crash to 20-30% of previous peak value, goes sideways for a year or two, then goes up to 2x its previous peak.
the 'four year cycle' is perhaps moreso the 'US presidential cycle'.
Bitcoin has already largely separated from the 4 year cycle.
It’s my personal belief that btc has been the currency of foreign influence operations ie for paying media figures to influence popular opinion and sentiments. I believe this can be most readily seen in the US right and maga. The messaging is all very consistent across YouTube, x, fox, news nation etc across weeks, months and years.
Brexit was a proof of concept, certainly it has spread.
The Bitcoin genesis is certainly unclear; a FLOSS project is proudly published by those who create it and certainly don't want to remain anonymous, but the super-value of BTC over time has been driven by substantial criminal activities, not exactly US nor pro-US. The first ones were indeed US "ally", the D-Company that sold drugs for BTC to arm Al-Qaeda by selling BTC for weapons and explosives, which the sellers were happy to accept because they could sell them for various nations' fiat currencies to D-Company customers, laundering it well and without having to carry around pallets of unmarked bills, which are easy to seize during travel. Yes, Al-Qaeda was pro-US kleptocracy, certainly not pro-American people, see https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/c...
But then China also used them to smuggle Fentanyl into the US, and this late revenge against the East India companies that invaded it with opium so long ago, on the wrong subject (since it was the UK that started the Opium War and the US helped and was largely helped by China, which paid for e.g. the development of the railway networks in the US, a history forgotten by most), it proved that BTC as a tool is neutral. Its use by Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea confirms this.
So I suspend judgment, I don't trust the genesis, I read and encounter various problems https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html but I am not completely convinced by your analysis and honestly, I am very much in favor of the end of the banking system and the current financial model for the development of humanity, and it matters little who brings about this event; they are the enemy of my enemy in any case.
So a minus of about 45% from the all time high three months ago?
If this is it for this cycle, that would indicate the volatility of Bitcoin went down significantly.
Taking a look at the Bitcoin to USD price chart, I see roughly these numbers:
2013: $1,100 -> $238 = -78%
2017: $19,000 -> $3,500 = -82%
2021: $68,000 -> $16,000 = -76%
It will be interesting to watch if the volatility really stays this low suddenly. If so, one could point to the institutional adoption over the last years as the reason for this. When I ask Gemini for the number of public companies with Bitcoin on their balance sheets over the last years, I get:
2023: 67
2024: 79
2025: 190
And a similar trend for Bitcoin ETFs and ETPs. Twice as many in 2025 than in 2023.
As others have pointed out, it also runs up less in percentage terms during the resurgence. If, as you posit, Bitcoin is becoming less volatile, then the question will be what the demand looks like when it is no longer a way of getting exposure to potential large upside. In other words, a lot of people have bought it in the hope that it will double or more. How many will buy it in the hope that it doesn't go down? Perhaps it will happen, but it's not obvious.
In the limit, that would mean that Bitcoin's volatility reflects only the savings rate of people.
That would mean that Bitcoin is pure monetary value. In that case, it would suck out all the monetary premium from other assets like real estate, equities and gold. The monetary premium in those is probably a few hundred trillion. So by that time, Bitcoin's price should be 2 orders of magnitude higher than today.
XMR has dropped about 50%, which means it’s back to November prices. (If you ignore the unusual January spike, it’s not even down that much, price is usually rising slowly over time.)
Since the maturation of XMR, I really don’t understand the popularity of Bitcoin except as a speculative asset. XMR is everything that BTC promised and failed to be, with real anonymity baked in. I’m not big on crypto, but it’s strange to see the continued focus on one of the least interesting technologies in the space.
Once Bitcoin goes to zero, the "everything bubble" healing can begin.
Maybe Satoshi will finally sell his coins at $0 as a joke to the world
Remember that bitcoin miners have to pay for electricity with real currencies, so they have to sell bitcoin regularly.
Most other bitcoin uses are balanced -- ie user buys bitcoin gives to dealer who sells it. When the number of transactions per day is going up this is slight buy pressure because of the time lag between buy & sell, but in a steady state system this is neutral.
IOW, the natural direction of bitcoin prices during steady state is down.
The myth that bitcoin is an effective store of value (aka "digital gold") has just died. The proof is available in your crypto wallet.
Real gold bullion has now been fully "digitized". You can buy and hold real bullion without taking delivery, without transactions fees and without dealing with tbe schenanigans of unregulated markets and manipulators.
Over the past year of unprecedented marketplace turmoil and upheaval, "real gold" has risen just as dramatically as "digital gold" has fallen.
Only one myth left standing in the way of bitcoin's total demise --- the idea that PoW is a reasonable and effective basis for financial markets/transactions. Are you willing to put real money on it?
I’m a crypto skeptic but the benefit of bitcoin over gold has never been ease of transaction. The benefit is that regulators and governments are generally unable to confiscate bitcoin. The same is not true of gold, particularly if you do not take final delivery.
Here are estimates of the value of Bitcoin currently held (mostly via seizure) by the US government:
https://www.theblock.co/post/374636/the-daily-us-government-...
https://www.mexc.com/learn/article/how-much-bitcoin-does-the...
How can you seize it without the private keys? Do they force it out of the people involved?
Do they force it out of the people involved?
Yes, in a manner of speaking.
Government has lots of coercive tools at it's disposable. For example, search warrants and incarceration.
If you refuse to hand over your keys, government can easily nullify you or your relatives ability to make use of them and make your life really bad in the meantime.
Keepjng money from government is yet another crypto myth that doesn't hold up very well in many cases.
You find the private keys wherever the owners stored them.
The benefit is that regulators and governments are generally unable to confiscate bitcoin.
The US government can and has seized a lot of bitcoin so this is another crypto myth that has died.
It requires keeping the keys secure, rather than entrusting them to a custodial service, yes.
Keeping them secure from an untrustworthy government is no easy task.
Not true though.
"the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has also seized almost 130,000 bitcoin worth around $15 billion at the time of the announcement—the largest US cryptocurrency seizure to date."
https://www.wired.com/story/feds-seize-record-breaking-15-bi...
If gold rises (and therefore falls) as crazy as Bitcoin, then why is it better
Excellent question.
The answer is that "real gold" has a long, long history as a stable store of value and as a result, more people know it, trust it and are willing to buy it when the chips hit the fan.
Here is a chart showing the price of gold over the past decade.
https://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html
Here is a corresponding chart for bitcoin.
https://charts.bitbo.io/price/
But I would argue that the most important and telling part is what has ocurred recently, after a crypto fan assumed personal control over the world's largest economy.
You don't just want the best investment, you want several good investments that are uncorrelated with each other. Gold is better if you're looking for something to diversify your investments in the stock market, since it tends to do well when stocks are doing badly (though that's not guaranteed). Bitcoin of course has been better for really high returns, mostly when stocks are doing well. Whether that will continue is anyone's guess. Long-term returns for gold have basically matched the S&P500 total performance since the bottom of the dotcom crash.
Because they're not actually equivalents. Gold has unique properties as a material, unique properties that are useful. It'd be more widely used in industry if it wasn't such a scarce and expensive material. Bitcoin on the other hand, has no use other than for conducting trade. Because of this, they inherently carry different risks as an asset.
You can use gold in tangible ways.
Because when you buy gold you don’t have to rely on shady crypto bros to cash out
Having an app that tells you that you have a thing is not the same as physically having the thing. Owning gold in that sense is no different than owning bitcoin: They both rely on a societal fiction that you can actually get the value of the asset when you expect that you can. In other words: The presence of a reliable financial and legal system is what makes the myth real for both assets.
We forget that the idea that the gold could be “further away from”/“not actually in the physical possession of” the human who “owns” was not universally accepted at all points in history. In a weird way, bitcoin is more forthright in that it says out loud “trust me this is valuable because we all agree it just is” where non-custodial ownership of gold tries to imply that there’s less need for this trust because there’s an actual shiny rock on the planet somewhere and humans have a history of valuing shiny rocks.
Ultimately it seems like it’s the “trust” part that mostly matters. Bitcoin is certainly harder to trust at the moment. But gold is rallying because there is less trust overall. That’s not good for either asset.
>You can buy and hold real bullion without taking delivery
Not your vault, not your gold.
True. Physical possession is an option with real gold --- as is stuffing fiat under your mattress.
But even if you don't choose this route, I would argue that a fully regulated vault is a safer and more reasonable option than one that isn't.
*BTC is on sale. Buy and hold .
It's converging back towards its intrinsic value.
Related:
Bitcoin gets a zero price target in wake of Burry warning
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46907794
3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46900497
Well the reason people buy bitcoin at 100k is because they think it will someday be worth a million. If it's never going to be worth a million, then it's not worth 100k either.
Unlike other goods with some real worth (like a tulip), you can apply your correct observation all the way to a cent if you exclude illicit uses of Bitcoin.
After trying to trade the cycles I gave up and stuck some key currencies on a hard wallet put it somewhere safe and told my wife. My kids will either thanks me or wonder what the heck I was thinking in the future. Worth it for pure asymmetric payoff scenario and just to have some skin in the game. All imho and not advice!
its kind of fun now, in the 'post crypto' era.
i used to think, well the 'serious' stuff is stocks, PMs, RE, etc., but crypto is a 'shitcoin', a 'gamble'.
but infact, it recently dawned on me, its (almost) the other way around. everything is a 'shitcoin'. your real estate is a 'shitcoin', and can get 'rugged' with crime rates, or tax band shifts, or legislative changes with the sole purpose of winning populist votes. stocks can (and have) been getting rugged. gold got rugged recently (although now recovered.) cash gets rugged with money printing (but everyone already knows that.)
for a long time i felt an implication that there's a 'safe house' for your resources, like in a video game, but at your choosing you can 'leave' the safe house for a risky win. but thinking about it more - that's a very 90s US-centric viewpoint of 'the end of history' - no, you can get absolutely screwed doing the 'right thing', playing 'smart'. you can do your homework and get deep fried anyway.
i'm actually not sure which is more risky: holding bitcoin or real estate. genuinely, which is more dangerous?
Well, it would depend greatly on which real estate you mean. There are empty cities in China which testify that real estate can, in fact, be very risky, but most real estate is not like that.
Lots of other places where it is certainly not safe, but in the end you can at least use it as a place to live (unlike the Chinese ghost cities), whereas Bitcoin does not have any intrinsic use (even T-bills can be used to pay government debt such as taxes).
> i'm actually not sure which is more risky: holding bitcoin or real estate. genuinely, which is more dangerous?
You can look at past statistics and volatility. The answer is clearly that Bitcoin is far more risky on average. This is an objective question with an objective answer.
rugged doesn't seem the right word. A rug pull represents the person creating and controlling a thing deciding to reveal it to be a scam and cash in at the expense of the suckers. Things like that tend to be illegal in the analogs you talk about.
> i'm actually not sure which is more risky: holding bitcoin or real estate
Both can have wild swings in valuation, but at the end of the day, you still hold something by owning real estate.
> at the end of the day, you still hold something by owning real estate
Unless you fail to keep up on rent^Wproperty taxes, in which case you will find that someone comes to take it away from you.
Tulip mania
Hasn't wild volatility always proved to be the very nature of Bitcoin?