Somewhere in Paris, a phone laying on a glass table started vibrating and was picked up by a mysterious person who answered, with a thick French accent: "Yes?".
In all seriousness to me this is still within the bounds of "a Tuesday" in the BTC space. Stranger things have happened many times already.
Bitcoin treasury companies [0] have equity values lower then their Bitcoin holdings, so it is the financially correct move to sell BTC at market price and use the proceeds to buy back their stock at the market price.
This will lead to additional downward pressure on BTC.
Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede?
But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncrackable Bitcoin private keys might someday be crackable with quantum computing. Preposterous? Maybe. Maybe not. There's a mind-blowing amount of compute coming into the world, and not all of it's going to be used to create goofy memes or robo-PowerPoints. Call me timid, but I cashed out with modest Bitcoin profits last year and am fine watching the show from the sidelines from here on.
The way bitcoin works is that addresses are hashes of a public key.
This technically allows for an emergency measure in case ECC is broken by a quantum computer:
The [unknown] public key becomes the private key. The signature becomes a ZKP of this key. I believe this has been proposed before as well.
The signature sizes are going to be a big problem is this scenario however, consensus may actually do something up to alleviate this in extremis. And also the people who have coins in addresses for which the public keys are known will be screwed, but then that's how everyone will know there is a problem - it's unlikely early cryptoraphically-relevant quantum computers (CRQC) will be able to front-run bitcoin transactions.
Quantum computing isn't a serious threat. Would require a concentrated effort from the community to migrate to a quantum-proof hashing algorithm but there's no greater motivation than potentially losing it all.
BTC failed to live up to it's own prophecy by not doubling from the last height of ca. 69420 to at least 140k in 2025. There was a last chance in October of last year, where it seemed to get close but ultimately it just didn't find enough buyers. Now with the narrative broken (bitcoin always goes up over the long term) one sell off will lead to the next as more and more people lose trust.
Wrong. The problem with bitcoin is its volatility itself. If it doubled in value, that means its undergoing hyper deflation, which makes it a terrible store of value.
Bitcoin's proponents are its own biggest liability. People who see it as a speculative asset rather than a currency that needs to be a stable store of value. It, like all currency, has no ingerent value and its stupid to speculate on it
When silver is behaving like a shitcoin you know we're in for a fun ride. I think the fact that anyone with a phone can now download countless apps that allows them to """invest""" with leverage &co was a mistake. My bank app now advertises memecoins as a way to build "wealth"...
Whether the price goes up or down from here, one notion has been sufficiently shattered over the last couple of years - that Bitcoin is a stable ~source~ store of value that acts has a hedge against inflation and currency control by governments. While assets like gold and silver have surged in the same time period due to political and economic uncertainty, as one may expect, Bitcoin has gone in the opposite direction and has been driven more by hype cycles and a small number of whales rather than any fundamentals.
A currency has no intrinsic value except a minimal one; for BTC, we can say it was 10k BTC for two pizzas. The subsequent value didn't come from speculation but from an underlying economy. In BTC case, it was the D-Company that sold drugs for BTC and with BTC bought weapons, explosives etc for Al-Qaeda, and those who sold them accepted BTC because they could sell it for local fiat currencies to various D-Company customers. From there, it was an uphill race.
The decline came when it moved from the criminal economy, which was well-supplied and very interested in exchanging BTC, to Wall Street, interested in speculating and with capital far greater than states evading sanctions and criminal groups.
However, the decline is always relative, because in its brief existence to date, BTC is still the asset that has gained the most value over time compared to any other.
Despite many technical problems https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html, it has spread. Running a node costs, let's say, a BitAxe/NerdMiner+Raspberry Pi+2TB of storage and an internet connection, meaning it's within reach of many. Once you have a node, you can set up a Lightning channel with your own node to have a "wallet" for everyday payments with low fees and sufficient TPS to pay for a coffee, if the seller accepts SAT.
In other words, it truly is an asset against failed currencies, authoritarian governments, geopolitical quakes, and so on. It isn't much compared to gold only because most people don't own BTC, don't know how to use it, so in a major crisis, well, only a few would know what to do, and these few would still need other things for daily exchanges. However, these few could, for example, flee a country taking wealth with them. Something that in a major crisis isn't guaranteed to be possible otherwise.
So, it isn't much of a currency at this moment. The currency uses that gave it the bulk of its super-value during this period are reduced, while speculative ones are high. It isn't very sustainable for the miners' economy without a rising price, and this creates a very dangerous downward spiral because, to date, states and giant actors accumulate BTC here and there but don't do much mining, and the interest in keeping the network up remains to be seen how it will hold over time. But it does have value in the current context.
The problem is always that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. The market isn't made up entirely of homines economici, but only some, and many other purely emotional subjects whose reasoning seems more constructed after the fact to justify emotional choices.
Personally, I suspend judgment. I've never really digested the definition of "store of value" nor that of digital gold, but I don't digest gold either because in itself it has minimal value; the super-value is pure psychology that can change at any time, ESPECIALLY in a major crisis where most are hungry and don't eat ingots. I just wonder in case of a major crisis what the few who have BTC can do with it, besides waiting for better times.
To me it’s only true use is to anonymize payments (which requires some work to truly anonymize properly) - I see it as a system you dive in and out of. Not hold in. Simply because it’s not backed by anything it has no implied stability. At least the dollar (not backed properly anymore) has one of the largest world powers behind it keeping it floating along. There isn’t one of those for BTC…
I think most crypto is really all about another market for pump and dumps, a Wild West without much regulation…
Much like AI’s promise about letting humans enjoy a life with less labor, the idea sounds great but its reality is the majority of people just truthfully to make more money one way or another.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 54.7 ms ] threadThere’s no way to prove this, but I’m seeing unexpected behaviors on the secondary markets for privately held AI companies.
In all seriousness to me this is still within the bounds of "a Tuesday" in the BTC space. Stranger things have happened many times already.
Bitcoin treasury companies [0] have equity values lower then their Bitcoin holdings, so it is the financially correct move to sell BTC at market price and use the proceeds to buy back their stock at the market price.
This will lead to additional downward pressure on BTC.
[0] https://bitbo.io/treasuries/
But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncrackable Bitcoin private keys might someday be crackable with quantum computing. Preposterous? Maybe. Maybe not. There's a mind-blowing amount of compute coming into the world, and not all of it's going to be used to create goofy memes or robo-PowerPoints. Call me timid, but I cashed out with modest Bitcoin profits last year and am fine watching the show from the sidelines from here on.
This technically allows for an emergency measure in case ECC is broken by a quantum computer:
The [unknown] public key becomes the private key. The signature becomes a ZKP of this key. I believe this has been proposed before as well.
The signature sizes are going to be a big problem is this scenario however, consensus may actually do something up to alleviate this in extremis. And also the people who have coins in addresses for which the public keys are known will be screwed, but then that's how everyone will know there is a problem - it's unlikely early cryptoraphically-relevant quantum computers (CRQC) will be able to front-run bitcoin transactions.
Nowadays even includes banks and custody companies.
Doesn't matter how much it falls.
Bitcoin's proponents are its own biggest liability. People who see it as a speculative asset rather than a currency that needs to be a stable store of value. It, like all currency, has no ingerent value and its stupid to speculate on it
When silver is behaving like a shitcoin you know we're in for a fun ride. I think the fact that anyone with a phone can now download countless apps that allows them to """invest""" with leverage &co was a mistake. My bank app now advertises memecoins as a way to build "wealth"...
The decline came when it moved from the criminal economy, which was well-supplied and very interested in exchanging BTC, to Wall Street, interested in speculating and with capital far greater than states evading sanctions and criminal groups.
However, the decline is always relative, because in its brief existence to date, BTC is still the asset that has gained the most value over time compared to any other.
Despite many technical problems https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html, it has spread. Running a node costs, let's say, a BitAxe/NerdMiner+Raspberry Pi+2TB of storage and an internet connection, meaning it's within reach of many. Once you have a node, you can set up a Lightning channel with your own node to have a "wallet" for everyday payments with low fees and sufficient TPS to pay for a coffee, if the seller accepts SAT.
In other words, it truly is an asset against failed currencies, authoritarian governments, geopolitical quakes, and so on. It isn't much compared to gold only because most people don't own BTC, don't know how to use it, so in a major crisis, well, only a few would know what to do, and these few would still need other things for daily exchanges. However, these few could, for example, flee a country taking wealth with them. Something that in a major crisis isn't guaranteed to be possible otherwise.
So, it isn't much of a currency at this moment. The currency uses that gave it the bulk of its super-value during this period are reduced, while speculative ones are high. It isn't very sustainable for the miners' economy without a rising price, and this creates a very dangerous downward spiral because, to date, states and giant actors accumulate BTC here and there but don't do much mining, and the interest in keeping the network up remains to be seen how it will hold over time. But it does have value in the current context.
The problem is always that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. The market isn't made up entirely of homines economici, but only some, and many other purely emotional subjects whose reasoning seems more constructed after the fact to justify emotional choices.
Personally, I suspend judgment. I've never really digested the definition of "store of value" nor that of digital gold, but I don't digest gold either because in itself it has minimal value; the super-value is pure psychology that can change at any time, ESPECIALLY in a major crisis where most are hungry and don't eat ingots. I just wonder in case of a major crisis what the few who have BTC can do with it, besides waiting for better times.
To me it’s only true use is to anonymize payments (which requires some work to truly anonymize properly) - I see it as a system you dive in and out of. Not hold in. Simply because it’s not backed by anything it has no implied stability. At least the dollar (not backed properly anymore) has one of the largest world powers behind it keeping it floating along. There isn’t one of those for BTC…
I think most crypto is really all about another market for pump and dumps, a Wild West without much regulation…
Much like AI’s promise about letting humans enjoy a life with less labor, the idea sounds great but its reality is the majority of people just truthfully to make more money one way or another.