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.
Hindsight is 20/20. That bitcoin is a store of value has been talked about for a very long time when other blockchains overtook it in terms of functionality. People’s memories are short so I am sure it will be touted as such again in a couple years.
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.
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 biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate.
How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.
> there's no fundamental underlying value [...] its free to fluctuate
I don't understand this argument since that's how literally all markets work: the consensus is the current price. If we're talking about fundamentals then crypto isn't comparable to gold at all since 1) it's a physical, tangible, durable thing, and 2) has been used for centuries as a store of value.
Gold is easy to understand from a human perspective and doesn't require knowledge of a blockchain or anything tech related. You store it, secure it, and transport it like any other physical asset. Whereas something like Bitcoin involves seed phrases, blockchains, irreversible transactions, a public ledger, and it's all virtual. If your store of value is one mistake away from being lost to the void then it's not very good. I'll just finish with this: there is a reason that central banks have been loading up on gold recently in light of uncertainty and not crypto.
A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. That presents a very real floor on price. If good was suddenly worth 1/10th as much we would use it in far more industrial applications thus driving up the price. Similarly mining would slow down from the current ~3,000 tons annually again driving the price up.
Gold is currently priced way above that level, but just like the stock market were dividends allow people to buy more stock when the price is low there is a very tangible feedback loop propping up the price which eventually kicks in.
Counterintuitively this means using gold as an investment vehicle makes the world a worse place because we fall back to less efficient methods in industry, and efficiency is ultimately the engine of progress.
Gold is also one of the best heat conductors so if it got really cheap it could be used a lot in industry and electronics. Anything from cookware to heat sinks!
Hence why I said at 1/10th the price we would use a lot more of it.
There’s easily decades worth of industrial use in vaults so the instantaneous floor is quite low. However feedback occurs well before you hit the actual limits here.
They’re durable, resistant to corruption, relatively rare, pretty… Titanium or gems would’ve been equally used if they were equally convenient. Not to mention that coinage could be minted or mixed with, say, copper. Gold makes good alloys and can be recovered later.
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.
Quantum computing is interesting to think about in the context of bitcoin. It would be technically feasible to upgrade the protocol to be quantum-secure (e.g. allow wallets to make an on-chain declaration of a new PQ pubkey, and after that point all transactions must be signed with the PQ keypair) - but getting everyone to coordinate on something like that would be challenging.
You can easily trade gold today. You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts to the goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead. You can easily trade gold after a nuclear apocalypse to your local warlord so you get access to non-irradiated food.
Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable. It is fundamentally a superior store of value than bitcoin if you’re talking about notable global disruptions, even without going into the actual tech.
This can’t be a serious comment. If ww3 starts the respective countries central banks will keep the gold for themselves. You are so naieve if you think any government is going to honour the fact that you have a piece of paper that saya you own some gold in their vault.
It is not like they haven't done lot to collect it off the population in such scenarios during previous crises. My guess is that if WW3 breaks out. For duration your gold will have rather little use. At best you get price set by government. At worst it will be confiscated. And black market will probably be only place to use it.
And post WW3. If there is economy left. It will be while before people lock back on gold.
If you want something you can trade post ww3 also stockpile alcohol, tobacco, coffee, etc. . Small luxuries everyone will be willing to trade for in a post war country.
Sugar and salt are non-perishable if stored in right conditions. Later one does not get too much use. But first one can be turned to drugs and those are always popular.
Yeah, that angle never worked out for me. If we imagine instead the world became hyper-capitalistic (even more than today), then I could see that digital and untracable (not Bitcoin) decentralized money might have a big influence, but in the opposite scenarios, I don't think there is a lot of need for cryptocurrencies.
It might be worth considering why drug deals are always portrayed as a high stakes, dangerous event (it's because to do the sale, the physical products have to all be in one well known place where everybody knows both the place and time).
> Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable.
But isn't this all based on belief? What if you break the spell? During the Dutch Tulip Mania you could've replaced "gold" with "tulip" and changed a few adjectives and it was the same until the spell broke... I don't see the difference to Bitcoin, GME, or TSLA, "I'm going to hoard this because tomorrow (for an infinite amount of tomorrows) someone else will want to buy it at a higher price!".
Yeah yeah yeah, gold can also be used for technology (e.g. as a non-reactive metal), but copper is useful in technology too...
Sheep is probably a better thing to own. You can eat it, or you can take its wool to make clothes to keep yourself warm. You can't eat gold.
At least AI produces something. Maybe not what everyone hopes for, but there is some output that people are worth paying for.
Cryptocurrency lived entirely in the hopes that people wanted to replace regular money, and it turns out not to be a big use case outside of criminals and refugees.
The AI bubble will one day collapse too. But the Bitcoin bubble could just plain vanish.
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.
I'm not a fan of Bitcoin but from a purely financial perspective it's natural for treasury companies to trade at a discount to the underlying assets. Obviously the executives are going to find some way to steal most of the value and leave the minority shareholders (suckers) holding the bag.
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.
That isn’t something you can categorically say for sure though. If it hits 125k next month then Bitcoin does go up over the long term. Same if it hits 125k next year.
I still find it interesting that the pump and dump still works - it's the same cycle over and over again of building the market to dump crap onto people. I bet some folks have so much crap they've been dumping it gradually just so the market can absorb it.
and it has proven to not be a great hedge against inflation (lately, short term)
the digital gold narrative falls apart when non-digital gold outperforms it and nobody wants it for its digital properties (payments, blockchain, etc.)
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.
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"...
Let's say if I had old-school BTC, mined personally or bought back in the day for very little fiat currency and today it's an enormously larger sum, I'd say it's time to not keep all my eggs in one basket and rebalance my portfolio.
For example, I'd say it's actually been time for a while now, ever since the crypto-tax wave start to hit, to convert into fiat currency and buy land, houses, assets that, IF the state doesn't collapse and they're chosen in reasonable areas, could still preserve significant value, allow you to flee to another country (houses purchased abroad) if necessary etc.
If someone had put 0.001% of their capital or even 0.01% into old-school BTC and today finds themselves with 50% of their capital in BTC, it's high time to give some thought to diversification.
Smart contracts will become the contracts of the future and NFTs will be digital identity is pretty obvious; we don't know WHO will be used by whom for these tasks, but it's clear that this is what they'll be because they're the most functional choice we have in the trend toward rules as code. The problem is that the market can stay irrational longer than we can stay solvent, so it's a gamble, but also a logical diversification in its own right as well.
The only highly uncertain element is the miners' ability to withstand long periods of loss.
As far as I can tell, bitcoin, having no intrinsic value, is priced entirely by vibes. Right now the vibes are generally negative. The latest bubble of interest has faded. I would wait, the world could become interested again but it may be 2 or 3 years. The bottom will probably be around 70k.
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