no sane person could have ever held that notion - there is no underlying value.
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.
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.
How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.
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.
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.
I thought that was less than 10%. That's a very low floor! (That said, gold is sound money)
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.
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.
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.
Wouldn't they just take your gold and pressgang you? Double win for them.
The amount of gold you can realistically conceal is less than a year of your salary.
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.
Sheep get sick and die, and you have to feed them.
Yeah, when food and water are scarce, rearing sheep will be hard too.
There’s no way to prove this, but I’m seeing unexpected behaviors on the secondary markets for privately held AI companies.
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.
Was this the final dump? I doubt it.
the digital gold narrative falls apart when non-digital gold outperforms it and nobody wants it for its digital properties (payments, blockchain, etc.)
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.
Nowadays even includes banks and custody companies.
Doesn't matter how much it falls.
I just did so with a few pounds of silver (when @ 49.5:1; now 56:1).
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"...
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.
It's not as good as an ASIC, but we talk about millions of GPUs