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 value is based on --- pure speculation and manipulation in an unregulated marketplace
You can’t pump bitcoin with monopoly money forever, because the liquidity becomes too small
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.
What do you get by squeezing bitcoin? Once the liquidity is exposed as non existent everyone loses their money. There’s no hedge
(I dont own any bitcoin and believe the world would be a better place without cryptocurrencies)
But with the current political volatility anything might happen
the 'four year cycle' is perhaps moreso the 'US presidential cycle'.
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.
Brexit was a proof of concept, certainly it has spread.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://www.theblock.co/post/374636/the-daily-us-government-...
https://www.mexc.com/learn/article/how-much-bitcoin-does-the...
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.
The US government can and has seized a lot of bitcoin so this is another crypto myth that has died.
"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...
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.
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.
Not your vault, not your gold.
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.
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?
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).
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.
Both can have wild swings in valuation, but 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.