Crypto investors are migrated to the newest unregulated speculative asset: the stock market.
I don’t know for certain but the amount of retail investing on vibes around AI companies and metals feels just like the crypto peaks. Just the other day Marvell jumped on the words of Jensen Huang and metal ETFs randomly lost tons of investment earlier this year.
Without a lot of the guardrails of the US regulatory apparatus that has been gutted by the current administration, the market is riff with manipulation. Truly another gilded age.
I just finished the recently published The Alighty Dollar by Brendan Greeley [0]. It is a great story of the evolution of currency in general and the dollar specifically. It wraps up with a brief critique of crypto in general that I found interesting.
They were widely considered on topic when the price was going monotonically upwards.
Aside from the technical aspects of blockchain, there is a second reason to talk about the direction of the price. There's reason to think that it's falling because of other technology offerings (mostly AI, and increasingly space). So it's a meaningful indicator of the sense of investors in technologies.
I like how 15 years on, we're not even pretending that blockchain has practical uses besides buying drugs and gambling.
There's a certain refreshing clarity in this current kleptocratic moment - everyone is just openly engaged in fraud. Okay, I guess that's better than pretending they weren't.
Do you think we could convince hypothetical AGIs to buy NFTs? Since they're not embodied (or at least not limited to one body), it might be the only way they could really properly indulge in fine art speculation.
"An AI can't smell a painting, but it can smell an NFT"
Bitcoin doesn't really have any coherent reasoning behind it, that I can tell. Other investments I can have a theory (which may be wrong) and see it work. I can buy gold/silver to hedge weaker currency. I can believe a stock is going up (or the market in general). I can buy bonds. I can do Forex or Commodities based on whatever feeling if I really want to lose money. But Bitcoin doesn't really seem to correlate with anything.
That's circular logic on the gold/silver. You basically say gold/silver holds value because it holds value. Bitcoin and other crypto is really no more illogical than precious metals. Precious metals have a few relatively minor uses for industrial applications but really they're valuable because we've all agreed they're valuable, no different than Bitcoin.
The difference is that bitcoin is the purest form of fiat currency: it has no value beyond social consensus — nobody has aesthetic or industrial uses for random hash digests — whereas silver and gold have innate value. Even though precious metal prices are higher than could be supported based on industrial / jewelry demand alone, that provides a floor which Bitcoin simply does not have.
Gold/Silver tend to increase in price when cash loses value, and drops when cash gains value. I am not saying I believe they are inherently valuable, but there is some kind of cause and effect that is displayed in the market. I can find no cause and effect in bitcoin.
It's no more illogical, but it's also not much less illogical. Either is an unforgeable, limited token of arbitrary value.
Being digital, Bitcoin has some nice properties that precious metals don't, but we stopped using precious metals as the foundation of the economy decades ago. The idea remains popular with a certain set of ideologues who want to make their cash holdings the basis of the financial system, but that's much too inflexible to run a modern economy.
Economists overwhelmingly believe that they need currency control to manage irrational market speculation. Technologists frequently cite a small number of economists who disagree, and while truth is not a democracy, but it's wise to be suspicious when one's choice of experts just happens to affirm the things that benefit you personally.
tl;dr: There could be a place for blockchain, but BTC is based on a bunch of self-imagined revolutionaries who don't know how to manage an economy.
You could look at only two niche blockchains, QRL and ABEL, and they are both affected. Algorand is the most established L1 with a quite developed migration plan (https://algorand.co/technology/post-quantum) but also not really thriving. I think for Bitcoin in the longterm it is a massive risk psychologically, because what to do with all of the locked in value, that cannot be migrated. My guess is that the market panics and security breaks down, because it is not worth it anymore to run that many nodes. Best time to buy would be then and hope it recovers. It is actually a big chance to move just to another L1 which migrates. Those risks are all priced in.
Bitcoin has gone through a number of narratives. A big one was the it was digital gold. Then, gold went up like crazy and bitcoin stagnated and people lost interest.
Bitcoin (and crypto at large) goes through these 4 year cycles repeatedly. Each time people claim its dead, "this time is different", etc etc. It peaked at the end of 2024 and now we're in mid 2026...traditionally near the bottom of the cycle. There IS someone in the White House now that seems hellbent on driving the global economy into the ground but until there's definitive evidence that this time really is different, I'm going to assume it's business as usual and people screaming about how its over is just the buy indicator it's been many times in the past.
There's no such thing as predicting the future when it comes to assets. Patterns aren't guarantors of future returns. If they were; the asset would be a sure-thing. Your confidence isn't warranted.
I'm well aware it's not a guarantee of future returns but as I said in my original message, this is a well established pattern. Until there's definitive evidence that it has stopped acting according to that pattern I'm going to disregard the "it's dead for real this time" crowd.
"History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes"
I'm not a TA nerd, but there is a very clear pattern that has been established. Crypto moves in cycles. You don't need to draw a ton of triangles and lines all over a chart to see the cycle this has gone through over and over.
Here is a prediction about Bitcoin: there will be a financial crash at some point in the future, maybe it will be the AI bubble, maybe because of oil, shortages, something entirely unforeseen or some combination of those things, but if there is something to know about cycles is that crashes happens.
And because Bitcoin is now old enough that most people understand what it is, the hype has vanished, it won't survive the global fear or losing it all.
A financial bubble.. Like the one caused by the inflation of the dollar to unimaginable levels? 1/2 of all dollars in existance have been printed in the last 6 years.
I would much rather have hard asset like Bitcoin, that is backed by the biggest computer network that has ever existed, that has a hard cap of 200m, than Federal Reserve IOU notes that can be printed ad-infenitem with zero recourse from you and me other than being made more poor.
Although even if you buy and sell perfectly. This cycle gain shouldn't be larger than about 100% between now and +2.5 years from now. And that's in dollars, that are gonna probably lose another another 15% of their value in that time.
Huh. The price as of today is 63K USD. Please always state your currency unit, and it's best to stick to USD for international communication purposes. Are you new to this?
I guess it's okay for different people to have different beliefs about how low it'll go, otherwise it wouldn't get traded. I base mine in experience over the last few cycles.
I use USD to pay for things several times a day. Sometimes many times a day. Something that in comparison works only "several times a month" fits the criteria of not being very good at it.
Value can only teleport if someone is willing to trade traditional currency in exchange on the other side. My no international fee bank account also teleports value across the globe instantly and more merchants are willing to accept it than Bitcoin.
Your "no international fee bank account" also inflates away at 8-10% a year if you're holding US dollars in savings. And about the same or more for other currencies.
The Federal reserve has printed 1/2 of all dollars in existance in the last 6 years, and deflated the value of your dollar by around half.
While I can buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin, I'd rather use the federal reserve notes that are backed by nothing but empty promises from government institutions that look down on you.
Telll it to my friend who was escaping a country under sanctions and had to move his money elsewhere. His bank didn't have that miraculous power, but Bitcoin did.
- US Dollar: Backed by the US government, which has a monopoly on violence over its citizens and pretty much the entire world. The Federal Reserve has the ability to print new dollars as demanded by US government policies and is responsible for funding the endless conflicts that the US has been involved in overseas for the last 100 years. The inflation of the US dollar cripples the middle class and weights down future generations with debt that they will never be able to pay off.
- Bitcoin: 100% free of any kind of force, created by an individual who believed individuals should have sovereign control of their money and is 100%. Due to the limited supply cap it makes wars unfundable and actually increases in value as the years go on so you can pass it on to your children and their children.
Even as someone who thinks crypto is an absolute cesspool, and while acknowledging that even in the "move cash" scenario that the vast majority of it is shady, from avoiding taxes to ... whatever, to be honest, I can't get too mad if it helps the "average person" who is sincerely escaping a "problematic" country/home do so.
> Value can only teleport if someone is willing to trade traditional currency in exchange on the other side.
If no one paid traditional money to your friend on the other side, he’d have no money. Also, whoever was sanctioning the country, can also very well sanction and seize the bitcoin if they’d like.
Can your imaginary dog be stolen by Russia and North Korea to circumvent sanctions? Are people buying "ownership" of your imaginary dog in a speculative frenzy that will cause the last bagholder to take a bath when there are no more greater fools?
It's true that your imaginary dog, like Bitcoin, has no good legal use; but your imaginary dog is harmless. Bitcoin is not.
Don't forget the flagrant use by politicians to grift their supporters and/or receive money that would otherwise be illegal to do so from foreign actors through it.
Truly amazing that the tech elite have replicated everything wrong with the existing financial system while not managing to get any of the actual good, useful parts.
Are you one of those people who have much difficulty understanding even the basics of quantum computing and what it implies for cryptography and for Bitcoin after 2029?
There are many articles with sources that a Bitcoin post-quantum algorithm is in development and running on a testnet. Your fear is irrational and premature on something that is not even close to being production ready.
The recent AI development and progress has fried everyone's brain that every new tech will take a financial quarter to develop.
Maybe I should sell my gold also because nuclear fusion will make it plentiful and obsolete as store of value?
Oh it will take many iterations of any testnet algorithm for it to really be sufficient against quantum computing. It will also add to the computational burden on the nodes, which has its own cost.
Moreover, many of the Bitcoin wallet types, except perhaps SegWit, readily leak their public key when a transaction is made.
All this has nothing to do with AI. The current forecast for commercial quantum computing is 2029.
Crypto investors are migrated to the newest unregulated speculative asset: the stock market.
I don’t know for certain but the amount of retail investing on vibes around AI companies and metals feels just like the crypto peaks. Just the other day Marvell jumped on the words of Jensen Huang and metal ETFs randomly lost tons of investment earlier this year.
Without a lot of the guardrails of the US regulatory apparatus that has been gutted by the current administration, the market is riff with manipulation. Truly another gilded age.
I just finished the recently published The Alighty Dollar by Brendan Greeley [0]. It is a great story of the evolution of currency in general and the dollar specifically. It wraps up with a brief critique of crypto in general that I found interesting.
[0]https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634502/the-almighty...
Bitcoin price stories should no longer be considered on topic for HN.
They were widely considered on topic when the price was going monotonically upwards.
Aside from the technical aspects of blockchain, there is a second reason to talk about the direction of the price. There's reason to think that it's falling because of other technology offerings (mostly AI, and increasingly space). So it's a meaningful indicator of the sense of investors in technologies.
I like how 15 years on, we're not even pretending that blockchain has practical uses besides buying drugs and gambling.
There's a certain refreshing clarity in this current kleptocratic moment - everyone is just openly engaged in fraud. Okay, I guess that's better than pretending they weren't.
I disagreed with that as well. There is no technical content in a finance publication playing the price change horserace.
Very true. Now that we have AI, Bitcoin is irrelevant.
Do you think we could convince hypothetical AGIs to buy NFTs? Since they're not embodied (or at least not limited to one body), it might be the only way they could really properly indulge in fine art speculation.
"An AI can't smell a painting, but it can smell an NFT"
I would say the same thing about stories purely about AI company stock price changes, but I imagine that is a losing battle here.
agreed
Looks like BTC might still be overvalued by $63,825.96
Bitcoin doesn't really have any coherent reasoning behind it, that I can tell. Other investments I can have a theory (which may be wrong) and see it work. I can buy gold/silver to hedge weaker currency. I can believe a stock is going up (or the market in general). I can buy bonds. I can do Forex or Commodities based on whatever feeling if I really want to lose money. But Bitcoin doesn't really seem to correlate with anything.
That's circular logic on the gold/silver. You basically say gold/silver holds value because it holds value. Bitcoin and other crypto is really no more illogical than precious metals. Precious metals have a few relatively minor uses for industrial applications but really they're valuable because we've all agreed they're valuable, no different than Bitcoin.
The difference is that bitcoin is the purest form of fiat currency: it has no value beyond social consensus — nobody has aesthetic or industrial uses for random hash digests — whereas silver and gold have innate value. Even though precious metal prices are higher than could be supported based on industrial / jewelry demand alone, that provides a floor which Bitcoin simply does not have.
Gold/Silver tend to increase in price when cash loses value, and drops when cash gains value. I am not saying I believe they are inherently valuable, but there is some kind of cause and effect that is displayed in the market. I can find no cause and effect in bitcoin.
It's no more illogical, but it's also not much less illogical. Either is an unforgeable, limited token of arbitrary value.
Being digital, Bitcoin has some nice properties that precious metals don't, but we stopped using precious metals as the foundation of the economy decades ago. The idea remains popular with a certain set of ideologues who want to make their cash holdings the basis of the financial system, but that's much too inflexible to run a modern economy.
Economists overwhelmingly believe that they need currency control to manage irrational market speculation. Technologists frequently cite a small number of economists who disagree, and while truth is not a democracy, but it's wise to be suspicious when one's choice of experts just happens to affirm the things that benefit you personally.
tl;dr: There could be a place for blockchain, but BTC is based on a bunch of self-imagined revolutionaries who don't know how to manage an economy.
> Bitcoin doesn't really have any coherent reasoning behind it
Stocks are feeling more and more like this also.
You mean you aren't bullish on volume of illegal transactions? /s
My own personal opinion is that the hype around bitcoin is not coming back. I dont think its going to zero, but too many people have just moved on.
Do we need hype when Blackrock is in?
You clearly must not be familiar with its cycles.
Is bitcoin a commodity? What’s driving the cyclical nature of the price discovery for entries on a global ledger?
> What’s driving the cyclical nature of the price discovery for entries on a global ledger?
https://www.investopedia.com/bitcoin-halving-4843769
Halvings? I guess?
Quantum fears: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48375692
Are there other cryptocurrencies that use quantum safe cryptography that aren't being affected by the downswing?
You could look at only two niche blockchains, QRL and ABEL, and they are both affected. Algorand is the most established L1 with a quite developed migration plan (https://algorand.co/technology/post-quantum) but also not really thriving. I think for Bitcoin in the longterm it is a massive risk psychologically, because what to do with all of the locked in value, that cannot be migrated. My guess is that the market panics and security breaks down, because it is not worth it anymore to run that many nodes. Best time to buy would be then and hope it recovers. It is actually a big chance to move just to another L1 which migrates. Those risks are all priced in.
or maybe they sont need an alternate criminal coin if you can now do fraud and crime in dollars with less transaction (bribe) cost.
Another idea is big players pulling out of the crypto market and putting it into the LLM market.
Yeah, all it takes is a shift in the narrative to trigger capital reallocation.
well I think you mean people with crypto rigs or whatever are too busy playing with LLMs.
Bitcoin has gone through a number of narratives. A big one was the it was digital gold. Then, gold went up like crazy and bitcoin stagnated and people lost interest.
It's still a store of value.. I guess?
Just like beanie babies
Bitcoin (and crypto at large) goes through these 4 year cycles repeatedly. Each time people claim its dead, "this time is different", etc etc. It peaked at the end of 2024 and now we're in mid 2026...traditionally near the bottom of the cycle. There IS someone in the White House now that seems hellbent on driving the global economy into the ground but until there's definitive evidence that this time really is different, I'm going to assume it's business as usual and people screaming about how its over is just the buy indicator it's been many times in the past.
> Each time people claim its dead, "this time is different", etc etc
Related: https://www.bitcoinisdead.org/
There's no such thing as predicting the future when it comes to assets. Patterns aren't guarantors of future returns. If they were; the asset would be a sure-thing. Your confidence isn't warranted.
I'm well aware it's not a guarantee of future returns but as I said in my original message, this is a well established pattern. Until there's definitive evidence that it has stopped acting according to that pattern I'm going to disregard the "it's dead for real this time" crowd.
"History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes"
lets's come back to this one year from now and see if it bottoms around Oct 6
Technical analysis is just astrology for finance bros.
I'm not a TA nerd, but there is a very clear pattern that has been established. Crypto moves in cycles. You don't need to draw a ton of triangles and lines all over a chart to see the cycle this has gone through over and over.
Here is a prediction about Bitcoin: there will be a financial crash at some point in the future, maybe it will be the AI bubble, maybe because of oil, shortages, something entirely unforeseen or some combination of those things, but if there is something to know about cycles is that crashes happens.
And because Bitcoin is now old enough that most people understand what it is, the hype has vanished, it won't survive the global fear or losing it all.
A financial bubble.. Like the one caused by the inflation of the dollar to unimaginable levels? 1/2 of all dollars in existance have been printed in the last 6 years.
I would much rather have hard asset like Bitcoin, that is backed by the biggest computer network that has ever existed, that has a hard cap of 200m, than Federal Reserve IOU notes that can be printed ad-infenitem with zero recourse from you and me other than being made more poor.
Of course it won’t survive, it’s the jpeg of a chimp in a baseball cap smoking a cigar of money.
We are in the middle of every 4 year hole at the moment. Heights and lows are unpredictable but the timing is still solid.
The lows are also predictable in my estimation.
How low will it go in this cycle by your estimates? In my estimate not much lower than that. Baring any catastrophic event, like a pandemic.
> not much lower than that.
Not much lower than what?
> How low will it go in this cycle
In the ballpark of 50K USD.
> Not much lower than what?
Than the current price of fifty-ish k.
Although even if you buy and sell perfectly. This cycle gain shouldn't be larger than about 100% between now and +2.5 years from now. And that's in dollars, that are gonna probably lose another another 15% of their value in that time.
Bitcoin became a pretty boring asset.
> Than the current price of fifty-ish k.
Huh. The price as of today is 63K USD. Please always state your currency unit, and it's best to stick to USD for international communication purposes. Are you new to this?
I guess it's okay for different people to have different beliefs about how low it'll go, otherwise it wouldn't get traded. I base mine in experience over the last few cycles.
I like to tell people I have an imaginary dog.
It fits my needs perfectly except for one critical issue --- it won't clean up food dropped on the floor.
Bitcoin is imaginary money. It works perfectly except for one critical issue --- it's not very good for purchasing stuff.
Bitcoin has about the same value as my imaginary dog.
I use bitcoin to pay for things several times a month, works fine for me.
I use USD to pay for things several times a day. Sometimes many times a day. Something that in comparison works only "several times a month" fits the criteria of not being very good at it.
Are you paying Strait of Hormuz passage fees, perchance?
Contrived.
Your imaginary dog can’t teleport value across the globe instantly, but Bitcoin can.
Value can only teleport if someone is willing to trade traditional currency in exchange on the other side. My no international fee bank account also teleports value across the globe instantly and more merchants are willing to accept it than Bitcoin.
Your "no international fee bank account" also inflates away at 8-10% a year if you're holding US dollars in savings. And about the same or more for other currencies. The Federal reserve has printed 1/2 of all dollars in existance in the last 6 years, and deflated the value of your dollar by around half.
While I can buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin, I'd rather use the federal reserve notes that are backed by nothing but empty promises from government institutions that look down on you.
Telll it to my friend who was escaping a country under sanctions and had to move his money elsewhere. His bank didn't have that miraculous power, but Bitcoin did.
Yes, I agree. Bitcoin is great for crime.
The U.S. dollar is the #1 currency used for organized crime.
https://xkcd.com/1138/
Very true:
- US Dollar: Backed by the US government, which has a monopoly on violence over its citizens and pretty much the entire world. The Federal Reserve has the ability to print new dollars as demanded by US government policies and is responsible for funding the endless conflicts that the US has been involved in overseas for the last 100 years. The inflation of the US dollar cripples the middle class and weights down future generations with debt that they will never be able to pay off.
- Bitcoin: 100% free of any kind of force, created by an individual who believed individuals should have sovereign control of their money and is 100%. Due to the limited supply cap it makes wars unfundable and actually increases in value as the years go on so you can pass it on to your children and their children.
Even as someone who thinks crypto is an absolute cesspool, and while acknowledging that even in the "move cash" scenario that the vast majority of it is shady, from avoiding taxes to ... whatever, to be honest, I can't get too mad if it helps the "average person" who is sincerely escaping a "problematic" country/home do so.
> Value can only teleport if someone is willing to trade traditional currency in exchange on the other side.
If no one paid traditional money to your friend on the other side, he’d have no money. Also, whoever was sanctioning the country, can also very well sanction and seize the bitcoin if they’d like.
> Your imaginary dog can’t teleport value across the globe instantly, but Bitcoin can.
"Someone can instantly and permanently steal your beloved dog and you'll never see it again" is a downside.
The fact that people have instantly and permanently stolen Bitcoin renders that argument moot.
I think you've misunderstood my point. Yes, this happens to Bitcoin. That is a downside of it. The parent poster's asserting it's an upside.
D'oh! Sorry! I'll go grab some more coffee before trying to think critically.
That's only because many people share the mental image of the imaginary dog.
Can your imaginary dog be stolen by Russia and North Korea to circumvent sanctions? Are people buying "ownership" of your imaginary dog in a speculative frenzy that will cause the last bagholder to take a bath when there are no more greater fools?
It's true that your imaginary dog, like Bitcoin, has no good legal use; but your imaginary dog is harmless. Bitcoin is not.
Don't forget the flagrant use by politicians to grift their supporters and/or receive money that would otherwise be illegal to do so from foreign actors through it.
Truly amazing that the tech elite have replicated everything wrong with the existing financial system while not managing to get any of the actual good, useful parts.
Because foreign actors never "donate" hundreds of thousands of dollars to "charity" organizations run by US politicians or their families?
Bitcoin didn't change anything, other than permanently instript those transactions into a public ledger for everyone to see.
Wait till you learn about fiat
People will FUD. After the cycle is over, Bitcoin will make new ATH and the people who bought the dip will be called lucky. Same old tale
> Same old tale
I have sweatshirts that are older than Bitcoin, brother.
Your sweatshirt was made in a factory by maybe 10 people.
Bitcoin has tens of thousands of people running nodes, mining, and is the largest collective CPU compute that has ever existed.
And will certainly outlive your sweatshirts
Precisely, although the dip is likely to be deeper. Having said this, the quantum risk is real, and if left unaddressed, the pattern will break.
People will come up with whatever narrative for Bitcoin. Bears sound smart but in the end bulls make the money
Are you one of those people who have much difficulty understanding even the basics of quantum computing and what it implies for cryptography and for Bitcoin after 2029?
There are many articles with sources that a Bitcoin post-quantum algorithm is in development and running on a testnet. Your fear is irrational and premature on something that is not even close to being production ready.
The recent AI development and progress has fried everyone's brain that every new tech will take a financial quarter to develop.
Maybe I should sell my gold also because nuclear fusion will make it plentiful and obsolete as store of value?
Oh it will take many iterations of any testnet algorithm for it to really be sufficient against quantum computing. It will also add to the computational burden on the nodes, which has its own cost.
Moreover, many of the Bitcoin wallet types, except perhaps SegWit, readily leak their public key when a transaction is made.
All this has nothing to do with AI. The current forecast for commercial quantum computing is 2029.
"Good time to buy"
My immediate reaction: "Oooh, bitcoin's on sale!"
I've been buying the dip all week
Catch that falling knife
That's what kevlar gloves are for.