Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018

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.

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.

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.

How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.

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.

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.)

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

The irony of this is that since every transaction and all its metadata is on chain, it has turned out to be easily traced back to the beginning of time. Fully open, the opposite of anonymized. (see: Chainalysis et. al.)

I just did so with a few pounds of silver (when @ 49.5:1; now 56:1).