[safe haven asset]

It has been debated for some time now if Bitcoin is considered a safe haven asset like gold by the investors.

The opinions on that do not really match the price behavior. Since 2020, Bitcoin seems to follow the US stock indexes, and thus it's likely many people consider it "one stock more", or a speculative risk asset.

It seems also to be a fact that currently Fed interest rate increases influence the Bitcoin price negatively, as they do with stocks. Even if that doesn't lead to price jumps, it reforces the assumption that Bitcoin is not really considered a "safe haven" assets.

In contrast, there are some polls which say that a majority (in this case more than 70%) of Bitcoin investors consider BTC "digital gold". And digital gold should normally be a safe haven asset, isn't it?


Now the question I want to ask: Can the Bitcoin community do something to reforce the "safe haven" asset narrative?

I see some possibilities. Because the way the Bitcoin community communicates, does in my opinion trigger some decisions, like buying, selling, FOMO and panic.

So my proposals would be (above all for those who have some kind of "influencer" function, be them youtubers/tiktokers or influential forum members):

- Whine a little less about bear markets, and see them as an opportunity or "discount".
- Also don't whine about things like "Bitcoin being not anymore the most profitable asset". Nobody should care about that. If Bitcoin's concept is sound, it will attract investment anyway.
- Bitcoiners could try to talk a bit more about the long term and less about the short term. Above all, the whole "cyclist" narrative (hey, let's catch the bottom!) probably hurts the digital gold narrative.
- It also would help to talk about the benefits of Bitcoin which are not related to its price evolution, like censorship resistance, international payments, etc..
- Also a bit less exaggeration of the supposed danger of Saylor and friends would not do harm.
- And of course, promote DCA.

On the other hand, there are those that say "well, ok, we can do what we want in the community, but the whales are those driving the market! Wall Street decided it's a risk asset, and we can't do anything about it!".

I'm highly skeptical of that assumption. A single whale cannot move enough money to counter the sentiment of a big group of smaller Bitcoin investors. See also this thread: in 2024, a supposed "whale sale" (which even happened in another timeframe) of 30,000 BTC triggered more than 100,000 BTC being sold by other investors.

But what's your take on this? Has the community any chance to influence the narrative? And if yes, how?

When I was updating the stats for my OP_RETURN observer, I also checked the state of Ordinals inscriptions and BRC-20 transactions.

The results are quite clear:



See the violet curve in in the right area? That's the total size of all Ordinals together.

Not even when Runes were introduced in 2024, there has been such a big drop in Ordinals.

Let's see the numbers:

- At its height in 2023, around 40 MB of Ordinals were posted each day. There were peaks up to 80 MB. Most of this always was BRC-20, a very unefficient meme token format.
- In 2024, there was a dip when Runes entered the stage. The values dropped to 5-10 MB per day, so they were still significant.
- Then in 2025 with the decreasing fees, Ordinals seems to have had a comeback, although it seems that none of the tokens was really able to profit. But there were again 20-30 MB per day, with peaks over 60.
- Now in 2026 there was a very surprising and sharp decline:
-- in March they dropped below 20 MB,
-- in April they dropped below 8-10 and finally below 5 MB,
-- and from May on the line is almost flat, with only 1-3 MB per day added. That's almost nothing.

Runes seem to be still around, probably due to the low fees. And thus it's surprising that Ordinals haven't benefitted from the low fees too.

From another query it is posible to see that the huge majority of the transactions are still small <1 kB transactions and thus very likely BRC-20. Which is a bit surprising to me, because BRC-20 have a lot of competition now with Runes and lots of other meme coin platforms, while the "meme NFT" model isn't possible with Runes afaik.

Now I wonder if there was a specific reason for that drop. I asked an AI but it was quite clueless, okay it said the bear market was a reason, but then it even argued that fees were too high

Does anybody know the answer? Has a big meme coin project switched from BRC-20 to Runes, for example? Or are Inscriptions now deprecated in the Ordinals project? (unlikely) Fear of BIP-110? Don't think so with minuscule support by miners.

If you have an opinion on that, I'm interested

[Why do I think Lightning and Ark are Bitcoin?]

This is a discussion that pops up every now and then, so I try here to contribute to clarify it a bit. It popped up last time in a thread about volatility but at least in detail it is off topic there. And I think it merits an own topic, as there was not even one in the past, the closest one is this one.

Why do I think Lightning and Ark are Bitcoin?

Well, first, as some have pointed out, "X is Bitcoin" is a terribly vague statement which has to be defined.

My logic goes this way:

1) Bitcoin can be defined as a system with a clear goal: to solve the double spend problem.
2) Both Lightning and Ark use exclusively Bitcoin techniques to solve the double spend problem:

-- They use Bitcoin transactions which use exclusively Bitcoin Script rules (e.g. HTLCs), which reference real UTXOs on the Bitcoin chain (not on a sidechain or altchain).
-- If there is any disagreement, the disagreement is solved with a on-chain transaction. This is the so-called unilateral exit (see this definition). Every Lightning or Ark participant can push the transaction "bundle" to the chain whenever they want.

3) There are no additional trust assumptions when you use Ark or Lightning. There is no trust necessary in the Lightning nodes or in the channel partners. [1]

Both Ark and Lightning can be both nailed down to the following statement:

They use only the Bitcoin protocol for transactions and validation, but they only use the Bitcoin blockchain if it is really needed because there is a disagreement, i.e. a double spend attempt.

Or in other words: If you use regular Bitcoin transactions, then often you use the on-chain mechanism even if there is no double spend risk. In reality you wouldn't need that mechanism in most cases.[2]

Conclusion:

If we assume that a transaction is "Bitcoin" if it is secured exclusively by the Proof of Work mechanism in combination to Bitcoin Script rules, then both Ark and Lightning transactions "are Bitcoin transactions".


[1] An argument could be made that there are possible attacks on Lightning that aren't possible to regular on-chain transactions, like the well known Replacement Cycle Attack. But these attacks are based on software bugs and thus can be solved. They are not really different from the situation where an user uses a client which has an exploitable vulnerability. The culprit is not the Lightning concept.

[2] Only the party which makes a payment can double spend, i.e. the receiver is the one protected by Bitcoin's mechanisms. But the payer is "allowed" to double spend by the protocol until the first confirmation. We can say: If the payer is honest, then he can accept a set of restrictions. Lightning and Ark are rulesets with such restrictions. In both, the entity in control of the funds allows the receiver to revert the transaction if he misbehaves, and he's even penalized in the case of LN-Penalty. This occurs by a series of Bitcoin Script commands, i.e. this mechanism is 100% Bitcoin-native.

AI is probably the technology of the decade. And much has been written about the potential to transform the economy.

But could have AI agents an effect on Bitcoin price? How do AIs view the current price, cheap or expensive?

Well, let's ask the current AIs if they would invest. While Google Gemini's "summary" was fast to answer that an AI would definitely invest in Bitcoin (based for example on studies made about AI agents which already had invested in Bitcoin in late 2025, but also on general considerations like programmed scarcity) , Claude doesn't want to give a real answer, for them it depends on the timeframe of the investment. At least for a long term investment, Claude's answer looked positive, they were more concerned about a possible later bottom if the bear market continues.

To understand the reasoning a bit more, I asked Claude about what fundamental theories about Bitcoin price evolution they consider most convincing. Unsurprisingly, Stock-to-flow (S2F) was the least convincing for them, but at the bottom (surprising for me) they mentioned also more established theories like the network effect (I personally consider it important, am I wrong now? ) and the Total Addressable Market (TAM) theory. While the most convincing for them, albeit not perfect to predict a "fair value", were the quantitative theory (which considers the circulation velocity), and at #2, on-chain models like Network Value to Transactions (NVT) and MVRV. In the middle of the table, they still cited the mining cost of production.

This makes me think that current AI is still not much more intelligent than humans, even if LLMs have access to a big part of the literature written by humanity. Some takes however were interesting, for example Claude's skepticism towards Metcalfe's law (network effect). I think they more or less still "parrot" the existing Bitcoin media articles without really being able to "reason" differently than an human trader would do.

But that could change in the future.

So well, what I would like to discuss in this thread:

1) have yourself tried to ask an AI if it would invest in Bitcoin? If yes, what prompt was used and what was the conclusion/result (please don't just paste the result, describe it in your own words)?

2) have you access to studies about AI agents investing in Bitcoin?

3) what do you think about the future, would a "more intelligent" AI invest differently than current AI agents, and why? In other words, do you have objections to the answers AIs currently give if you ask them that question?

(There has been a somewhat related thread last year, but it's quality was not very high and the question was also a bit different.)

Viel wird ja derzeit mal wieder über den 4-Jahres-Zyklus [1] gesprochen. Weil der Dump der letzten Wochen da so schön reinpasst.

Ich habe ja mehrmals geschrieben, dass ich zumindest an einen mathematisch vorbestimmten Zyklus nicht glaube, weil die Miner inzwischen nur noch einen geringen Prozentsatz des Angebots ausmachen.

Wie könnte es aber sein, dass die Zyklen 2013-17, 2017-21 und mit Abstrichen 2021-25 so schön regelmäßig aussehen? Also etwa immer 3 Jahre Bulle + 1 Jahr Bärenmarkt mit markanten Peaks und Lows beide Ende oder Anfang eines Jahres?

Mein Annahme dazu ist folgende (ich gebe das mal für die Übersichtlichkeit in Stichpunkten wieder):

1 - Bitcoin ist derzeit schon "knapp", d.h. grundsätzlich gibt es mehr Nachfrage als Angebot. Wir sind in einer Adoptionsphase. Deshalb ist die Normalbewegung aufwärts.
2 - Innerhalb dieser Aufwärtsbewegung gibt es Ungleichgewichte, die zu einer Erhöhung der Nachfrage durch starke FOMO-Phasen und eine temporäre Abschwächung infolge starker Gewinnmitnahmen entstehen.
3 - Die Aufwärtsbewegung selbst schwächt sich langsam ab durch einen Sättigungseffekt und sich erhöhende Liquidität.
4 - Die FOMO-Übertreibung ist die Hauptursache für den Bärenmarkt, weil es einfach zu attraktiv ist, danach Gewinne mitzunehmen. Dazu kommen Panikphasen, Liquidationen, eventuell Firmenpleiten etc., die die Abwärtsbewegung verstärken.

Bis daher ist das ganze auch mit dem traditionellen Zyklus kompatibel. Jetzt aber beginnen wir abzuweichen:

5 - Die FOMO-Übertreibung entsteht durch gesteigerte Aufmerksamkeit auf Bitcoin.
6 - Diese Aufmerksamkeit entsteht aus einem längeren Bullenmarkt. Man könnte sagen: Nach 1-2 Jahren Aufwärtsbewegung versucht jeder, auf den Zug aufzuspringen.  Wie entsteht nun dieser längere Bullenmarkt? Nun erstmal aus Punkt 1, aber dann ist auch das Sentiment relevant.
7 - Das Halving ist relevant, weil es Bitcoiner an das mathematisch begrenzte Angebot erinnert. Es kann also das Sentiment aufhellen und damit die bullische Grundstimmung verstärken oder einen Umschwung herbeiführen. 2016 beispielsweise war Bitcoin in der Öffentlichkeit nahezu tot nach der MtGox-Pleite. Die Vorfreude auf das Halving ließ den Preis wieder steigen.
8 - Es gibt aber auch andere Katalysatoren für einen  verstärkten Bullenmarkt. Diese traten tatsächlich rein zufällig in den letzten Jahren so auf, dass sie in das 4-Jahres-Muster passen:
  - 2016/2017: Ethereum und die erste große ICO-Welle. Für ETH musste man damals oft noch vorher Bitcoin kaufen, oder man wurde nach einer Enttäuschung im ETH-Universum (TheDAO!) "geläutert" und kaufte auch Bitcoin.
  - 2017: Bitcoin-Futures (hier gab es also mindestens 2 starke Gründe für die FOMO-Phase)
  - 2020: Elon Musks Interesse an Bitcoin.
  - Mitte 2021: Legal Tender in El Salvador (konnte sogar die negativen News des China-Miningbanns "umdrehen" und zu einem neuen ATH führen)
   - 2023/24: Die absehbare Genehmigung der ETFs in den USA.
  - 2024: Donald Trumps Ankündigung der strategischen Reserve und generell einer kryptofreundlichen Politik.

9 - Dass der Bärenmarkt immer ca. 1 Jahr lang dauert hängt auch mit der Aufmerksamkeit zusammen. Das "Trauma" des initialen Dump des Bärenmarkts muss langsam vergessen werden, dann können langsam wieder erste Ideen zum Kauf neuer BTC enstehen.

Meine Annahme ist hier: Jedes dieser Großereignisse wäre selbst dann zu einem Selbstläufer geworden dass eine FOMO-Phase ausgelöst hätte, wenn es komplett außerhalb des "4-Jahres-Fahrplans" aufgetreten wäre. Wir hätten also auch andere Zykluslängen sehen können.

Ebenso zufällig trat kein einziges dieser Großereignisse mitten in einem Bärenmarkt auf.

Was haltet ihr von diesem Zyklusmodell? Gibt es für euch Ereignisse, die nicht reinpassen?


[1] Die traditionelle Zyklustheorie, falls nicht bekannt, sagt aus, dass allein das verminderte Angebot der Miner (also die verminderte Geldmengeninflation) nach einem Halving das Ungleichgewicht für den verstärkten Bullenmarkt generiert.

I recently renewed a domain and was pleasantly surprised to see that payments with Bitcoin got a 3% discount.

As 3% is a common credit card fee for merchants (in my country they charge up to 7-9% approx.), so this is only a logical consequence that a Bitcoin payments saves this fee for them. But it's the first time I saw that as long as I remember. To be fair, BTC was not the only option with a discount, stablecoins and bank transfers were rewarded too. Which is also understandable.

Did you folks get some sort of special offer for a Bitcoin payment? Poll is online

I could even imagine larger discounts in some cases if merchants realize that at least some tech-related merchants could attract a loyal customer base. Above all if they accept Lightning, Ark or any other layer-2.

Merchant adoption of Lightning and Bitcoin in general would be huge, I think. We can forget about Saylor if this type of adoption continues

To clarify: this is not about the pure transaction volume. It is completely obvious that for every Bitcoin that is bought there is a Bitcoin that was sold.

But on the other hand there is a difference between "buying" and "selling":

- Buy / Purchase: add a buy order to an exchange with it either being executed immediately (market order) or the intention of it to be executed in the short-term. (this is important, because there are fake orders, see below)
- Sale: add a sell order with the same intention.

Sometimes what I want to know how many orders of each kind (Buy/Purchase or Sale) are added each day, with the intention to know the difference between these two numbers (measured in BTC).

The problem is that we'd need to know the real time orderbook for a precise estimation. And data about that seems to be not publicly available normally. In addition, there's the difficulty of fake orders that later are removed or placed very far away for the spot price only to try to incite either optimism or fear ("buy walls" and "sell walls"). If they were removed the same day, it would be easy to spot them if you had access to the real time order book, but some of them are there for longer.

So for an approximation I came up with the following idea in this thread:

- Take the hourly candles of the market data of a major exchange.
- For each candle, take the volume and the direction (green or red).
- If the candle is green, add the volume to the "Purchases", while if the candle is red, add it to the "Sales".

Of course this method is inexact but it becomes more exact if you use more precise candles, i.e. 5-minute or even 1-minute candles. And if you had a candle for each executed order that would be the perfect way. Because if, due to the execution of the order, the price becomes higher, then it is clear that the order was placed with the intention to buy, and vice versa.

I want to ask:

- Has someone tried the same thing and found a better method?
- Is there another flaw I'm not taking into account than the candle imprecision?

[Reason 1: Lows preserved an increasingly higher percentage of the ATH price.]

Bitcoin's volatility is declining and Bitcoin is slowly becoming a more stable and reliable asset.

But some observers (including me) have spotted a possible problem: It seems that mainly the bull markets are becoming weaker, while bear markets seem almost as harsh as ever.

For example, if we think 126k was the top of the last bull market, then this would be a 80% increase from the 2021 high (70k). The 2021 high, in contrast, had more than tripled the 2017 high of 20k. While the last bear markets fell consistently by more than 75%, compared with the previous ATH. (Well, if 60k hold in this cycle, then this bear would have significantly weaker with -53%.)

In other words: Upside volatility seems to decline faster than downside volatility. I have wondered if this is a warning sign. Could we get into a situation where it becomes harder and harder to reach an ATH, but we still every couple of years we see a ~70-80% crash? And could that make Bitcoin unattractive as an asset?

But I've thought again about it, and I found some reasons why it might be less of a problem than I thought initially.

Reason 1: Lows preserved an increasingly higher percentage of the ATH price.

The fall from high to low looks scary in all bear markets: The 2011 bear fell by 93% (32 to 2$), the 2014 bear by 88% (1200 to 135), the 2018 bear by 85% (20000 to 3000) and the 2022 bear by 77% (70000 to 15500).

But if we look the other way around we see: The 2011 low was only 7% of the high, but it increased to 12% (2014/15), 15% (2018) and 23% (2022). If we compare the percentages, it means a constant increase by more than 20% in each cycle, the 2018-2022 increase was strongest with an increase over 50%.

The crashes look far more scary due to psychology. And the next reason confirms that positive trend ...

Reason 2: The lows are increasing faster than the highs.

Also if we look at the evolution of the "cycle lows" we see an encouraging trend: $2 (2011) - $135 (2015) - $3000 (2018) - $15500 (2022). The 2022 low was more than 5 times higher than the 2018 low! The ATH to ATH comparison instead yielded lower values both for 2017-21 (3 times) and 2021-25 (1.8 times).

The result is quite bullish and surprising: Lows are increasing faster than the highs. This means also that if you invested close to the low, you always got a good profit even if you were so terribly unlucky to sell exactly at the next low. Good news for contrarian investors and dip fishers.

Reason 3: The last big crash in 2022 had specific reasons: Terra/Luna and FTX.

It is very likely that these two events triggered a lot of panic sales. Before Terra/Luna the low was at around $30000. That would have been a 55% crash, a notable improvement over the 80% crashes previously recorded. And after Terra/Luna but before FTX, the low was $20000. Still a noticeable improvement (70% crash). Only the FTX crash brought the depth close to 80% again.

Of course we can't roll back history, but it's nice to imagine that if Terra/Luna and FTX had better business practices, Bitcoin would already be an asset almost as stable as gold.


With all that being said, I still think Bitcoin could do even better. If the usage was less speculative and more about long term saving, the crashes would be even lighter. And we could approach gold volatility.

I had thought a bit about the role of prediction markets as a competitor to traditional investment strategies in assets like stocks or gold.

A simple example: If you are investing in stock X with your goal being price Y (e.g. your buy price + 20%), you could be tempted to instead place a bet on a prediction market site that stock X would reach price Y.

This of course only applies to prediction markets with some relation to traditional markets. Of course it would also work with Bitcoin price bets.

The advantages on a first glance are that you are often much more flexible: you can place almost any amount, so even "poor people" can invest a few dollars instead of having to buy entire shares. Thus it becomes a bit like micro-investing.

In contrast to micro-investing, you can also place bets on more exotic events. If stock X for example is an aerospace company, you could bet on the event of that company announcing a new aircraft model, not only invest in their stock.

But both micro-investing and prediction markets, on the other hand, have a disadvantage: the fees in general are higher and the odds are a bit biased against the common bettors (see also this article (with anti prediction market bias)).

What do you think? Are prediction markets a more flexible and less costly "competitor" of investing? Or are the costs such a high disadvantage that we can't talk about them really being an alternative?

(Myself I have a quite nuanced opinion on that, but I will wait for some answers first.)

[Hourglass]

At a first glance, it seems impossible to protect P2PK (and P2MS, P2TR ...) addresses from quantum computer attacks. The public key is already known, so a quantum attacker could compute the private key only based on blockchain data and thus easily produce proofs about the knowledge of the private key.

But there may be data elements that only the original owners could know, at least in some cases. And these elements could then be additionally required to move P2PK funds.

For example, if a P2PKH address with still protected key is known, and that address can be safely attributed to a person which also has P2PK outputs, then one could require a signature from this non-vulnerable address to move the P2PK coins. Of course I'm thinking about Satoshi here. Is there a P2PKH address known that can be attributed to Satoshi but was not used, i.e. the public key is not known?

I also think the Hourglass idea presented in 2025 by Mike Casey is interesting: limit the BTC which can be transferred from P2PK addresses, for example to 1 BTC per block. This would be perhaps the most straightforward idea, although it doesn't provide 100% protection, it would take 50 blocks at minimum to steal a single Satoshi block reward and it would reduce the efficiency and privacy of the hackers (they would be detected very likely before they could transfer the whole output).

It could be elaborated further, e.g. that only 0.1 BTC from the same address can be moved per block. And that amount could reduce over time, e.g. per difficulty period to counter the improvements in quantum computing.

Of course that would also limit the capacity of the real owners of these BTC to react to a threat and to move the coins fastly. But for example I can imagine the following recovery protocol:

- Instead of moving your P2PK funds, you can designate another address as a recovery address. This addresses private key must be used in the next transaction spending the P2PK output, and in the same tx, you have to designate a quantum-resistant address to be used in further transactions.
- This address must have received coins in the same year or at least the same halving period when your P2PK output was created, but its public key must not be known. (Yes, that's a difficult requirement, but otherwise the quantum attacker can designate any address.)
- The recovery address must be related in some way to your P2PK funds (e.g. there were some transactions between both addresses/keys, or they were related to the same mining pool ...).


These are of course stupid layman ideas, but I'd be interested if experts came up with something similar.

[BIP-360]

I've recently discovered there is a prediction market for the so called BIP-110.

As some may know, this is a proposal for a softfork which aims to install consensus-based "filters" which wouldn't allow some of the techniques that were used in the past to store data like images on the Bitcoin blockchain. But it won't be able to filter out all NFTs and similar stuff, as it was demonstrated recently with an image of Luke-Jr embedded into the chain.

The prediction is however devastating for the supporters of that "BIP" (it's not even an official BIP, but the supporters are very loud and aggressive) 6%. The platform is predyx, one I didn't know until now.

But there seem to be some other markets too.

A much more "seriously interesting" topic than BIP-110 is BIP-360, which would prepare Bitcoin slowly for post-quantum cryptography. It is a very cautious first step, but still the activation probability for 2026 according to Polymarket is only 11% at the time of writing. It's however also possible that people consider 2026 too early and would opt for "yes" in 2027 or 2028.

I've added a poll. Do you think gambling with Bitcoin in this fashion is fun? Or it's too "nerdy" for you, or otherwise uninteresting?

In this thread you can also mention or discuss other similar prediction markets related to Bitcoin's development (not its price, for the price there are many markets).

[boreout argument]

This thread is a response to Volatility is not a bug and also the continuation a short remark I made recently in the Wall Observer but forgot about it.

I firmly believe that volatility in Bitcoin should lower, otherwise Bitcoin will die [1] eventually. It can do this gradually, but the trend should be clear. And until now, the values indeed are decreasing.

Think about a bit which assets are most volatile: Pennystocks and altcoins. To my knowledge no other assets compete with Bitcoin's volatility. And are they sustainable? No. Only a handful of altcoins founded in 2022 or earlier have reached a new ATH since then.

The "attention argument" that ANSEL 2.0 brought up in the other thread, can be debunked simply with the boreout argument.

Let's say Bitcoin continues as volatile as it is. The problem is that upside and downside volatility have evolved in a different manner.

- Downside volatility is only reducing very gradually. From a -90% in the very initial stages, during the last long dips we lost about -80% (-75% to -85% roughly) compared to the last ATH. The differences between the different bear markets were negligible.
- Upside volatility instead is reducing much faster. From more than 100000% in 2011 between the previous low and the ATH of the bubble, the value decreased to 15000% in the 2017 bull, to 2000% in 2021, and finally only 500% in 2025 (if the ATH is in, as it seems).

And it is likely that this continues that way because liquidity increases, there are more early adopters or smart bear market buyers willing to sell when they achieve a few hundreds % of profit.

But that will lead to a situation where Bitcoin will struggle to reach new ATHs. Because it's not that attractive anymore for "gamblers" who want to get rich quick, and it continues to be risky, because the masses still tend to sell at the same time, creating huge crashes. That can lead to a slow boreout, people will get bored of Bitcoin.

Does this mean that Bitcoin's volatility has to be zero? No.

The mathematically controlled Bitcoin supply prevents that Bitcoin will have an extremely low volatility. So fiat-like values are probably impossible.

But it should not be much higher than gold's volatility in "normal times" (not taking into account the 1980s or the 2025/26 bubble).

That can be achieved by behavioral changes in the community: using DCA instead of hoard-and-sell, adopting it as a currency, not believing anymore in "get rich quick" but in "a stable asset which is likely to grow slowly to moderately".


[1] "die" here doesn't mean it will fall to zero. But it is likely that it will be valued much lower than now. Or at least not grow anymore.

[[Trigger warning / Disclaimer] This is only a speculative horror fairytaile]

[Trigger warning / Disclaimer] This is only a speculative horror fairytaile  It's not something I consider likely (not completely impossible, but less than 1% likelihood).

In another thread I got the following shower thought:

What, if purely by forces of speculation and panic selling, but without a fundamental reason like a bug or quantum computing, Bitcoin takes a massive dip which erases more than 95% of its value, letting it fall as low as $1000 or so?

Would Bitcoin recover?

There are many potential reasons for such a fall to be at least hypothetically possible:

- Strategy (Saylor) goes bankrupt and has to sell all coins, creating extreme panic.
- The US Strategic Bitcoin reserve is removed and sold.
- Tether goes bankrupt.
- Blackrock removes its Bitcoin ETF.
- Satoshi's coins are sold (not by quantum hackers, but by Satoshi himself).
- Massive chain reaction and panic after a stock market crash like in 2008.

My own crystal ball says that it the price is likely to recover in the mid to long term, even possibly in the short term, for two reasons:

1) Many people will take this as a massive opportunity. Many of those that missed the train before 2017 would be happy to enter the market for such a low price. Because even a recovery to $10,000 would mean massive profits.
2) It's possible that many early cypherpunks and idealist Bitcoiners could return if "the Wall Street bros" are out, e.g. if Saylor, the ETFs and the US government exit the market. This could even be the base for a more healthy growth as currency and storage of value.

Why? Because Bitcoin's value proposition of the most secure and active decentralized payment network has not changed.

This is of course possible if and only if:

- There is no other decentralized cryptocurrency which took Bitcoin's place and its competition was the main reason for the crash.
- There is no other fundamental reason like a successful 51% attack. (Bankruptcies aren't really "fundamental" for Bitcoin).
- There are no major bans or extremely harsh regulations.
- Money is still relevant, we haven't advanced to post-scarcity or so

Share your opinion

[4-year SMA]

The shortest (simple and straightforward) moving average which hasn't declined even in the deepest bear markets is currently at $58,000. It is the 4-year SMA (simple moving average) - i.e. the average price of the last 4 years.

I think the 4-year SMA is an excellent measure to see if the long term trend is still intact. If this indicator goes down for more than a few days (which can happen in some extreme market conditions), it may indicate that there is a fundamental problem with the long term price trend.

But currently it is going up. Since the start of 2026, it went from approximately 56,300$ to 57,300$ - almost a 2% increase, despite of the declining spot price.

Here's a little chart:


(Source is the Bitstamp price at BitcoinWisdom).

Unfortunately the pic is a little bit small, so I write out the major milestones and year-end values since 2020:

- January 2020: $6600
- January 2021: $7900
- $10,000: March 2021
- January 2022: $18,400
- $20,000: March 2022
- January 2023: $23,300
- January 2024: $29,000
- $30,000: February 2024
- $40,000: November 2024
- January 2025: $42,000
- $50,000: July 2025
- January 2026: $56400

If we could invest in this indicator, we would have an asset that steadily grows. In theory, it would be possible to realize it with a combination of smart contracts, for example with Discreet Log Contracts.

Would you invest in this indicator? You would lose all the spikes that make Bitcoin so exciting than right now when the price is fighting to hold the low 70k's. But on the plus side: the indicator has only grown until now.

(I am not planning to implement such a contract myself, although I have investigated a bit how it could be done. But if someone would implement that thing, I'd be really interested!)

In many countries, courts have ruled that Bitcoin and other "crypto-assets" can be considered digital property. Even in China, where many crypto-related (commercial) activities are banned.

Now we have the situation that some people are proposing changes to the Bitcoin software like the so called "BWP[1]-110" or "The Cat" that would confiscate some coins. There are also proposals related to the "Quantum computer threat" which would inhabilitate potentially vulnerable coins, for example those in P2PK outputs.

If such a proposal was to get successful (I hope it never is!) could then the people who lost their Bitcoins take legal action?

And against whom?

- Against the developers, who implemented it? I think if the confiscation was accidental due to a bug (and thus potentially reversible), this doesn't sound "correct", as it could be considered part of the risk if you use open source software. But proposals like BWP-110 are pursued in full awareness that they will confiscate coins. And "The Cat" even has confiscation as a goal, afaik, as do the "quantum confiscation" proposals. In these cases, I think there may be indeed a legal risk for the developers. Or could they argue that you could simply use the old version (forking away)?
- Against the miners who supported it, if it was a softfork? Maybe this is also a possibility, as these are those who are changing the protocol and who forked into a protocol which confiscates the coins. One could argue that if the proposal is only in the code, it still is only an inactive proposal, and the miners are those really "activating" the confiscation.

What do you think?

PS: If this has been discussed in another thread, I'm grateful for a link and let's continue there


[1] see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5572483.msg66367379#msg66367379

[However, there's a problem:]

The Iranian protests are brutally supressed by the regime's troops and allied militias. NGOs speak of over 12,000 deaths and even this number could be too low.

As there are well known actors in the Iranian civil society, Bitcoin could be used to support them, bypassing the (probably tightly controlled / censored) banking system.

If this support is strong enough, perhaps the opposition can win - first enabling the purchase of good communication equipment, but also because in poor countries, everybody can be bribed and bought. And the currency in Iran plummeted down to minuscule values, probably making Bitcoin (and other crypto, e.g. USDT) payments highly valuable in the country.

However, there's a problem: The internet has been shut down in Iran.

Could Bitcoiners help the Iranian opposition to receive donations in Bitcoin and use cryptocurrency to transact? Some possible strategies:

- Smuggle satellite communication equipment into Iran, for example for Starlink (Can even be a profitable business, although it shouldn't be too expensive.)
- Provide strong wireless internet signal from neighboring countries at the country's borders (e.g. at the border to Turkey). Idem, could even be profitable.
- Help to build up mesh networks, which can share the Internet and also Bitcoin networking. This could be a "safety net" if the government tries to shut down the Internet again.
- Introduce equipment to receive and broadcast Bitcoin blocks and transactions over alternative means like shortwave radio. This should however only be used for emergencies.
- Software tools to hide the reception of Bitcoin or other "subversive" communication, to avoid to get catched by the police.
- Share strategies to hide communication equipment.

Here in an Internet forum most of us are of course amateurs in these "serious" topics, but it would be interesting to know what ideas are possible.

[Bitcoin's economy]

I think it's highly likely that there are two main scenarios for Bitcoin's economy in the next decades:

1) a speculative & volatile scenario with possible high ROI but also high risk:

Bitcoin continues to be used mostly like today. People (and also businesses) buy it because it's volatile and can yield high ROI if you catch the correct moment to enter and sell near the peaks. In this scenario, we will continue to see wild price swings, spectacular bull markets and insane crashes after massive profit takings. But that would limit adoption to people (and business) with money they can afford to lose.

Price growth would be higher than 30% in most years, sometimes 50% or more, but there is also the possibility of deeply negative years with 50% loss or more.

2) a boring / stable scenario with higher adoption by common people.

Volatility will decrease further driven by more and stronger hands involved, possibly also by BTC adoption "as a currency". You won't get rich if you invest in Bitcoin, but you can store your wealth safely investing in it. So the adoption by "retailers" would be higher, as people with normal salaries can use Bitcoin for their savings without having to fear a deep crash.

Price growth would be less than 10-15% per year, but even in bear markets never more than -10%.


More details about the scenarios in this post in another thread.

I would like to know from the Bitcointalk community which scenario you prefer. I think still both scenarios are possible at this stage and have a similar probability.

On purpose, I haven't included a "moderate" scenario. It is far more interesting if people would prefer high but risky ROI or a slow, stable growth, otherwise people would gravitate probably to the moderate scenario.

I think this topic hasn't been discussed here (at least a Google search yielded no result):

What do you think about betting on events which are far away in the future? "Far away", may be something like at least 10 years away.

A couple of examples:

- Will there be humans on Mars before the year 2050?
- Will we see a long distance maglev train before 2036? (Japan is building one scheduled for 2034 afaik ... but we all know that such pioneer projects often take more time)
- Will there be quantum computes capable of hacking a Bitcoin private key until 2035?
- Will we see fully capable humanoid robots with AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) until 2050?

But also things like:

- Will (country X) be able to provide housing for all its citizens until 2040?
- Will medicine progress increase life expectancy for people with (medical condition Y, e.g. cancer) by more than 20% in the next 10 years?

I think personally such bets could be fun, of course to risk a few dollars only. But even better: they could give some insights, like gathering the sentiment of techno-optimism or pessimism in a certain year.

As most advanced users know, Lightning Network has no "global state" as the Bitcoin blockchain has, which can be observed by external parties, as it's a private network.

Thus, it is not possible with conventional means to see a "balance" of a certain Bitcoin address, like it would be possible analyzing the blockchain (what block explorers do).

It could however be possible to create a transaction between the address owner we want to consult (A) and a verifier (B), without trust between these two parties, where A could prove to B that they have solvency of a certain amount of BTC X.

The idea is to create an HTLC between A and B, where A transfers the exact amount X to B, but B also transfers X back to A, with the same secret (preimage) and hash. If the payment goes through, A has proven to B that it has access to a certain balance.

I have found this paper on a similar subject, and the technique I'm asking about here is probably what there was described as "payment probing" (but there are no more details in the paper).

But the doubts I have is:

1) The HTLC(s) would have to be "bound" together with more than the preimage/secret. Because: What if B does't have enough balance to carry out the transaction? Wouldn't then be A transferring X, but B wouldn't transfer X back to A? If it was the other way around (B transferring X first, i.e. with shorter deadline), wouldn't A be able to scam B?
2) Does the Lightning protocol allow this kind of "fake swap"? There are no funds really moved (apart from fees).

If there is a name for this technique I would be interested in knowing it

PS: The original topic where this came up was deleted. There seems to have been a duplicate, but I couldn't find the duplicate thread. So I'm starting a new thread, a bit more "focused" on a possible solution to this issue.

[But is it a good idea to buy now in the 80-90k area?]

The lower the price goes, the less risky it is to buy Bitcoins. Is this phrase true?

I believe in general yes, but all depends on your time horizon.

Until now, Bitcoin was always in a long term uptrend. This meant basically that every dip and bear market was an opportunity. While a bull market could be always a trap -- if you bought in at the top, waiting for even more returns, you could lose in the short term.

In general I think those who refused to buy at $125k were not wrong. For many reasons this was a very risky point to buy. The price had been going up for almost 3 years, and historical bull markets were never longer than that.

But is it a good idea to buy now in the 80-90k area?

Let's see: Price can obviously go up and down or run sideways But what counts are the probabilities.

For the following reasons I think that a price about 80-85k could be a decent opportunity:

- Bitcoin's volatility is continuously lowering. It is thus unlikely, if no extreme even (black swan) happens, that we will see another ~80% dip, and even a ~70% dip could be already out of reach. We're already down around 35%. So you have already a decent discount even if the bearish trend continues some months more.
- A price about a third under the previous ATH in the worst case meant you had to wait 2 years to make a profit again. For example: if you bought in early 2022 for 45k (a third below 70k), this price was reached again in late 2023.
- It still could be an intermediate dip in a bull market. There were such dips in longer-term bull markets too which also lost ~30-40%. The worst one in recent years was the 65% dip in 2019 to early 2020, followed by the 50% in mid-2021, and several ~30% dips in 2024 and 2025.

How would I thus consider the probabilities for the evolution of the next year?

- 30% that we will have a heavily bearish next year. I would consider everything significantly (10% less) below the 2021 ATH (69k) as "heavily bearish". In short: a fall below 60k. This could happen for example if Strategy really runs into difficulties (unlikely in 2025/26,  but may become a fear for 2028+). Or if another big 2022 style hack occurs. Or if Tether falls.
- 25% lightly bearish scenarios, like a dip into the 60-75k territory and then a very slow recovery.
- 25% that the bull market will continue and until early 2026 we'll see 100k+ prices  again.
- 20% of a sideways scenario, either in the current region (around 75-90ish k) or a bit higher (e.g. around 100k). The argument for this scenario is that there may be neither overwhelmingly positive nor negative trends in adoption. And it would be basically a continuation of the lowering volatility pattern.

Now what does that mean? Is 80-85k an opportunity to buy or not?

Only in the "heavily bearish" scenario a buy in the 80k region is really a loss in the mid-term. And even then, it may be enough to simply wait again 1-2 years until the price recovers, if the patterns of previous cycles repeat. And remind: you didn't buy at 125k but already 30-35% lower! So you very likely won't lose "everything" even if there is another deep 70%+ bear market.

In all other scenarios, the biggest part of the crash risk is already gone. You may suffer some losses, but probably not more than 20%, and it's also quite likely that these losses will be temporary.

And in the bullish scenario you may have "won the lottery": you got perhaps the best price forever or for a very long time.

Conclusion:

- 80k is in my opinion a quite decent buying price. It is not free of risks. But much less risky than buying at >110k was.
- If you don't want to gamble that much, DCA is always a good option too. And if you didn't DCA in the "bubble phase" over 100k, perhaps now is a good moment to begin.

(Disclaimer: This is a personal opinion and not investment advice. You may come to different conclusions doing analysis, and that's okay!)

PS: I'm especially interested in different approaches to the calculation of probabilities of bearish and bullish scenarios.