Bitcoin as a Safe Haven Asset: Can the community contribute to make it happen?

[d5000]

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?

[Don Pedro Dinero]

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?

That was popularised by Michael Saylor, but given that he’s fallen out of favour recently, I wouldn’t be surprised if the narrative were to change.

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

I don't think so. The ‘community’ is an abstract concept. You’re not going to get the people on the forum – who represent only a small part of the community – to agree on something, let alone get the entire community to agree. There isn’t even agreement on more practical matters, such as BIP 110, so it’s unlikely there’ll be agreement on something conceptual.

- 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.

I think you’re missing the point here. What made Bitcoin popular were the returns. If the price of Bitcoin were $1.73 today, nobody would be talking about it, however decentralised, autonomous and uncensorable it might be. I visit two other forums where this topic is discussed, and it’s interesting that not even the trolls are bothering to criticise it anymore. There is a widespread feeling that the best opportunities in history to get rich from Bitcoin have already passed. If Bitcoin is no longer seen as the most profitable asset and that role is taken over by AI or other tech stocks, it will lose popularity, investors and that very notion of ‘digital gold’ itself.

- Also a bit less exaggeration of the supposed danger of Saylor and friends would not do harm.

That’s just your opinion about it being an exaggeration. A bloke who has over 800,000 bitcoins in his company – the very one who has underpinned the rubbish returns that bitcoin delivered in 2025, having bought more than all the bitcoin mined that year – and who has now started selling, is a clear threat, mainly to the price. But on top of that, the fact that he holds his bitcoins with a third party (Coinbase and Fidelity custody, if I’m not mistaken) and that this is his view of bitcoin doesn’t seem to be doing much good:



This idea that there’s a ‘consensus’ that Bitcoin is digital capital is a massive lie he’s peddling so he can sell his products.

It’s a bit like those shitcoiners who tell you: ‘I’m a Bitcoin maximalist, but buy my (rubbish) shitcoin.’ Well, he tells you: ‘I’m a Bitcoin maximalist, but buy my (rubbish) STRC.’ Bitcoin was created as a rebuke to the banks, yet what he does is buy up huge amounts of bitcoin, centralise it, store it with third parties, and use the banks and Wall Street to sell his derivatives, paying them 3 per cent.

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

Already responded, no.

[Alpha Marine]

I agree with your points, but I don't see how it could work. There is no way to get everyone to agree on a particular way of life. People would always talk about or do what they want or what they perceive will get them paid. The YouTubers and TikTokers make money from the things they talk about, so for the views to keep coming, they need to discuss the hot topic of Bitcoin.

I find it funny when Bitcoiners talk about how Bitcoin is a long-term investment all year, and the moment there is a crash, they panic and sell. I mean, there is nothing wrong with selling your Bitcoin; I sell mine too, but not because I panic or because the Bitcoin price is crashing.
It doesn't make sense to call a safe-haven asset all year long and then get worked up by the short-term price. It just shows they didn't believe in what they were preaching all along.

[Fortify]

What community? Are you specifically talking about this forum here? Otherwise you are just talking about current bitcoin holders in general which is too broad a brush to stroke. Some people are diehard bitcoin supporters who will blindly buy more at every opportunity they get without ever questioning "why" beyond HODL. Others will be skeptical investors who might buy in on the way up, make a little profit and consider it a possible investment to hold longer term in the future, or get burned buying at the top then swearing off buying it ever again. Then others who don't care to understand it or simply need it explained to them before the possibility of them buying opens up. The "community" is wide and needs more definition or goals if you propose they are the ones to help.

[IjawMan]

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

Yes to a degree, cause by individual interest not every one will fall in with this narrative.

The problem is more of a psychological issue and purpose among retailer than ownership of larger quantities of bitcoins to whales like Saylor of Strategy. When people coming into bitcoin investing with value hodling purpose and not entirely for profit making at every event that looks like an opportunity to make one, it could be then the Bitcoin community may begin living to this proposed expectations.

I do not know how many Bitcoiners have been paying attention to this detail. Bitcoin price does not take action immediately a whale like Saylor sales a large whole numbers of their Bitcoins in reserve, it does immediately retailers begin to chicken out and starts a massive queue sells in amplification of a panic sell price actions. A dip price fall that should not have occurred if every retailer act as though nothing had happened when the news about such sells reaches retailers ears, but then it eventually begins. And the stories will be that is cause a whale as Micheal Saylor sold, but no, it dew to retail Bitcoin holders giving support to a panic sale sentiment. Which should have had not significant effect if every retailer had acted normal and put on a buy sentiment instead of a responsive sell.

[d5000]

That was popularised by Michael Saylor

I'm quite sure that this narrative was quite popular in the mid 2010s already. Here I found a little history of that narrative. There was even a book with this title from 2015. So I'd say Saylor's relevancy is limited.

"Safe haven" does also not mean "not currency". The P2P currency and the digital gold narrative are very compatible one with another. It is less compatible with the speculative "ride the waves" narrative.

I don't think so. The ‘community’ is an abstract concept.

It's abstract, but of course what I mean here is more in line with the concept of "leaders of opinion", i.e. influencers, forum members, all that stuff Or: All people who want to share their own thoughts on Bitcoin with others. Also those who are able to develop solutions for Bitcoin, like layer-2's, DeFi, and other stuff. These solutions can contribute too, see below for my take that the digital gold narrative is compatible with the currency narrative, but not with the volatility/speculation narrative, and thus layer-2's for example can help.

These actors won't agree all with that narrative, some will like to stay in the speculative camp. But perhaps some could re-think their stance if they become convinced that a "safe haven" narrative would be advantageous for a lot of use cases.

I think you’re missing the point here. What made Bitcoin popular were the returns.[...] If Bitcoin is no longer seen as the most profitable asset and that role is taken over by AI or other tech stocks, it will lose popularity, investors and that very notion of ‘digital gold’ itself.

Disagree fundamentally. The market for safe haven assets is afaik much bigger than for high-return risk assets. So if people became to believe that it's a good idea to hold Bitcoin in the long term then this will cater to those who are looking to an alternative to overpriced real estate, for example.

The essential point for me is the risk-reward relation. If Bitcoin can prove that its risk is lowering, then the use case "long term value storage" should get more popular by the laws of logic.

However, everybody who whines about "only" an average 15-20% return per year (that's approximately what the SMA-200 is yielding), of course increases the risk because they implicate that Bitcoin is only worth something because of its exceptionally high returns, and create fear and distrust. So we have a "whining spiral", where the whiners are creating artificial volatility. Clever investors will buy it up at the bottom.

For me there is a big conflict between "volatility lovers" ("ride the waves" guys, shorters, leveraged traders etc.) and "long term holders". If the volatility camp wins, then Bitcoin in my eyes will have a very difficult time in the near future, probably as early as the 2030s.

You make a case for the volatility camp being dominant for a quite long time still because it currently may dominate the narratives (even if I'm not sure). My stance is, this is definitely possible, but then maybe we will have to go through a big bear market, and I mean big here, to shake out the volatility camp. But maybe "the community" can do better. See above.

That’s just your opinion about it being an exaggeration. A bloke who has over 800,000 bitcoins in his company – the very one who has underpinned the rubbish returns that bitcoin delivered in 2025, having bought more than all the bitcoin mined that year – and who has now started selling, is a clear threat, mainly to the price. But on top of that, the fact that he holds his bitcoins with a third party (Coinbase and Fidelity custody, if I’m not mistaken) and that this is his view of bitcoin doesn’t seem to be doing much good:

The 800,000 Bitcoins are a lot but not a game changer. It's 4% of all Bitcoins currently in circulation. We have a lot of volume each day (200,000-500,000) being traded.

If Saylor's narratives are being questioned, that is good in my opinion - for the safe haven camp.

@Fortify: See early part of answer to DPD.

It doesn't make sense to call a safe-haven asset all year long and then get worked up by the short-term price. It just shows they didn't believe in what they were preaching all along.

Yes, this is also a problem: "fake save haven preachers". Those that only preach about safe havens but only because they want to ride a bull market. This is one of the behaviors that in the end harms the narrative, and makes it more difficult for Bitcoin to become one.

[Ambatman]

People tend to subconsciously look for something that would validate their opinion.
Not everyone in the community understands Bitcoin or cared about it being bullish.
And also even if you want to be bullish don't make it sound like a scam project with weird price speculation (Saylor)
It's counter productive.

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

Gold has been considered a safe haven for years
Though not as volatile as Bitcoin
It still gets influence by various policies around the world.
No matter how much Peter shows that Gold is well Gold and Bitcoin is scam
It doesn't change the fact that it's peforming poorly in the short term.

[Lida93]

People would talk about what they want to talk about since what seems irrelevant to you to not talk about the more may not be same for them. I have read posts about people who are bearish on price of bitcoin to continue to fall dip because they have a particular price target they're waiting on to buy from there. Such people would not think of talking less about the bears, hope you know that?

Your proposals are good but it would have being likely practicable for all if bitcoin was a centralized asset that doesn't give everyone the freedom to react and do with it the way they want to. All small investors may not come with a long term goal, some are with short term and may sell at any profit given price which could coincide with when a big whale investor is selling. You also have to consider that there might be other set of small investors that have made a target of selling at a particular price for personal reasons but on hearing about a big whale sell off, they would have no option but to sell as well before price fall below the current price they have on screen

[asriloni]

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?

The whale dump means nothing because public was still having their role model that push them to keep accumulated bitcoin, and it's saylor. The narrative was changing when saylor dump his 32 bitcoin to the market, then it driven sentiment to be very bearish.

The dump by whales also feels nothing because there were still people who accumulated as many bitcoin as they can. Once none does it, i believe a massive dump will happen.

So it proves how market is still being driven by money. It's because bitcoin is one of speculative asset. Gold is now also moving down similar to bitcoin.

So basically both of assets have similarities. Other than it, i think it's impossible to create such influence because market is valuing someone with unlimited money on his pocket. There's no guarantee the money owned by whole bitcoin community can even greater than what Saylor have alone.

[Fiatless]

The whale dump means nothing because public was still having their role model that push them to keep accumulated bitcoin, and it's saylor. The narrative was changing when saylor dump his 32 bitcoin to the market, then it driven sentiment to be very bearish.

The dump by whales also feels nothing because there were still people who accumulated as many bitcoin as they can. Once none does it, i believe a massive dump will happen.

So it proves how market is still being driven by money. It's because bitcoin is one of speculative asset. Gold is now also moving down similar to bitcoin.

So basically both of assets have similarities. Other than it, i think it's impossible to create such influence because market is valuing someone with unlimited money on his pocket. There's no guarantee the money owned by whole bitcoin community can even greater than what Saylor have alone.

These whales have the financial strength to finance ads that promote their services. So they easily manipulate the market by spreading FUD or FOMO. The US Fed's interest rate will always influence investors' decisions in almost all sectors.

But the community shouldn't just fold their hands, believing that we have lost control of the Bitcoin space. We can still make our little contribution in promoting Bitcoin as a long-term safe asset. And one of the ways to do that is to stop reinforcing or promoting the information these whales put in the Bitcoin space. It is not all about money, but about sending the right messages using available platforms.

[Taskford]

The whale dump means nothing because public was still having their role model that push them to keep accumulated bitcoin, and it's saylor. The narrative was changing when saylor dump his 32 bitcoin to the market, then it driven sentiment to be very bearish.

The dump by whales also feels nothing because there were still people who accumulated as many bitcoin as they can. Once none does it, i believe a massive dump will happen.

So it proves how market is still being driven by money. It's because bitcoin is one of speculative asset. Gold is now also moving down similar to bitcoin.

So basically both of assets have similarities. Other than it, i think it's impossible to create such influence because market is valuing someone with unlimited money on his pocket. There's no guarantee the money owned by whole bitcoin community can even greater than what Saylor have alone.

These whales have the financial strength to finance ads that promote their services. So they easily manipulate the market by spreading FUD or FOMO. The US Fed's interest rate will always influence investors' decisions in almost all sectors.

But the community shouldn't just fold their hands, believing that we have lost control of the Bitcoin space. We can still make our little contribution in promoting Bitcoin as a long-term safe asset. And one of the ways to do that is to stop reinforcing or promoting the information these whales put in the Bitcoin space. It is not all about money, but about sending the right messages using available platforms.

Big institution may have influence to change the sentiments of people, but those situation does not mean at all the community don't have power. Yeah the Fed can affect the market, including Bitcoin. But the effect of their decision is just short live. That's why better for people to do their own diligence to figure out this matter and they could learn lots of things if they have long conviction on Bitcoin, but also they can able to get those matters from having proper education and not just by the hype.

Best thing to do with those matter is we should avoid joining the manipulators by sharing those FOMO and FUDs, then we can focus on sharing more valuable sentiments or information since this is more helpful on Bitcoin. We may cannot easily control the market just with that matter, but those positive messages we try to share or discuss will provably helpful to other investors not to buy all those statements released by those institutions.

[adultcrypto]

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

- And of course, promote DCA.

There is too much reliant on the whales by the bitcoin community which is why people celebrate whenever Michael Saylor places his buy orders. People have the erroneous mindset that for bitcoin to surge in price, whales must continuously buy and there is nothing the community can do order than play by their rules. But reading through your post, I'm beginning to think otherwise. If we begin to look beyond the whales and encourage as many people as possible to buy through the DCA method as you suggested in your post, that a lone can make huge impact. There is power in community and the earlier we wake up and face the task, the better for all of us.

[Satofan44]

Anyone who voted "No" is an idiot and does not understand basic market dynamics, let alone the market dynamics that are involved in Bitcoin. Of course the answer is YES, a big YES. Most of the people are trading and panicking along with the narrative, instead of behaving the correct way they are acting like children. I'll shortly illustrate with a single example. Just before the first clash of Israel/USA and Iran, there was a huge demand of various people for buying Bitcoin in OTC markets. We are talking about individual community members, who are already Bitcoiners. As soon as the way started, the demand disappeared completely -- as the price continued to slide down, instead of buying and getting more Bitcoin for the same amount of money that they wanted to buy with, they simply fucked off in fear. At some point some of them started calling for a $30k low, simply from the initial panic dump -- they were panicking with the market, much more than they are willing to admit to others. Over the years, I have known and read about significantly more cases of "community members" buying high and selling low than people buying low and selling high. This already tells you where the issue lies.

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

You see the issue here too, many people will shitpost and repeat that you shouldn't trade with emotions and yet they will get into negative sentiment as soon as there is fear in the market -- completely contradicting their own "advice" or "knowledge". Actually practicing what is preached, and learning how to HODL would be good start. Obviously all answers will center around education, but the issue is that you can't force education on someone. They may even nod their head in agreements or say a few words, but that is completely useless if they do the wrong thing the very next time they find themselves in this situation.

Therefore, the topic would be perhaps more how do you educate people who are actually stubborn in their ways regardless of what they say in response to the education attempt?