It Ain't 2009 No More
Bitcoin was built for a world that no longer exists. The environment we're living in today — with AI, cybercrime, Internet Computer Protocol, and the ability to put everything on blockchain — has changed completely, and Bitcoin is still stuck in 2009. Like that song says, it ain't 2009 no more. If you're a Bitcoin maxi, or you're holding any Bitcoin at all, I'm going to walk you through a deep, deep research report on the maximum Bitcoin bear case. It runs seventy-something pages, and it contains information that is incredibly important for you to see before other people realize all of these things. The whole market is trending, hyping, and showing up. Bitcoin is dominating. But underneath that, there is massive weakness. There is a huge amount of centralized entities holding huge amounts of Bitcoin that want you to buy it from them so they can make a profit off of you buying it. And meanwhile, almost everybody holding Bitcoin is utterly clueless about all these liabilities I'm going to share here. The full report will be available shortly for you to enjoy and look through in great detail yourself.
I created this report using ChatGPT Pro with a long prompt containing all the things I already know about Bitcoin, encouraging it to do real research — to find things I don't know and dive deeper into the things I've only heard in passing. What came back is a pile of huge problems Bitcoin is facing: the security budget decay, scaling limits, custodialization, the mining-to-AI migration, quantum coordination, governance ossification, and programmable money displacement. Just tons of them. And here's the thing: Bitcoin can remain technically alive while economically getting bypassed. To me, that is one of the biggest risks, and it's why everybody thinking they can just hold and the price will go up forever makes no sense when you look at the state the world is in today. It's not 2009 no more. There are literally 26 sections in this report — I also had Claude do something with it — but I'd rather just go through the documents themselves and present the evidence.
The Executive Thesis
Bitcoin's hardest risk is not that it suddenly stops producing blocks. It's that the chain survives while the reasons to keep buying Bitcoin continually slip away. Yes, it began as something unique and special. But now there are all kinds of other ways to send money. There are all kinds of stablecoins out there being used on other blockchains that minimize the need for Bitcoin. The maximum case for Bitcoin right now is utter ignorance — people have no idea what they're buying. That might make sense for crypto retail, but it doesn't make sense for companies. I had a one-on-one call with a guy today, and he said companies are going to start putting Bitcoin and Ethereum on their balance sheets. Slow down. There's a big difference between companies putting cash on their balance sheets and doing that. Companies are usually extremely conservative with balance sheets, holding things like cash and stocks. They're not eager to throw money into something risky that could introduce a bunch of problems. The idea that lots of companies will do what MicroStrategy did and load up on Bitcoin ignores the fact that most companies have watched that play out for years now, and they've chosen not to do it. So the thesis that companies are going to start loading Bitcoin and Ethereum onto their balance sheets — and I did a deep dive into that in my last Ethereum video — keeps getting less and less likely.
Here's what we're actually seeing happen, and what is likely to keep happening: Bitcoin keeps producing blocks, but the economic activity continues to migrate elsewhere, and that continues to drain the value from Bitcoin. The chain survives, but the idea of digital gold keeps slipping into oblivion.
The Harshest Conclusions
Let's look at the harshest conclusions before going into deeper details. First, the idea that sells Bitcoin today is "digital gold," but Bitcoin was actually created to be direct global electronic cash. It was not built to just sit there while you hope the price goes up — it was built to be sent from person to person. That is clearly not happening. Bitcoin has not become direct global electronic cash at all, especially as stablecoins have risen. Once stablecoins rose, Bitcoin's markets had the edge taken off. One big reason Bitcoin originally pumped was that altcoins traded against Bitcoin — but now they trade against cash and stablecoins. Bitcoin isn't even a big means of exchange on crypto exchanges anymore.
Second, the digital gold narrative premium is not a real cash-flow floor. There's no contractual yield. There's no claim on productive assets. The perceived value can be enormous, but underneath there's nothing. In my view it really comes back to feeling like a Ponzi scheme, where you're just hoping somebody else buys after you.
Third, miner funding is still overwhelmingly inflationary, even though so many people are so bullish on Bitcoin. Here's what happens every ten minutes with the way the supply is set up: about three Bitcoin come out and are made available to miners. Multiply three by the Bitcoin price today and that's roughly $180,000 to $200,000 worth of Bitcoin every ten minutes getting handed to miners — while only around 0.64 of the miner reward comes from transaction fees, which is tiny by comparison. So while people celebrate halvings and talk about four-year Bitcoin cycles, this is getting less sustainable every year. When the next halving comes in 2028, the subsidy drops from about $200,000 a block to about $100,000 a block at the current price. The only way that's sustainable is if the price keeps going up. What happens if, in 2028, the price is lower, and suddenly miners are looking at getting under a hundred thousand dollars a block instead of two hundred thousand? That's not a good system. Really, you have to have transaction fees go up, or the price has to constantly double every time Bitcoin halves, just to sustain the thing. This stuff made sense back in 2009, but it doesn't make sense anymore. And the long-run fee solution contains a contradiction: fees high enough to fund miners weaken Bitcoin's usability, while low fees improve access but leave security dependent on a shrinking subsidy.
Mining Centralization and the AI Squeeze
Now let's talk about mining. The top three mining pools in Bitcoin — as I've repeatedly emphasized — control 62% of the blocks. Cambridge survey data attributes 82% of the ASIC supply to Bitmain and 99% to the top three manufacturers. Do you see how all the claims about how decentralized Bitcoin is don't manifest in reality, when there are three pools that more than likely have a handful of people in charge of them? That means a handful of people have the power to make serious changes to Bitcoin mining if they feel like it. And the actual manufacturing of Bitcoin mining equipment is utterly centralized down to three manufacturers — literally one manufacturer making 82% of it. If they ever decided to take Bitcoin mining hostage by putting anything in the devices that could potentially cause problems, that's a risk point almost nobody thinks about. That is a serious level of centralization. On top of that, mining is massively wasteful in terms of energy and computer equipment — and it gets worse when we talk about AI.
This is why my thesis is that it's not 2009 no more. In 2009, the outlook for Bitcoin was bullish. Today, to me, it has to be bearish — I don't care what the price is. The technical limitations of the blockchain and the world environment are very bearish for a 17-year-old technology that is mainly pushed on hype and speculation. A world of AIs is not a friendly environment for Bitcoin, because while AI does not directly repurpose Bitcoin ASICs, it competes for the same things: data centers, energized campuses, interconnects, fiber, cooling, utility relationships, and capital. What's happened in the last few years is that in the same locations where Bitcoin mining was happening, it's much more profitable — if you own that location — to kick the Bitcoin mining out and bring AI in. So between the fee problem, the price-and-halvings problem I just described, and AI making it much more profitable to displace Bitcoin mining, you are looking at serious issues with no clear resolution. The only answer people offer is screaming that the price will pump indefinitely — and at this point that's based on people not understanding any of these things. You're betting that companies and governments are going to load this up, while companies and governments usually do a lot more research than private individuals. Honestly, I probably ought to be getting paid $20,000 to go present this information to a company boardroom that's considering Bitcoin, instead of just publishing it on YouTube. Maybe that will happen — maybe somebody will see one of these breakdowns and schedule a call with me and say, "Hey, why don't you come talk to our board? We'll pay for you to come out here and answer all our questions in person." Maybe something cool like that will happen.
Self-Custody Is Already a Reason Not to Use It
Do you see how I've only covered the first six conclusions and it already looks bleak? It gets even worse. Right now, just custodying Bitcoin by itself is, to me, a reason not to use it. In the simplest form there are two basic ways to hold it — there are others, but consider this: if I had Bitcoin today, I would send it to the OISY wallet or to the Network Nervous System on ICP, because then I'd have all my crypto in one wallet on the ICP blockchain. Even then, I'm still trusting the ICP blockchain — which I already trust with all my crypto. This is not financial advice, and I'm all in on ICP. This stuff is why I sold my Bitcoin. I saw all of this years ago — and back when I saw it, there were about half as many things on this list as there are now.
The Self-Custody Nightmare
Self-custody was a nightmare back then, and most people simply leave their Bitcoin with some quote-unquote "trusted third party" — which never should be trusted. It totally defeats the purpose of Bitcoin in the first place. Letting a banker or an ETF hold your Bitcoin utterly defeats the point of Bitcoin existing. So if you're not going to let some third party like Coinbase, Binance, or an ETF sit on your Bitcoin — where maybe they have it, maybe they don't — then you're going to try to self-custody it. How? You're going to get a Ledger hardware wallet or a Tangem wallet, or you're going to use a Bitcoin Core wallet, which ends up being a hot wallet — where if your computer gets hacked, you could lose all your Bitcoin. That actually happened to one of the Bitcoin developers, who had something like a hundred Bitcoin in a hot wallet. The reality today is that self-custodying Bitcoin remains a nightmare, and that's part of the reason it's getting pushed on you the way it is. It's difficult to self-custody Bitcoin, and there's a very good chance you could lose it in a variety of ways. And if it's too hard to self-custody, you just leave it on exchanges, ETFs, and custodians — which is exactly what everybody already in the game wants you to do. They want you to give them dollars, and they'll supposedly hold Bitcoin for you. That's the exact model Bitcoin was designed to avoid.
So today, actually trying to take real control of your Bitcoin is a nightmare. In my experience, the best way to do it is just to put it on ICP. But then it's like — why do I even need Bitcoin? If the best way to hold Bitcoin is to use the OISY wallet or the Network Nervous System on ICP, why wouldn't I just hold ICP, if that's the best solution?
Bitcoin's Utility Happens Outside of Bitcoin
Next: Bitcoin utility increasingly occurs outside of Bitcoin. You have Lightning payments, exchange ledgers, wrapped Bitcoin, chain-key Bitcoin, cbBTC, and all these other representations. They're basically leeching off the Bitcoin branding, while almost all the fees, customer relationships, and governance go back to the operators of those chains — not to the Bitcoin blockchain. That's a huge problem, because even on the Internet Computer, when you deposit your Bitcoin into an address the Internet Computer gives you, all the chain-key Bitcoin transactions happen on the Internet Computer. The Bitcoin doesn't need to move on the Bitcoin blockchain itself.
A viewer asked me: given that 90% of the other cryptos are copies of copies, meme coins, and outdated tech, do we need to flush most of the cryptos and restart the market? Absolutely — and that's what I see coming, because historically that's what happens. When a market fills up with a bunch of bloated junk, at some point it all gets flushed. The best of the best comes to the top — which would be ICP — and almost everything else takes a huge dump. It's just a question of when that happens and how fast. So right now a lot of the Bitcoin branding is taken up by all these other uses of Bitcoin that don't even involve much activity on the blockchain, which goes right back to the mining and fee issue I described before.
The Quantum Migration Problem
Then there's quantum migration — a huge issue that almost everybody is far too lighthearted about. "Oh, that's not a big deal." To me, quantum migration is a big problem, because while the cryptography can be upgraded, the wallets, custodians, miners, and holders must all move, and legacy coins raise a political choice. Quantum computers are going to be able to break Bitcoin's encryption — if they can't already in secret. Think about the addresses that haven't moved in forever: whether it's the guy who threw out his Bitcoin in a landfill in the UK — who I actually DMed on Twitter back in the day — or Satoshi's wallet. What are you going to do? Those wallets will eventually be cracked by quantum computing, because the blockchain itself is still living in 2009. The hashing algorithms set up in 2009 made sense for zero-and-one computing in 2009, but they don't hold up against quantum computing, where a quantum computer can go in and crack that old encryption. Upgrading away from that will require arguably the most serious changes in the history of Bitcoin. That's a perfect opportunity for people to be very unhappy: you either lock legacy coins, permit quantum theft, or restrict old spending. It's a disaster, and it must be faced someday — and you have to combine it with everything else on this list.
What Bitcoin cannot deal with right now is a price collapse. If people understood what a house of cards this is — what a Ponzi-like structure this is, in my view — Bitcoin could easily go back into the thousands. This is quicksand, because the entire Bitcoin thesis only works if the price, at a minimum, doubles every four years. If the price doesn't keep doubling, the whole thing is extremely questionable.
Finally, one more thing that was not an issue at all in 2009: AI agents may value programmable money more than passive scarcity. The emerging payment systems — stablecoins, sub-cent payments, instant execution, all the things you can do on Internet Computer Protocol — leave you asking how and why you would use Bitcoin in these scenarios at all. Bitcoin, with the digital gold narrative and the original idea of digital cash, is unusable in an AI environment outside of being used through chain-key Bitcoin. And then the question becomes: why would you use chain-key Bitcoin instead of everything else you could use? I think that's a really important question.
Someone asked whether ICP is preparing for quantum. That's the thing — ICP has hundreds of people at DFINITY working on it right now, and they're a publicly transparent foundation that stays on top of what's happening with quantum computing. Dominic Williams has said they could make more aggressive moves to prepare for quantum computing, but right now he doesn't see the need — it's in the roadmap, and they're planning for it. ICP is literally more than a decade newer than Bitcoin. It was built differently from the beginning, and it's built for AI agents more than any other blockchain — which is why on my Jerry Banfield ICP channel, ICP is all I talk about. It's the number one blockchain in terms of technology.
What Would Make This Bear Case Wrong?
Let's flip it: what would make this bear case wrong? Transaction fees would have to become a durable, sustainable share of miner revenue across multiple cycles — that seems unlikely at this point. Self-custodial Lightning would have to become simple, reliable, and broadly used without concentrating liquidity — unlikely. Mining pools would have to adopt widely used miner transaction-selection templates, and ASIC supply would have to meaningfully diversify. Bitcoin would have to complete a credible post-quantum migration long before a cryptographically relevant machine exists — and as slow as Bitcoin moves, what will probably happen instead is that one of these wallets gets quantum-hacked, and then they'll do something. AI agents would have to use native BTC or trust-minimized Bitcoin layers at material scale rather than stablecoins — again, unlikely, because why not just use stablecoins, which is what almost everybody will mostly be using? And if you're going to do that anyway, that activity is going to be on ICP.
Institutional custody would also have to broaden ownership without creating correlated redemption, leverage, or forced-selling risks. Here's the thing about these third parties holding all this Bitcoin: if any of them are being dishonest — and I'd say a significant percentage are — they might have a hundred Bitcoin, or a thousand, and sell two hundred, or two thousand, or maybe five thousand Bitcoin to their clients, because the clients can't tell the difference, especially if they can't even withdraw it. Institutional custody like that requires suppressing the price by selling all this fake Bitcoin. I would guess at least 20%, if not 50%, of the Bitcoin people think they hold doesn't exist on the blockchain. To put it another way: two people think they each have one Bitcoin when there's really one Bitcoin on the blockchain and two people sitting on an exchange believing it's in their wallet. Now, the bullish people say that proves Bitcoin demand is actually higher and the price is being suppressed — and that's valid. But at the same time, if you can't stop it from happening, it means the price has to get dumped constantly just to get people to sell so the custodians can profit, and the upside is limited because it would take an insane amount of buying power to absorb all that fake Bitcoin. So right now, the bear case looks extremely relevant, and the bull cases look ridiculous when you consider the technology, AI, and all the issues I've described.
Headline Facts
Let's look at some headline facts. Right now, the market cap for Bitcoin is around $1.6 trillion — valued up there as high as some of the top companies in the world, which is ridiculous. Everybody talks about market cap, but a lot of that Bitcoin is not actually circulating. Meanwhile, the price is down about 50% from the October 2025 high, and at this rate there's not necessarily a bottom in sight. Even if it goes up, is it even going to reach the all-time high again? And how clueless do people have to be to keep buying this when something like ICP exists and all these concerns are on the table? Meanwhile, you have ten-minute blocks, which makes Bitcoin very difficult to use for many real-world applications, and miners are collecting less than one block's worth of Bitcoin in fees for the entire day. Hardly any of the rewards are fees at all. Bitcoin, 17 years after it launched, is still depending on subsidy inflation instead of fees. Add in the hash price — around $31 per petahash per day — and the pool concentration, and there are just so many fragile parts. It's kind of amazing this ecosystem came this far, but it's not going to last forever. Look at the railroads. A hundred years ago, the railroads seemed like forever fixtures — people could hardly have imagined the state the railroads are in today. What happened is that better technology replaced them.
Better Technology Already Exists
While people in crypto might have a hard time imagining better technology replacing Bitcoin, you should know that ICP has been out for five years. Ethereum is not that much better than Bitcoin — yes, you can do smart contracts and such, but the infrastructure still has to be built the same basic way around it. ICP, though, is so much better than Bitcoin and Ethereum. As I show consistently on cryptotechcap.com, it makes everything else in crypto irrelevant. There is major building happening on ICP from what we can see, and it's only a matter of time until that goes live — a matter of time until the cycle burn rate shoots up and the amount of ICP that has to be bought to pay for all of it shoots up with it. And when the ICP price pumps, everything else in crypto stands to lose massively — which is why, in my view, the price is being suppressed as much as possible. That's a huge additional risk on top of all these other fragile spots.
Institutional Custody by the Numbers
Right now, about 6% of the circulating supply of Bitcoin sits in spot ETFs — many of which don't even allow people to withdraw; you can only transact in cash. A single company holds around 800,000 Bitcoin, which is another single point of failure if anything happens there. All those channels combined put roughly 2 million Bitcoin circulating through institutional channels, which can amplify flows in both directions and defeats the original purpose of Bitcoin. That's 10% of Bitcoin's total supply — hundreds of billions of dollars sitting in institutional hands instead of regular people's hands. It doesn't make any sense. Meanwhile, the public Lightning capacity, for as long as it's been around, remains tiny — and chain-key Bitcoin, with almost no marketing, is already up to hundreds of Bitcoin. You've got hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin trapped in wrapped Bitcoin, something like a hundred thousand tied up in Coinbase's cbBTC supply, and greater than 34% of Bitcoin sitting on an exposed public key — so the quantum exposure estimate is very serious. Meanwhile, the El Salvador pilot that was supposed to be so bullish has gone almost nowhere. That one national use case has dramatically undercut the real mass-adoption claims. And now ICP has come out with a real solution.
A Period of Ignorance
The price of Bitcoin is high right now, in my view, because half of it is effectively fake due to all these exchanges, and because people are not looking deeper at what actually happens when you buy quote-unquote "Bitcoin" on an exchange, let it sit there, and hope for the price to go up. It's going up because a lot of people operating in crypto have a low level of knowledge, and because it's not widely understood that something vastly superior — something that actually has yield — is available. We're in a period of ignorance, where something dramatically better exists, most people don't know about it, and most people who hold Bitcoin don't understand almost anything I'm saying here. People tell me, "Well, you don't understand Bitcoin." There's a big difference between "I don't agree with your limited understanding of it" and the reality that I have a depth of understanding about Bitcoin that I could probably talk through for five or six hours. Probably 99% of Bitcoin holders do not have this level of research and analysis — which is why I provide it. They sit there and watch Bitcoin hype videos that tell you the same stuff over and over. It's like going into a hypnotic trance: the same things repeated again and again, and never a mention of the serious problems underneath. All the Bitcoin hype videos are basically useless. This is what you actually need to hear.
One viewer put it this way: Bitcoin is obsolete, yet it's propped up by archaic fossils right now. And I see that it's insane to expect archaic fossils and governments to prop Bitcoin up — and to invest based on that idea. What happens when governments start using ICP for infrastructure and decide it makes much more sense to buy ICP, stake it, take part in governance, and earn yield, instead of sitting on Bitcoin hoping the price goes up? All the Bitcoin narratives only make sense if you don't know about ICP. Once you know about ICP, the entire Bitcoin thesis collapses, because now there's a better option than just hoping Bitcoin goes up. People are not going to be fooled indefinitely by narratives and shallow digital gold promises — at least, people with big wallets tend to do a hell of a lot more research, and pay people to look all this up, before they put $100 million into something like Bitcoin. Not everybody — some people will willy-nilly throw millions into Bitcoin without knowing anything. But the more money people have, the more they tend to have researchers on hand. And with AI, research like this is getting easier than ever. The more AI rises, the less friendly AI will be to Bitcoin — AI is really good at cutting through the crap, especially if you ask it the right questions.
Digital Gold Is Just Marketing
Bitcoin does not make sense right now. Digital gold is just a narrative — there's no actual gold behind it, only perceived scarcity. People point at how little Bitcoin is on exchanges, around 10% of the supply, but to buy all the Bitcoin on exchanges you'd need something like a hundred-and-some billion dollars. Meanwhile, you'd only need a hundred-million-and-some dollars to buy all the ICP on exchanges — and ICP is vastly superior to Bitcoin in every single respect. When you look at what this digital gold narrative is based on, it's just talk. It's just marketing. The whole idea that Bitcoin is "digital gold" is ridiculous — ICP fits digital gold much better than Bitcoin does. And if you're thinking Bitcoin is just going to go up because institutions are going to pump it, why would you even support that? Even if it does happen, I don't see why I'd want to participate in that system — any more than I want to participate in the stock market. The truth is that Bitcoin doesn't produce any earnings, rent, interest, or governance cash flows. That doesn't make Bitcoin utterly worthless, but the price targets are merely adoption and scarcity narratives. It's absolutely ridiculous to think Bitcoin will keep going up and up. Right now, the most valuable company in the world is, last I checked, around $2 trillion — and that's roughly Bitcoin at $100,000. So even thinking Bitcoin goes to $200,000 — that it will be worth more than the most valuable company in the world — is ridiculous. Meanwhile, to me, going back to $10,000 seems completely reasonable at some point.
The Scaling Contradiction
I've talked about a lot of this at a high level, but I encourage you to look deeper into all of it, because there are just so many problems. Take the direct scaling contradiction: you simply can't scale Bitcoin without using something else, and as soon as you use something else, why even bother with Bitcoin? It doesn't make any sense to expect a future for something that does about seven transactions per second — and doesn't even actually do them per second; it batches them into ten-minute batches, and you generally need several blocks for confirmation. With 8 billion people on the planet, it makes no sense to think Bitcoin can do anything by itself. And if it's not doing it by itself and needs something else, wouldn't it be more efficient to go straight to that something else — go straight to ICP, or build your own blockchain — instead of trying to route it through Bitcoin? Every practical scaling solution reduces the number of users who interact with the base layer and inserts a service provider, a consensus system, or an external token. To me, that just crushes everything.
Someone asked me whether Michael Saylor is a wacko. I don't think Michael Saylor has done this kind of research on Bitcoin — which you'd think would be impossible. If I were Michael Saylor and had seen this research, I'd be unloading that Bitcoin. But see, if he unloads it, he crashes it. If MicroStrategy unloads its Bitcoin, Bitcoin could go to several thousand dollars — it could absolutely collapse. That's the delicate position this whole thing is in: one single company could collapse Bitcoin by something like 90% if they decided to sell. They're holding roughly as much Bitcoin as a third of the entire amount sitting on exchanges. That's how delicate all of this is. And yes — Dominic Williams is a genius.
The Inflation Nobody Talks About
The Lightning Network is not a solution, and you can't narrative your way out of the halving problem. Right now, miners are receiving about 452 Bitcoin a day — and people complain about ICP's inflation! Multiply it out: if the Bitcoin price is around a hundred thousand dollars, 452 times $100,000 is roughly $45 million. Every single day. Bitcoin miners are getting on the order of $45 million a day, and almost all of it is pure blockchain inflation. Meanwhile, ICP's inflation right now is about 3% — roughly $31 million per year. This is how uninformed people in crypto are: in a single day, Bitcoin has more inflation than ICP has in an entire year — and people complain about ICP tokenomics while Bitcoin runs $45 million a day. All of this gets put into serious question if the price dumps, because then mining becomes utterly unprofitable. And at the next halving, miner issuance falls another 50%, so mining keeps getting less and less profitable into the future. You absolutely have to have the Bitcoin price double just to keep up with this.
Hash Power Is Not Decentralized
You would also have to have fees climb to make up for the shrinking subsidy, and I just don't see how that happens. And the hash power is not very decentralized at this point either. The report includes a detailed graph of it, with Foundry USA right at the top. Right now, the US and China utterly dominate Bitcoin. It makes no sense. Sure, it might make sense for MicroStrategy, a US company, to hold Bitcoin — but it makes no sense for some company in Switzerland to put Bitcoin on its balance sheet. It makes no sense for a country like El Salvador. It makes no sense for a country like China to put Bitcoin on its balance sheet or make it national currency or legal tender, because Bitcoin is dominated and controlled by Chinese mining equipment producers, a mining pool in the USA, and US companies and institutions that hold a ton of it on their balance sheets and therefore have the ability to control the price.
A Brand Without Infrastructure
A viewer said Bitcoin is a brand. Well, here's the thing: big brands need underlying value. Brands need a deliverable, and most big brands have infrastructure. That's exactly what Bitcoin doesn't have. It has a blockchain that's something like ten times smaller than ICP's in terms of the data on it, even though it's 17 years old, and the infrastructure itself does almost nothing. When you think of brands like Coca-Cola, they have infrastructure for delivering huge amounts of soda to people in person. Google — massive infrastructure all over the planet. Microsoft, Apple — infrastructure. They have huge resources that deliver real things to real people. Bitcoin does not. It has a tiny little blockchain — I could fit at least ten complete copies of the Bitcoin blockchain on the computer I'm using right now. The blocks themselves are tiny, and very few people actually interact with the blockchain itself. Bitcoin is not infrastructure. It is a speculative protocol with all this hype built on top of it, where the thing itself is supposedly where the value is derived from — but there's a massive disconnect between the thing itself and the perceived value. At some point, people are going to figure that out. And the people with large amounts of money are going to figure it out first, not crypto retail.
Derper Zombies vs. Critical Thinkers
I don't think the ICP creator community is as full as it will be shortly, because high-IQ voices stand out amidst the noise. The level of information those of us in ICP are providing is so far past what the rest of zombie crypto is providing that it draws intelligent people in. Watch my Bitcoin breakdown and then go watch somebody else's Bitcoin video: one of them is a derper zombie looking at price charts and quoting narratives you've heard a hundred times — which works if you're in a trance and you don't think critically. "Yes sir. Yep, it's going to go up. Yep, these addresses are active. Oh, look at this price chart. Look what happened before — it's going to happen again." That's derper-zombie territory, not thinking critically at all. But critical thinkers are often the decision-makers, especially for large amounts of money. Sure, crypto retail is full of people who will follow authority into a trance, but a lot of the big-money people are not like that — that's how they became big-money people. They're critical thinkers who look deeper and analyze further. And when somebody who's not in the US or China looks at a chart showing 27% of the mining controlled by a single US company, and the majority of the mining equipment production controlled by a Chinese company — if you're outside the US or China, it doesn't make sense to invest in this at all.
AI and Bitcoin Are Opposites
And if you're excited about AI, it doesn't make sense to invest in Bitcoin at all. AI and Bitcoin are literally opposites: Bitcoin is an old, pre-AI technology, while AI requires new infrastructure just to support it — and Bitcoin can't fit into that at all. Frankly, the rest of crypto can't truly fit into it either. With AI, you get direct competition for power. AI competes for every dollar of investment and everything around Bitcoin mining. If you want to monetize your power, you're going to be much better off monetizing it with AI. If you want to monetize your data center, same thing. AI data center electricity demand is scaling much faster than mining. Look at how much power these AI data centers are going to consume — that cuts directly into what Bitcoin needs. AI is already cutting into Bitcoin mining and will continue to cut further. And you can see how vulnerable Bitcoin mining already is. Mining is the center of this whole setup, and it's a massively wasteful activity accomplishing nothing except supporting a blockchain that almost nobody actually uses directly — you interact with it through centralized tech. Critical-thinking minds are going to look at this and run from Bitcoin.
One viewer wondered whether Bitcoin is like a Trojan horse, a house of cards, or a false flag. I could absolutely see that. To me, crypto as a whole can seem like a giant Trojan horse or house of cards — though real value has come out of it. Bitcoin as a prototype was valuable. Ethereum as a prototype was valuable. ICP as infrastructure is valuable. Almost everything else in crypto has been like lying, cheating, stealing — modern-day organized crime. And to be clear, not every Bitcoin mining facility is instantly going to turn into an AI data center. But when you need huge amounts of power to run these mining facilities and AI pays better, there's just not much incentive to keep investing in Bitcoin mining when you can invest in AI instead.
We've already covered the mining, and "be your own bank" is a severe usability burden — it's just not something the average person is up for, and the average person knows it. There's also the lost coin paradox — an enormous amount of Bitcoin is simply lost — and the ETF problems I've already talked about. And look at the depth of this report: I don't even have time to really get into most of it. I could sit and talk for another thirty-plus minutes just on quantum. Here's what has to happen: quantum is not an imminent prediction — it's a coordination deadline with an unknown date. Once a quantum-capable attacker emerges, there's a migration deadline where every wallet and coin has to move. If you migrate early, you move to larger signatures and heavy coordination — ideal in a lot of ways, but still going to cause problems. If you restrict legacy coins, you get a property-rights dispute Bitcoin could really snowball over. If you allow movement, you get theft and supply shock. All of it becomes a governance crisis for Bitcoin. Do you see the level of detail in this thinking? People tell me I think too much. Yeah — this is the level I'm thinking at. If you're going to put a hundred million dollars into something, this is the level you would think at — not derpy crypto retail, throwing money in and hoping the price goes up.
I'll skip the conspiracy angle. But as for people talking about Bitcoin like it's somehow private: it's very easy to surveil. It's ridiculous to think anything you do with Bitcoin is private at all, especially when an exchange has you KYC'd. And as I said before, El Salvador shows that legal status does not manufacture demand, because of the technology. People call me a classical lateral thinker — I'd say I'm a deep thinker. I think through a lot of different probabilities and scenarios. I'm not saying Bitcoin is definitely finished; it just looks like most probabilities are not going to go well from here.
Where a Bitcoin Collapse Is Most Likely to Begin
Now let's get to the finale: the chart of where a Bitcoin collapse or long decline is most likely to begin. The number one scenario is slow monetary premium saturation — fewer and fewer new buyers just wandering into Bitcoin hoping the price goes up. That leaves you stuck with older buyers: people who have been holding, people who want to unload. And the price action, as we've seen, has continued to disappoint. The 2017 bull run for Bitcoin was much better than 2021, and there was hardly anything in 2025 compared to 2021. Whatever the next Bitcoin bull market is, it's likely to continue being disappointing — and the more disappointing it is, the more people will sell as soon as they're in profit, and the harder it becomes to reach higher and higher prices, because nobody holds while believing the price will even get past all-time highs.
They're like the guy I talked to today, who booked a one-on-one call with me — almost everybody who gets on a one-on-one call with me holds more crypto than I do, which I suppose makes sense: if you're paying to talk with me for thirty minutes, it's very worthwhile when you're sitting on big positions. This guy is holding a number of big crypto positions, and in a lot of them he's basically just waiting so he can sell at a profit — and it hardly has to be any profit. He's in losses now, and he just wants to get back to even. That's the mindset. Almost everybody in crypto is there. Hardly anybody even cares about a bull market anymore — hardly anybody even believes in one.
Fourteen Scenarios for Decline
All most people are trying to do now is exit their existing positions. That's a lot different from previous bull-market euphorias, when people were throwing around numbers like Bitcoin to a million dollars and nobody was thinking through whether that made any technical sense. The report lays out fourteen different scenarios, each rated for probability on a one-to-five scale. The probability of slow monetary premium saturation is very, very high, the impact is high, and the speed is slow — it's not going to happen overnight. What happens instead is that Bitcoin keeps sliding further and further down. It may hit a point where it stops even hitting new highs and just keeps returning to old lows without reaching new highs at all. Imagine if, in the next Bitcoin bull market, it didn't even get back to $120,000. Can you imagine the disappointment? That has been the recent experience in crypto — people have been so disappointed, and so quick to exit their positions. Maybe Bitcoin reaches a high someday of something like $180,000 — but imagine if whatever the next market is doesn't even get back to that.
You also have to adjust for inflation. Look at the previous bull markets — 2013, 2017. If you adjust for inflation, Bitcoin has barely kept up; it's only been slightly ahead of inflation in the more recent markets. There was a ton of inflation between 2017 and 2021, and while the Bitcoin price did pump and hit a high in 2021, adjusted for inflation it was a pretty weak high compared to 2017. Same thing for 2025. Adjust for inflation, then compare it against how much gold has pumped, and Bitcoin is already showing extremely clear signs of slow monetary premium saturation. Even if every other issue on this list gets handled, this is a nearly certain outcome in my view: Bitcoin relative to gold keeps sliding, and then the whole narrative collapses.
Squeezes, Unwinds, and Shocks
Then there's the security budget squeeze, which we've already covered — the fees don't provide any real money, so the system has to keep running on inflation, which makes mining unsustainable. Custodialization hollowing out the thesis, which we've also covered, is a very high probability scenario with lesser impact, but again slow. Then there are others, like an ETF or treasury-company reflexive unwind. Remember how much FTX going down destroyed Bitcoin? Well, there's now a whole collection of entities that could all go down — and with AI hacking, there are more and more opportunities for that to happen. And with quantum computers, you never know: one of these exchange wallets could get hit with a quantum hack. No Bitcoin wallet is truly safe from a quantum attack. Some — like the 34% with exposed public keys — are easier targets than others, but a quantum computer with high enough power can brute-force just about anything. You could feed a public key straight in and run through the probabilities in an insanely short amount of time and crack almost any wallet eventually. There are already enough easy wallets that even less powerful machines — which more than likely exist in secret — can probably crack some of them now. It's just a matter of time until it happens, or until there's a big upgrade. And this is on top of all the other issues that almost nobody in Bitcoin considers.
An energy or regulatory shock is also very likely. I saw a clip of a bomb getting dropped on Iran, and I thought: that's just insane. Can you imagine a missile blowing up in your neighborhood? Why are we doing that in 2026? Well, one consequence of conflict like that is energy. Do you remember the last Bitcoin bear market, when energy narratives smeared Bitcoin endlessly? I've got news for you: nothing has happened since then to change the reality that Bitcoin was built in 2009 and takes a huge amount of energy. That means any time the system decides to attack Bitcoin, those energy narratives will come piling back in — and the higher gas prices go, and the more AI demands power, the more those Bitcoin energy narratives will come firing out. When you see the energy narratives start to propagate again, you'll know dark times are coming for Bitcoin.
Where I Stand
I would sell my Bitcoin now if I had any — and I already sold mine years ago, because I saw that ICP has such a better future. Yes, ICP has slipped against Bitcoin so far, but in my view ICP could 10x or 100x against Bitcoin very easily, because it's infrastructure. I've gone on for 53 minutes here and barely gotten through the beginning of this report — I encourage you to dig into all of it yourself. If you want more research and analysis like this on crypto, you can find my ongoing breakdowns on my Crypto Reviews playlist.
If you'd like to talk crypto with me — or anything at all: YouTube, crypto, dating, content creation, AI — you can schedule a one-on-one call with me. I'm sticking to promoting the one-on-one calls primarily now. And if you'd like a one-on-one call every month, you can also join my community on Skool.
Thank you very much for reading. I hope you all have a wonderful day.