bitcoin hit $65k and nobody cared. here's why that might be the real stories
let's talk about something most crypto people don't want to admit: bitcoin might have already won its biggest battle and lost its biggest opportunity at the same time.
the uncomfortable truth about bitcoin's next 10xin my view, bitcoin to increase in value by 1,000x, 100x, or even 10x. i know that sounds bearish, but hear me out.
Fifteen years ago, bitcoin emerged at the perfect moment right after the 2008 financial crisis when trust in governments, banks, and fiat currencies was at historic lows. remember occupy wall street? the tea party? that was real rage. bitcoin offered something different: decentralized, scarce, and completely outside the traditional financial system.
back then, the extreme volatility (70% to 90% drawdowns, multiple times) was tolerable because it was always followed by 5x, 10x, sometimes even 100x rallies. much of this growth was driven by waves of new, highly leveraged investors attracted by returns that were near to impossible to find in traditional assets.
the discovery phase is over
today, bitcoin is widely known. your parents have heard of it. your barber has an opinion on it. that one friend who still uses a flip phone? yeah, they know what bitcoin is too.
this dramatically reduces the likelihood of massive new inflows purely from discovery. the "wait until people find out about this" narrative is dead. people found out. they either bought in or decided not to.
at the same time, investors seeking speculative upside now have alternatives: gold, silver, tech stocks like tesla, or other high-risk assets that offer more stability while satisfying the same appetite for outsized gains.
we got what we asked for (and it killed the dream)
here's the paradox that nobody wants to acknowledge:
bitcoin spent years fighting for mainstream institutional and governmental acceptance. that day has arrived.
Institutions are accumulating ✓
large institutions can now trade "paper bitcoin" through derivatives, potentially expanding synthetic supply through futures and short selling. the original scarcity narrative — the thing that made bitcoin special — gets diluted within the modern financial system.
so what's the path forward?
We struggle to see a clear trajectory for bitcoin under its current setup. the explosive growth phase was fueled by:
novelty (now gone)
distrust in traditional systems (institutions co-opted it)
extreme volatility cycles (being smoothed out by institutional participation)
now that bitcoin is widely known, institutionalized, and deeply integrated into mainstream finance, the asymmetric upside that defined its early years appears structuly harder to believe.
The one scenario that could change everything
one potential catalyst would be genuine, large-scale adoption as a unit of account for globally traded commodities — oil, gas, strategic resources.if major exporters began pricing and settling contracts in bit coin demand would shift from speculative to transactional. that would represent a structural transformation, not just another cycle of hype.however, this would require:geopolitical realignment
sovereign-level coordination
price stability (the irony and here's where it gets really interesting..and while stability could validate bitcoin as infrastructure, it would also kill its appeal as a high-beta speculative asset.
in that scenario, bitcoin might mature into a low-volatility settlement layer — valuable, sure, but unlikely to deliver the exponential gains that early adopters experienced.web3 promised decentralization. instead, it became vc-funded startups withtoken
but if that's the case, we should stop pretending it's revolutionary and just call it what it is: a speculative tech stock with better branding.
