Let’s start with a fundamental question.
What is Bitcoin?
The crypto bros will have you believe that it is the new world digital currency. A decentralised token that will solve all the problems we see in the fiat system.
But is Bitcoin really a currency?
The only two countries that accept Bitcoin as legal tender are El Salvador & Central African Republic… but the uptake has been disastrous, and most vendors refuse to accept it. And who could blame them? Can we seriously expect something as volatile as BTC, with intraday fluctuations of 20%, to be accepted as payment for goods and services?
Imagine if your inventory was worth $10,000,000 in the morning, then $11,000,000 at lunch time, then $9,000,000 at night? Imagine if the purchasing power of your “money” diminished 60% over the course of a year. What if you bought a business for 100 BTC today, and then although your business doubled in revenue it was only worth 80 BTC the following year because BTC went up 250%?
Bitcoin is not a viable alternative for money. If BTC behaves like real money, which is to decline or at best hold its value due to inflation, the crypto bros will be dumping it and pursuing other get-rich-quick schemes. As it currently stands, no one is using BTC as money. They just want to get rich and sell back to real money.
So if Bitcoin isn’t money, what is it?
Is it an investment?
That depends how you define investment. Before the days of derivatives, synthetic financial instruments, cryptos and NFTs, an investment was entered to gain a share in profits or rent. Unlike cryptos, companies produce goods and services which are consumed by their customers, and in the case of real estate, the tenant will pay the landlord a rental income to use their land. A crypto does not produce, and it cannot be lived on.
So no, in the same way Gold is not an investment, Bitcoin is also not an investment. But at least Gold has some industrial, commercial and aesthetic value.
So what is Bitcoin?
Let’s talk about so-called “blockchain technology.” The crypto bros like to conflate BTC with the “blockchain revolution,” which fails on two counts. First, blockchain “technology” is separate to BTC. Second, blockchain is the most overrated, overhyped so-called “technology” ever conceptualised. Blockchain is a digital ledger showing what wallet ID paid how much to what wallet ID. Even a technophobe like me could build a blockchain in an afternoon with data feeds from a platform into a live excel spreadsheet. Here’s one thing that all texts on the “blockchain revolution” have in common – they discuss ideals, politics and economics, not the technology itself.
So no, Bitcoin is not leading any technological revolution.
So what is Bitcoin?
Is it some kind of digital commodity that could be used as an alternative store of value, and its rising value comes from its “scarcity?” This idea fails on many counts. Firstly, it isn’t a commodity. It has no industrial use. Second, it is not scarce. At the time of writing there are 19.8 million BTCs in circulation. Each BTC can be split into 100 million units, called “Satoshis” meaning that there are currently 1,980,000,000,000,000 units (1.98 quadrillion) units of this stuff. As BTC is not “pegged” to anything else, its trading activity determines its value relative to fiat, it’s scarcity can therefore only be defined by its quantum of tradable units. That quantum is already a thousand times larger than the total global M1 money supply of US Dollars and will continue inflating at mind boggling levels – eventually stopping at 2.1 quadrillion Satoshis. The fact that an algorithm rather than a central banker determines its supply, doesn’t make it scarce.
Foundry USA is the world’s largest BTC “miner” (don’t get me started on how much the word “mining” is not an accurate description of what they do). It takes an extraordinary amount of money, infrastructure, resources and energy to build and run such an operation. Start up costs for Foundry USA were $100m and it is estimated that they consume 1 million KWh of electricity every day to generate BTC. It is estimated that each BTC costs Foundry around $50k to “mine.” Notwithstanding rising energy costs, we can expect this figure to double to at least $100k by next BTC “halving” in 2028. (“Halving” = algorithm slowing down the release of BTC. It will go from 450 BTC/day to 225 BTC/day, thereby effectively doubling the per BTC “mining” costs)
So no, Bitcoin is not a commodity.
So what is Bitcoin?
I’ll tell you what it is.
A sinister delusion. A string of valueless characters traversing fancified excel spreadsheets in a valuation vacuum inflated mercilessly on ideologies of hypocrisy, manic speculation, and gross misrepresentation. A gamble, except no-one knows the odds. While 90% of the “investors” lose money, BTC’s credibility remains intact from the endorsement of mainstream economists (the same kind who believe supply chain disruptions cause inflation), TV celebrities and polymath intellectuals – all of whom have fallen for “number go up” mentality like moths into flames. The historical performance of BTC relative to dollars is hard to ignore, but it doesn’t legitimise any of the crypto bros’ claims.
Bitcoin’s credibility is about to be broken, and one day we’ll look back at the 2020s and reminisce on the “crypto craze.” We’ll tell stories of the times people were paying more than double their annual wages just for 1 BTC, and how we thought for a moment the government would just sit back and allow private exchanges to become the new central banks.
Bitcoin is in many ways the perfect symbol for the decadence of the West, and how we thought we were so clever and financially invincible and could just keep speculating on asset bubbles forever. BTC may well be the thing we associate with the end of the American Empire itself. A last-ditch effort to remain the global financial hegemony one way or another. The US Government has lost control of its US Dollar printing machine, and despite all its claims to “technology leadership” it never had control over BTC – and when it crashes, they’ll tell us that they knew this was going to happen while praising their central bankers for their relative “stability.”
The cracks are already starting to show. The US Treasury has already said it will not buy any more BTC and has no intention to use BTC as legal tender nor will it be used for foreign trade. (Reasons why are obvious). Rather, the US Government is, as expected, going all-in on the US Dollar.
As for the private sector elites, the fund managers who built BTC ETFs were never in it for the “blockchain revolution” nor to adapt to any new financial order. They were in it for the money. Fund managers saw enormous uptakes of BTC, licked their chops and said “I’ll take a piece of that.” Do you think a Blackrock Bitcoin ETF manager really cares how much a BTC is worth? They collect huge management fees whether their ETFs win or lose.
And this brings me to Michael Saylor. The man who I believe will be responsible for the downfall of Bitcoin.
MicroStrategy is a company with fundamentals so bad it is uninvestable. What started as a software provider has effectively become a company that buys BTC as its primary business strategy. It owns $73 billion worth of BTC and has a market cap of $112 billion. Buying shares in Microstrategy is kind of like buying BTC at a 153% premium. The company loses money ($670m per quarter) and is so heavily indebted that if investment inflows slow down and/or BTC price falls, Strategy will have no choice but to dump BTC to stay solvent. (Saylor knows all about this). Strategy’s average entry price is $70k per BTC. All it would take is just 8% of Strategy’s BTC holdings to be sold and BTC’s price will tumble down to $70k.
People trust Saylor because he is charming and has a Musk-like quirkiness about him. Quite frankly, I like the guy. I like Musk too, but would I buy Tesla stock? Hell no! But the difference is, Tesla makes amazing cars and MicroStrategy is one big Ponzi scheme, and could be bankrupt by Christmas 2026 if not bailed out by the US taxpayer.
Now I turn to the reason I spoke about the “mining” costs earlier.
Assuming you were a BTC “miner” and it cost you $50k per BTC. At what BTC valuation would you be comfortable to continue “mining” BTC? At a price of $120k, it is an obvious choice – keep mining! But what if the value fell to $70k, or $50k.
What if the price dropped below $50k and you were losing money to generate each token?
At what point do you dump all your BTC and shut down your $100 million “mine”?
People talk about the size and scale of these “mining” operations like it’s a good thing – like they somehow strengthen BTC’s credibility. I don’t see it that way. In 2025, spending $100m upfront and millions of dollars each day to generate new tokens for the money supply is an obscene waste of resources. Not dissimilar to government.
And what if BTC crashed at the same time that the Unites States plunged into recession and the NASDAQ and S&P500 bubbles popped – which many fringe economists (with excellent track records in predicting recessions) agree is imminent?
What if your government printed so much money that cost of living rose +21% and you had to choose between selling your crypto portfolio and paying the rent?
I don’t like being the “crypto grinch” but I am utterly convinced it is going to hell and you’re all about to get “rekt.” At the end of the day, BTC has no fundamental economic, financial or ideological value.
BTC will be a relic of these times. Dusty cold wallets and stale server rooms costing the GDP of entire countries to build and maintain – not representing beauty, triumph, scarcity or output, but 2.1 quadrillion strings of ugly cryptographies representing greed, delusion and negative sum games – a time we no longer wanted to grow the economy but gamble it away – trying to get rich off someone else’s loss.
If you’re long on BTC, I hope I am wrong. And if it goes to $5 million per BTC like many of you believe, I give you full permission to send me pictures of your Lamborghini, super yacht or island and brag about how wrong I was (after you sell it back to dollars of course). But in the off chance I’m right, I encourage you not to go all-in on this stuff. High-risk bets should not make up more than 5% of your portfolio.