Bitcoin: What They Don’t Tell You When They Sell You the "Currency of the Future"

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Version française : https://medium.com/@hornick.charles/bitcoin-ce-quon-ne-vous-dit-pas-quand-on-vous-vend-la-monnaie-du-futur-a7f61d019e28

I am not a financial advisor and do not hold any Bitcoin. This article is a personal analysis, not investment advice.

"Why do you never sell your bitcoins?"

"Do you sell your euros? No. You spend them. I take the same approach with Bitcoin."

This analogy, from Éric Larchevêque, co-founder of Ledger and Coinhouse, went viral on LinkedIn. It's well crafted, with sound rhetoric. In short, it has everything it takes to convince.

Except I'm not convinced, and it doesn't survive analysis.

Foreword

This article is not a case against Bitcoin. The protocol's technical properties (decentralization, supply capped at 21 million units, on-chain censorship resistance) are real and undeniable. In countries plagued by hyperinflation or monetary corruption, Bitcoin can serve as a tool of resilience.

However, the narrative built around Bitcoin, "currency of the future," "inflation hedge," "financial sovereignty," "opting out of the system," deserves to be confronted with facts. That is the purpose of this analysis.

Note: The market data cited in this article (BTC price, unrealized losses, volumes) reflect conditions at the time of writing (late March 2026). Bitcoin's price fluctuates daily, which is, incidentally, one of the arguments made in this article. The structural analyses (correlation with equity markets, infrastructure dependency, hashrate concentration, Strategy's financing mechanisms) remain valid regardless of short-term price movements.

"I Don’t Sell, I Spend": The Actual Mechanics

Concretely, what happens when you "spend" Bitcoin?

In the vast majority of cases, your BTC is simply converted to fiat currency at the current rate. Stripe, one of the world's largest payment processors, works exactly this way: the customer pays in BTC, the merchant receives fiat. Bitcoin integration via OpenNode is merely a conversion option on the merchant side, not a BTC payment.

Square (Block) is the only major player offering a true BTC-to-BTC circuit since November 2025, via the Lightning Network, for its 4 million merchants. But reality is stubborn: even with Square, the vast majority of merchants display prices in dollars.

BTCPay Server, often cited as "the sovereign alternative," does allow the merchant to receive satoshis without an intermediary. But once again, reality prevails: that same merchant must then pay rent, suppliers, payroll taxes, and income taxes. All of these are paid in fiat, meaning the conversion is merely delayed.
And "delayed" is generous. VAT is calculated on the sale price, not the BTC value at the time taxes are due. What merchant would take the risk of holding their BTC?

As for the Lightning Network, River Financial data (February 2026) shows a monthly volume of $1.17 billion for 5.22 million transactions in November 2025.
That sounds impressive, but put it in perspective: Visa processes roughly $14 trillion per year, meaning Lightning represents only ~0.1% of Visa's volume.
Moreover, the average transaction is $223. In other words, not everyday micro-payments, but most likely transfers between exchange platforms.

In March 2026, MARA, one of the world’s largest Bitcoin miners, sold 15,000 BTC to repay $1 billion in debt. During Q1 2026, Riot Platforms followed by selling 3,778 BTC (~19.4% of its reserves) for $289.5 million.
If even those who manufacture Bitcoin have to sell it to pay their bills, how is it a currency?

Ultimately, "spending" Bitcoin is an illusion, as it almost automatically ends up being sold in the process.

Currency or Speculative Asset? The Three-Function Test

As a reminder, a currency serves three functions: unit of account, medium of exchange, store of value.

Unit of account: no merchant in the world prices goods in BTC in any stable manner; they are always aligned to fiat value. Even Bitcoin’s most ardent defenders speak in fiat equivalents.
When Michael Saylor says "Bitcoin will reach 1 million," he means 1 million dollars, the unit of measurement betraying reality. Even El Salvador, after adopting BTC as legal tender in 2021, reversed course in early 2025 under IMF pressure, as merchants weren’t required to accept it and the majority didn’t use it.

Medium of exchange: adoption remains marginal, as we’ve just seen. In November 2025, Jack Dorsey, a convinced Bitcoin maximalist, had to integrate stablecoins (dollar-pegged tokens) into Cash App because his own customers weren’t using BTC to pay. He admitted having done so reluctantly a few months later, under pressure from his clients.
The market shows that people want fiat stability, not Bitcoin volatility. Stablecoin volume actually exceeded Visa and Mastercard combined in 2024, indicating that the future of blockchain payments isn’t Bitcoin but the dollar or euro on a blockchain.

Store of value: with annualized volatility of 50–70%, compared to 15–20% for gold, Bitcoin clearly fails this role.
Between February and March 2026, according to CryptoQuant on-chain data, ~46% of the total circulating BTC supply is in theoretical loss. That means nearly one in two bitcoins has lost value since its holder’s last on-chain movement, approaching 2022 bear market levels. The "store of value" has destroyed value for more than 4 out of 10 holders.

An honest parallel would be that buying Bitcoin follows the same logic as buying Tesla or Nvidia stock: betting on rising value.
Yet you don't buy a currency for its performance. If Bitcoin "outperforms," it is, by definition, an investment asset.
Worse, Cathie Wood, CEO of ARK Invest, confirmed this inadvertently by declaring that "in the Bitcoin community, a 50% drawdown will be considered a real victory." On what planet is an asset losing half its value a victory?

Volatility prevents BTC pricing, which prevents adoption as currency, which keeps BTC as a speculative asset, which sustains the volatility... And the loop closes.

"Bitcoin Protects Against Inflation": The Internal Contradiction

Bitcoin's supply is capped at 21 million units, a protocol-level fact, written into the code. The maximalists are right when they say "you can't print Bitcoin."

But this property does not protect your real purchasing power.

As long as goods and services are priced in euros or dollars, you're buying goods subject to fiat inflation. When you "spend" your bitcoins to buy bread, you're paying the bread's price in fiat, converted to BTC at the current rate.
The deeper problem is that you're not just suffering inflation; you're stacking two risks: fiat inflation AND BTC volatility.

David McWilliams, former Chief European Economist at UBS and ex-economist at the Central Bank of Ireland (the man who predicted the 2008 Irish housing crash) puts the problem clearly: unlike bonds or equities, cryptocurrencies generate no cash flow or income and entail no legal claim on anything. Put simply, Bitcoin contributes to no capital formation.

The "historical outperformance" argument (BTC has outperformed inflation over every rolling 4-year period) proves exactly the opposite of what maximalists want to demonstrate. If BTC outperforms, it's an investment, and an investment that can lose 70% in a few months doesn't protect anyone from inflation; it exposes them to a far more dangerous asymmetric risk.

Infrastructure Dependency: The Achilles' Heel

Bitcoin requires a complete chain to function: electricity, internet connection, a connected device, an operational node network, and sufficient liquidity to convert to usable currency.

In March 2026, Russia announced internet shutdowns "for citizens' security." Without internet, Russian Bitcoin holders found themselves either without access to their money or holding a cryptographic paperweight.
Furthermore, China has already demonstrated that it is technically possible to block Bitcoin traffic via DPI (Deep Packet Inspection), and Iran and Russia have similar capabilities.

At the same time, American-Israeli strikes on Iranian electrical infrastructure took hundreds of thousands of mining machines offline, causing approximately an 8% drop in Bitcoin's total network hashrate. The "decentralized" and "resilient" asset lost 8% of its security because of conventional missiles.

Offline solutions exist (Blockstream Satellite, mesh networks, NFC via Secure Element protocols) but they all require either internet access at some point or a hardware trust anchor, which contradicts Bitcoin's foundational value proposition ("trustless").

A €5 bill works whether it rains, snows, whether there's internet or not, in a country at war or at peace.

Bitcoin's "censorship resistance" is real on-chain. But the access ramps (exchanges, payment processors, banks) are not. And without access ramps, Bitcoin is unusable in the real economy.

Finally, one maximalist argument deserves particular scrutiny: "Bitcoin will bank the unbanked in Africa," except the data tells a different story.

As of late 2023, only 27% of Sub-Saharan Africa's population had access to mobile internet (Africa Check / GSMA). In Chad, the Central African Republic, and Mozambique, it's below 15%. Bitcoin requires internet to function, and proposing it as a banking solution for a population where 73% lacks mobile internet access is like offering a sports car where there are no roads.

Meanwhile, M-Pesa, launched in Kenya in 2007, works on basic feature phones via SMS, without internet. The service has over 70 million active users, processes over $450 billion in annual transactions, and Sub-Saharan Africa now has 1.1 billion registered mobile money accounts, representing 74% of all global mobile money transactions. A study published in Science in 2016 demonstrated that M-Pesa lifted 194,000 Kenyan households out of extreme poverty. A legitimate question arises: where is the equivalent study for Bitcoin in Africa?

The solution Africa actually chose for financial inclusion, mobile money on basic phones, already operates at billion-account scale, without blockchain, without mining, without internet, without volatility, relegating Bitcoin to a solution in search of a problem that’s already been solved.

"Decentralization" in Numbers

According to the latest Luxor Technology study (Web Hashrate Index), the geographic distribution of Bitcoin's global mining power is: United States 37.5%, Russia 16.9%, China 12.0%. Together, these three countries represent over 66% of global hashrate.

The "stateless decentralized currency" is thus predominantly produced by the three largest state powers on the planet. Two-thirds of the network's security depends on the electrical infrastructure and regulatory tolerance of three governments, two of which (Russia and China) have already demonstrated both the ability and willingness to restrict Bitcoin access, among other questionable actions.

For fans of the thermodynamic argument ("a satoshi is proof of energy spent, therefore Bitcoin has intrinsic value"), this map raises an uncomfortable question: if Bitcoin's value comes from energy spent, then 37.5% of that "value" is American, 16.9% is Russian, and 12% is Chinese. The individual monetary sovereignty promised by Bitcoin is in reality a dependency on the energy policies of three superpowers.

And the concentration doesn't stop at geography, as the top 4 mining pools control over 50% of hashrate. "Decentralization" is a technical ideal, but reality is a geographically concentrated mining oligopoly.

The Digital Euro Irony

Ironically, there exists a technical solution that solves the offline digital payments problem: CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies). IDEMIA has demonstrated offline CBDC transactions between smartphones via NFC, using certified Secure Elements, the same chips found in EMV bank cards. These transactions are even quantum-resistant.

The problem is that this model requires a hardware trust anchor, exactly what Bitcoin philosophically rejects. Solving offline payments means reintroducing institutional trust: a beautiful architectural dead end for Bitcoin.

Maximalists criticize the digital euro as a state surveillance tool. But the digital euro has at least this going for it: it's honest about what it is, centralized, regulated, with an explicit trust anchor. Bitcoin claims to need none of this but depends on all of it at every step of its real-world use.

Important nuance: the digital euro doesn't protect against account freezes or state confiscation. Cyprus in 2013, Greece in 2015, Lebanon in 2020 are reminders that institutional trust can also be betrayed, and that no solution is perfect.
Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something.

Strategy: The Last Buyer, Running on Fumes

Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), led by Michael Saylor, holds approximately 767,000 BTC as of April 2026 (roughly 3.8% of total supply) acquired for a total cost of approximately $58 billion, at an average price of $75,644 per unit. With BTC around $67,000, the company posted an unrealized loss of $14.46 billion in Q1 2026.

Strategy's model is a self-reinforcing loop: issue shares or debt to buy BTC, hoping BTC's rise will boost MSTR stock, enabling further issuance. Some weeks, Strategy was buying 13 times the daily mining output.

But in late March 2026, after 13 consecutive weeks of purchases executed with Swiss-watch precision, Strategy missed a week. Is the clockwork starting to show cracks? MSTR stock has dropped over 60% in six months (77% from its November 2024 peak), and the STRC preferred shares are trading below par value.
As Cryptonaute noted with a certain irony: "Strategy, the company that turned Bitcoin buying into a signal of absolute conviction and independence from market cycles, finds itself paradoxically forced to bow to those very same cycles."

But on April 5, Saylor tweeted "₿ack to Work" with a chart showing his 766,970 BTC and $14.46 billion in unrealized losses, sporting an avatar featuring a photo of himself with a golden halo. With 18,900 likes and 1,200 replies, the faithful celebrated the prophet's return as he announced buying even more with debt, while his portfolio shows losses equivalent to the GDP of Mali.

Unfortunately for Saylor, reality behind this euphoria is quite different. Outside of Strategy, corporate demand for Bitcoin has fallen to 2% of total purchases according to CryptoQuant. 45,000 BTC purchased in 30 days by Strategy, versus approximately 1,000 BTC by all other companies combined.
As mentioned above, MARA sold 15,000 BTC, followed by Riot selling 3,778 BTC. Meanwhile, miners are pivoting to AI because production costs (estimated at ~$77k/BTC by JPMorgan) exceed the market price ($67–70,000 at the time of writing). Even Bhutan sold 519 BTC.
"Institutional adoption" rests on a single man, carrying $8.2 billion in debt with annual financial charges ($779 million) exceeding his software business revenue ($460 million).

If BTC falls sustainably below $50,000, Strategy could be forced to sell its holdings, dumping 3.8% of total supply onto a panicking market. Mohammad Shahid, journalist at BeInCrypto, estimates the probability of a total collapse at 10–20% in 2026.
Bloomberg Intelligence senior strategist Mike McGlone goes further, saying that if BTC fails to reclaim $75,000, the path to $10,000 (the pre-pandemic "equilibrium price") remains open.
At that level, Strategy would be technically insolvent with $58 billion invested in an asset worth less than $8 billion.

With its urge to collect BTC like Pokémon, Strategy has become exactly what Bitcoin was supposed to eliminate: a single point of systemic failure.

The Correlation That Kills the Narrative

The mantra says "Bitcoin is independent of the traditional financial system." But the data says otherwise.

The correlation between BTC and the S&P 500 has hovered around 0.55 in early 2026, with a historical multiplier of roughly 2x: when the Nasdaq loses 33% (as in 2022), BTC loses about 65%.

A French crypto outlet recently headlined: "US CPI inflation stays at 2.4%: the Fed could help Bitcoin break free from 70,000." The "independent" asset is waiting for Jerome Powell's green light to go up.

Even more telling, in a single day following a Powell speech in March 2026, $455 million were liquidated according to CoinGlass ($382 million of which were long positions) with a 125% imbalance concentrated in a single hour. The "uncorrelated" asset reacts like a leveraged equity derivative.

And the SEC is making this link official through the proposed amendment to Rule 15c2-11, which aims to integrate crypto-assets into the same regulatory framework as stocks. Bitcoin is no longer beside the system; it’s in it.

We've gone from "Bitcoin replaces fiat" to "fiat replaces Bitcoin on Bitcoin's infrastructure."

When Investment Becomes Belief

Upon closer inspection, Bitcoin maximalism exhibits structural characteristics reminiscent of organized belief systems:

• a sacred founding text (Satoshi’s whitepaper)
• a vanished and mysterious prophet (Satoshi Nakamoto)
• apostles (Saylor with his golden halo, Dorsey, Larchevêque)
• a ritualized cyclical event (the halving)
• initiatory vocabulary ("HODL," "have fun staying poor," "stacking sats")
• heretics to ostracize ("FUDers")
• and an unfalsifiable eschatological promise ("hyperbitcoinization")

And this is not a metaphor when you see Éric Larchevêque, who promotes nicknames like "Bitcoin's Apostle," launch The Bitcoin Society, his latest venture, in a cathedral.
And when an economist like Steve Keen, who predicted the 2008 crisis, criticizes Bitcoin, the response isn't a factual rebuttal but an ad hominem attack: "he regrets not buying, so his analysis is biased." A commentator on RTBF (a Belgian public broadcaster) used exactly this rhetoric on air, without ever disclosing whether he holds Bitcoin himself, making it impossible to know if there's a conflict of interest in his commentary.

The question nobody asks: who benefits from the narrative?

Doubt is discouraged because questioning the narrative makes you a "FUDer." The "it's still early" argument is unfalsifiable by design, but after 16 years, one is entitled to wonder: at what point do we move from "it's still early" to "it's not working as promised"?

For her part, Cathie Wood, who manages a spot Bitcoin ETF, declares on CNBC that "85% crashes are over" and that a 50% drop would be "a real victory." This is the progressive shifting of goalposts, a mechanism characteristic of belief systems! The original promise ("Bitcoin always goes up") gradually morphs into "it only drops 50% and that's a victory," and nobody notices the promise has changed.
Let's stick to facts: Cathie Wood sells Bitcoin ETFs. Every dollar invested by a "believer" convinced by her statements generates management fees for ARK. She's not an independent analyst, she's a saleswoman!

Éric Larchevêque predicted in January 2025 that Bitcoin would reach $250,000 before June 2025. By April 2026, he was clearly off by a factor of 3.5x, with BTC at $67,000. In January 2026, he declared that "Bitcoin will surpass one million dollars, it's inevitable." That's essentially predestination: there's no escaping it! With statements like these, he sounds like a believer, not an analyst.

Furthermore, several cognitive biases fuel this dynamic:

• sunk cost bias: someone who has invested €50,000 in BTC has a psychological interest in maintaining the narrative
• survivorship bias: everyone knows someone who "did 10x," nobody talks about those who bought at $65,000 in 2021 and sold at $16,000 in 2022
• tribal effect: questioning the narrative means risking exclusion from the group

Add to this technical complexity acting as a smokescreen: blockchain, Lightning, Taproot, ECDSA, all poorly understood words that inspire fascination rather than skepticism.

And at the summit of this structure, a carefully preserved founding mystery: Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of the protocol, who vanished in 2011 without revealing their identity. They allegedly hold approximately 1 million BTC (roughly $67 billion at current prices) which have never moved.

This silence is not trivial, and it is structurally necessary to the narrative. A revealed Satoshi would become a fallible individual: taxable, prosecutable, criticizable. The protocol would lose its transcendence to become "software written by a guy with a mailing address," triggering immediate desacralization.

And the incentives for silence are colossal, no conspiracy needed. A $1.3 trillion ecosystem, companies like Strategy whose valuation depends on the myth, ETF managers collecting billions in fees, an entire industry built on the mystique of "the immutable protocol created by an anonymous genius!" Everyone benefits from silence, and when the alignment of interests is total, silence maintains itself effortlessly.

Paradoxically, this may be the most eloquent proof that Bitcoin is not as "trustless" as it claims. The entire market rests on an implicit trust: that Satoshi will never move their 1 million BTC. If those coins were sold tomorrow, the market would collapse instantly.
The "trustless currency" rests on the most fundamental act of trust imaginable: that its anonymous creator remains benevolent and inactive for eternity.

Who Pays When the Music Stops?

Éric Larchevêque says he's put "all his money" in Bitcoin, and I don't doubt for a second that he did. But as co-founder of Ledger (valued at over €1 billion) and founder of Coinhouse and The Bitcoin Society, his corporate assets are an entirely different story. The distinct legal personality of his companies protects his professional assets regardless of BTC's performance.

The Bitcoin Society, his publicly listed Bitcoin Treasury Company, closed 2025 with a net loss of €1.5 million, only 2.35 shares in circulation, and "unavailable" trading data. Three people and a basketball player.

Michael Saylor holds Class B shares with majority voting rights at Strategy, preferred shares, and significant compensation. Whales (approximately 2% of addresses controlling over 95% of all BTC) have hedging strategies, options, and short positions unavailable to retail investors.

On regulated markets, protections exist: insider trading prohibitions, circuit breakers, transparency requirements, deposit guarantees. On crypto markets, none of this. BTC can drop 30% in hours with no emergency brake, and cascading liquidations accelerate the fall. Moreover, market manipulation (wash trading, pump and dump) that would be illegal on equity markets is perfectly executable in crypto.

~46% of the circulating supply is in theoretical loss.

And when evangelists say "HODL," "never sell," remember that the person telling you this has a Ledger to sell you, an ETF to manage, or preferred shares at 11.5% dividend to issue. "Never sell" is advice that benefits those who give it, too rarely those who follow it.

Conclusion: The Real Problem Is Education

Bitcoin is not a scam. It probably won't go to zero, as Steve Keen predicts. But it won't "inevitably" reach one million either, as Larchevêque preaches. The debate between these two extremes is sterile and obscures what matters.

Bitcoin is a speculative asset with real technical properties and legitimate use cases in certain extreme contexts. What's an illusion is the narrative built around it: the "currency of the future" that depends on internet to function, the "inflation hedge" that can lose 70% in months, the "financial sovereignty" whose access ramps are all regulated, the "system independence" whose price depends on Fed decisions, and the "decentralization" whose 66% of power sits in three countries.

There is no monetary system that is simultaneously decentralized, offline, stable, private, and secure. Every option (cash, Bitcoin, gold, CBDCs) is a trade-off. And as stated above, anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

The underlying idea of Bitcoin, a decentralized currency with controlled supply, resistant to censorship, is valid and important, but the current implementation doesn't deliver on its promises. Technology history teaches us that ideas always outlive implementations: Napster disappeared, music streaming lives. Netscape died, the web lives. There's no reason to exempt Bitcoin from this pattern.

And I'd even quote Larchevêque himself, who said that a currency lives on average only 30 years. If Bitcoin is a currency, it's already 16 years old. It's closer to its end than anything else.

The real solution to the problems Bitcoin claims to solve (distrust of the banking system, monetary dilution, financial exclusion) is not a speculative asset sold by entrepreneurs who profit from it. It's financial education: understanding how markets work, what risk is, why diversification exists, and why someone telling you to put all your money in a single asset is not acting in your interest.

An educated investor evaluates Bitcoin for what it is, a high-volatility speculative asset, and sizes their exposure accordingly. A "believer" puts their life savings on a Ledger because its co-founder told them it was the path to sovereignty.

Don't be the believer.

And if you really want to invest in a decentralized, censorship-resistant asset that works in all circumstances, forget Bitcoin, choose the camel:

• Decentralized
• Offline
• Quantum-resistant
• Inflation-resistant
• Predictable loss of value (aging)
• Staking via reproduction (your money literally makes babies)
• Residual value on failure (meat, leather, wool, bones)

The camel to the moon 🐫🚀

The people cited in this article have been notified and are invited to respond. The goal is not conflict, it’s factual debate.

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References and Sources

Market Data and On-Chain Analytics

• River Financial (February 2026) — Lightning Network: $1.17B monthly volume, 5.22M transactions in November 2025, average transaction $223.
• CryptoQuant (March–April 2026) — Corporate purchases: 45,000 BTC by Strategy vs. 1,000 BTC by all other companies (-99%). ~46% of circulating BTC supply in theoretical loss.
• CoinGlass (March 2026) — 125% liquidation imbalance post-Powell speech: $455M liquidated, $382M in long positions.
• BeInCrypto (March 2026) — BTC/S&P 500 correlation at 0.55. Strategy collapse probability estimated at 10–20%.
• Luxor Technology / Web Hashrate Index (April 2026) — Hashrate distribution: USA 37.5%, Russia 16.9%, China 12.0%.

Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy)

• SEC Filing Q4 2025 (February 2026) — 713,502 BTC, total cost $54.26B, average price $75,644.
• Bitbo.io (April 2026) — 766,970 BTC held, average cost $75,694, unrealized loss -11.76%.
• CoinDesk (March 2026) — End of 13-consecutive-week buying streak. MSTR down 77% from November 2024 peak.
• Cryptonaute (April 2026) — Analysis of purchase pause: financing mechanism jammed, STRC below par value.
• Fortune (February 2026) — Analysis of massive dilution and unsustainable financial charges.

Miners and Industry

• CoinDesk (March 2026) — Average production cost: $77k/BTC (JPMorgan), market price ~$70,000. Miners pivoting to AI, $70B in contracts.
• Journal du Coin (March 2026) — MARA sells 15,000 BTC to repay $1B in debt.
• Journal du Coin (April 2026) — Riot Platforms sells 3,778 BTC (~19.4% of reserves) for $289.5M.

Infrastructure and Payments

• Square/Block (November 2025) — Bitcoin Lightning payments for 4M merchants, BTC-to-BTC option.
• Stripe Documentation — No native Lightning support. Crypto architecture oriented toward stablecoins.
• Cryptoast (March 2026) — Jack Dorsey integrates stablecoins in Cash App: "capitulation" to user demand.

CBDCs and Offline Payments

• IDEMIA (June 2024) — First quantum-resistant offline CBDC transaction via Secure Element and NFC.
• IBM Research (October 2024) — Offline CBDC payment protocol with spent-token deletion.

Geopolitics and Regulation

• Journal du Coin (March 2026) — "The Fed could help Bitcoin break free from 70,000."
• Journal du Coin (March 2026) — Rule 15c2-11 amendment: SEC proposes integrating crypto-assets into securities regulation.
• Kremlin/media (March 2026) — Internet shutdowns in Russia "for citizens' security."
• CoinDesk (March 2026) — Strikes on Iran, 8% hashrate drop.

Economists and Independent Analysis

• David McWilliams — Adjunct Professor, Trinity College Dublin. Former Chief European Economist at UBS, former economist at the Central Bank of Ireland. Irish Times (February 2026): "Crypto is not money. It will never be. When it falls, it won’t be pretty."
• David McWilliams — Money: A Story of Humanity: "our financial future lies not in Bitcoin but in mobile phone credit."
• Steve Keen — Economist, 2008 crisis forecaster. "The Diary of a CEO" podcast (2026): BTC-to-zero prediction (extreme position, energy-based argument).
• Mike McGlone (Bloomberg Intelligence) — Senior Commodity Strategist. LinkedIn and CoinDesk (April 2026): BTC "equilibrium price" at ~$10,000 (pre-pandemic level). Key threshold: if BTC fails to reclaim $75,000, the bearish path to $10,000 remains intact. Also predicts stablecoins (Tether) could surpass Ethereum then Bitcoin in market cap.
• BIS (Bank for International Settlements) (2022) — Majority of retail crypto investors were at a loss between 2015 and 2022.

Bitcoin Movement Figures

• Satoshi Nakamoto — Anonymous creator of the Bitcoin protocol, vanished in 2011. Presumed holder of ~1M BTC (~$67B at current prices) that have never moved. Emails exchanged with Adam Back (2008) before whitepaper publication. Identity unconfirmed; most-cited candidates include Adam Back (Hashcash inventor, Blockstream CEO), Nick Szabo (bit gold inventor), and Hal Finney (first Bitcoin transaction recipient, deceased 2014).
• Éric Larchevêque — CNEWS, l’Heure des Pros: "I don’t sell, I spend." Coinhouse (January 2025): predicted BTC at $250,000 before June 2025 (BTC at ~$67,000 in April 2026). Boursorama (January 2026): "Bitcoin will surpass one million dollars, it’s inevitable." The Bitcoin Society launched in a cathedral, November 2025, holding zero Bitcoin at launch.
• Cathie Wood (ARK Invest) — CNBC (April 2026): "85% crashes are over. A 50% drawdown will be considered a real victory." Manages the ARKB spot Bitcoin ETF.
• Michael Saylor — Tweet April 5, 2026: "₿ack to Work" with golden-halo avatar. 766,970 BTC, Q1 2026 unrealized loss of $14.46B. Declared goal: 1 million BTC by end of 2026.

Media

• Amid Faljaoui — RTBF/Classic 21 (Belgian public broadcaster) commentary (April 2026): defended Bitcoin via ad hominem argument against Steve Keen, with no disclosure of conflicts of interest.
• Journal du Coin — Ledger advertisement embedded within an article reporting that 41% of BTC supply is at a loss.