Bitcoin was the best performing asset of the last decade, and now the tables have completely turned. Last week, it was officially down more than 50% from its all-time high. Some of the best investors in the world are calling it “worthless” publicly, and the situation has gotten so bad that one of the biggest Bitcoin holders, Michael Saylor’s Strategy, is even being investigated with a potential class action lawsuit.
People are beginning to wonder: Is Bitcoin finally broken? Or is this the moment that’s about to create millionaires?
Coin Bureau@coinbureau
🚨MASSIVE: BITCOIN HAS NOW OFFICIALLY LOST OVER HALF ITS VALUE $BTC is down 53% in 8 months, erasing over $1.33 TRILLION from its market cap.
1:08 PM · Jun 26, 2026 · 54.2K Views
89 Replies · 93 Reposts · 510 Likes
That’s why we really need to discuss exactly what’s going on.
I’m not new to this. I’ve been following Bitcoin for more than a decade, and it’s one of the topics I’ve been covering regularly on my YouTube channel. The surprising bit is that these videos also tend to follow the hype-cycle of Bitcoin: Sometimes Bitcoin videos are the best performing videos I’ve ever made. At other times, I get nothing.
That says a lot about how Bitcoin operates: looking at its history can teach us what to expect in the future. This could either be the single-best buying opportunity in years, or the biggest mistake of your entire life. We need to discuss what’s going on throughout the cryptocurrency market, the dangers that Strategy could be sensing, and when it makes sense for you to buy and sell, based on the data.
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There are five main reasons responsible for the recent price collapse:
Everyone is going risk-off. When investors get scared, they rotate out of risky assets like crypto into safer assets like treasuries, cash, and bonds. Now, there’s a lot to be worried about — the new Fed, high inflation, a volatile situation in the Middle East — and Bitcoin is usually one of the first casualties.
Bitcoin ETFs are working in reverse. When everyone started buying Bitcoin ETFs, the funds had to buy actual Bitcoin which pushed prices higher, causing more people to pile in. Now that people are selling, the opposite is happening, causing the price to fall. Demand fell by 652,000 coins last week alone.
Whales are selling. Large holders dumped nearly 45,000 Bitcoin in a single week recently. Even Michael Saylor wound up selling a small amount of Bitcoin, Strategy’s first sale in years, which broke their story that “they’d never sell.” When the big players exit, everyone else panics and follows.
There’s no more “Good News” to look forward to. A year ago, we had:
The possibility of a strategic Bitcoin Reserve
New ETF announcements
Institutional buyers flocking in
Price targets of $250,000, $500,000, and even $1 million
Now, a lot of that has been played out, legislation has stalled; gold, silver, and AI are stealing the spotlight, and there’s nothing new to get excited about.
There’s a loss of conviction. For years, Bitcoin was seen as digital gold, the hedge against chaos and inflation that would hold strong when everything else went down. When chaos actually hit last year, gold and stocks went up (even companies like Nokia), but Bitcoin went down. Now people are questioning the Bitcoin story and losing faith in it, so they’re starting to sell.
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Now, let’s get back to Bitcoin and one of the most influential forces that moved Bitcoin’s price recently.
Strategy is a software company that decided to pivot into a Bitcoin Treasury in 2020. Instead of keeping their cash idle in the bank, they decided to use a portion of their corporate balance sheet to buy Bitcoin. As Bitcoin continued to increase in value, this plan paid off: they began to raise money from investors, issue debt, sell stock, and use those proceeds to buy even more Bitcoin.
Basically, they went from being a software company to a publicly traded vehicle that gave exposure to Bitcoin through their stock. In return, they kept getting more money to buy Bitcoin, and their claim was that they’d never sell.
Eventually, they controlled 4% of all the supply of Bitcoin! (bought at an average price of about $75,600, for a total of $64 billion) But now that Bitcoin is trading at $60,000, Strategy is sitting on a $12.5 Billion unrealized loss.
Here’s the catch: If you think that Michael Saylor could be forced to sell his Bitcoin to pay Strategy’s debts, and that could crash the market down to zero, the truth is that Strategy didn’t buy Bitcoin with a margin loan, to the point where there’s a price that would force a sale. Instead, they raised money by issuing convertible debt and preferred stock, so the shareholder is ultimately the one who takes the hit while Strategy could ride out the fluctuations in price.
Having said that, there’s one more issue here: Dividends. When Strategy was recently raising money, they created a dividend fund to raise more capital to buy Bitcoin, promising an annualized return of 11%, with a stock price that was “supposed to trade” around $100. In a perfect world, Bitcoin would continue to go up, the company would raise more money, and the dividend would be paid out of the profits. If the stock falls, they could increase the return to entice more investors, and the stock price would go back up again. At least, that’s how it works in theory.
But in practice, it’s different: Now we’re seeing that the dividend stock is down substantially from its $100 threshold. The market is pricing in a likelihood that maybe they just can’t afford to pay the dividend, and on top of that, Strategy’s main stock has cratered — it’s down 77% in the last year. For the first time ever, Saylor has gone from saying “we will never sell” to admitting that selling some Bitcoin is now “not unlikely.” That shift spooked the market, and it also brought in the lawyers.
As of last week, the Rosen Law Firm announced it’s investigating Strategy and preparing a class-action lawsuit covering all five of the company’s publicly traded securities. This might sound severe, but it isn’t Strategy’s first lawsuit. In fact, they got hit with a nearly identical suit a year ago, alleging that the company overstated how profitable its Bitcoin bet was, and understated the risk. But that lawsuit got dropped. Now that the stock has fallen further, more lawsuits are back.
A lot of people think these lawsuits are ridiculous. One crypto developer asks, if you bought a stock that literally markets itself as “leverage on Bitcoin,” and then complain that it understated the risk… What did you even expect?
To figure out if this is the end of the story or the next generational buying opportunity, we need to recognize something: As painful as this feels, these crashes are not unusual. In the last 17 years, Bitcoin fell by:
99% in 2011
56% in 2012
83% in 2013
84% in 2018
74% in 2022
50% in 2021
So this current drop of 53% is completely normal by Bitcoin standards, and actually not as bad as it’s been in the past. For the last 15 years, Bitcoin has followed an almost robotic 4 year cycle.
So far it’s never failed.
It starts with people slowly accumulating into Bitcoin.
The price grinds higher.
Then it goes parabolic and the FOMO kicks in. People have to buy in.
Then it crashes 50-80% and everyone swears it’s dead.
Then quietly the cycle starts all over again, once everyone has lost hope.
On top of that, when it comes to discovering the best entry price, historically one of the most useful indicators is what’s called the “realized price.” This is simply the average price every Bitcoin investor paid for their holdings: think of it like the break-even line for the entire market. As of now, that price is roughly $53,000.
Why does that matter? So far, every single time Bitcoin falls below that line, it forms a bottom before skyrocketing back up. It’s the point of investor capitulation, and this pattern has worked for every bear market — in 2015, 2018, and 2022. Of course, things could turn out different this time around, but it is an interesting pattern to note. But along with the optimism, we need to hear the other side to balance the story:
Some people genuinely believe “this time is different.” The consensus seems to be split down the middle. For example, billionaire Jeremy Grantham believes that Bitcoin is a “useless, speculative mechanism going to zero,” and Warren Buffett agrees.
Others like CryptoQuant aren’t so pessimistic, but they believe the real bottom is around $53,600 and that it’s still too early to call the turn. The most bearish charts point to $47,000 before seeing a reversal. One 4chan poster who perfectly called the top in October of 2025 thinks the next ATH won’t be around until September 2029.
Price targets range anywhere from $120,000 to $400,000. Some targets are genuinely absurd, like ARK Invest that models over $1 million by 2030. Others like Peter Schiff claim that its intrinsic value is still zero.
But so far, Bitcoin has survived:
The single largest liquidation event in its history
Tariffs with China
A military conflict in the Middle East
The most Hawkish Fed in years
Michael Saylor breaking his “never sell” promise
Through all of it, Bitcoin is still trading at $60,000 which would have seemed absurd 6 years ago. But being historically cheap is not the same thing as a guaranteed bottom. Data suggests that the real capitulation moment might still be ahead of us. Anyone who tells you they know for sure is just guessing.
Let me know what your take on the situation is:
As for my plan, here it is:
I have about 8-10% of my portfolio in a Bitcoin ETF. It’s money that I don’t need, that I’ve been dollar-cost averaging into for years. I’ve accepted even before I started that it could drop 80% and I’d be totally fine. Usually, when it falls, I buy a little more. If it goes up, I hold. The swings just become white noise after a while.
However, there’s one thing that I am doing when it comes to this, now that the price is down, which is: Tax Loss Harvesting. When the price falls, I sell some of my Bitcoin ETF, lock in the loss on paper to offset my other capital gains, and then eventually, I could buy back in. If you own physical bitcoin yourself, it gets even better – “wash sale” rules don’t apply, and you can buy back in a minute later after locking in a loss, potentially saving a lot of money on your taxes.
Beyond that, for anyone watching this market, and wondering if they should buy at these levels:
Your biggest enemy is your own emotions. Hope makes you buy the top, fear makes you sell the bottom, and the only people I’ve ever seen consistently make money are the ones who were controlled by neither.
Buy only what you can afford to lose and no more. If a 50% drop would ruin your life or keep you up at night, that’s too much — the right amount is one where you’re okay with it going to either a million or to zero.
Don’t blindly follow your gut. Every time I get that panicky “sell before it gets worse” feeling, it’s usually closer to the bottom. When I get the euphoric feeling of “I have to buy in or I’ll miss out,” it turns out it was the top.
If you follow these rules and you have extra money that you’re willing to speculate on, now isn’t a bad time. Especially, when sentiment is some of the worst I’ve ever seen. But don’t expect to get rich or treat it like a sure thing, because it’s not. Every crash is different. We have no idea what might happen in the future, even though I tend to be optimistic.
If you found that useful, do hit like, restack, and share it with a friend:
I’ll see you next week.
— Graham
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