As The Guardian has noted:
Bitcoin's price sank to $63,000 on Thursday, its lowest level in more than a year, and half its all-time peak of $126,000, reached in October 2025. A months-long dip in cryptocurrency prices has tanked shares of companies that have increasingly invested in bitcoin, exacerbating broader stock market jitters.
This is the chart:
Note the trend: that is not an adjustment. That is a crash.
My conclusions are threefold.
First, this sham asset has a long way to fall as yet: there is literally no value to it. The destination is far down the Y-axis.
Second, this is the precursor. Sometime soon, the softness in the AI tech market will turn into a rout. There is real value there, so there will be a floor to the fall, but a halving of value is also likely. That will be a vastly better outcome than Bitcoin will enjoy, and mightily painful for the world economy, nonetheless.
Third, it would be great if Trump's fortunes went the same way. He has pitched his offering to both the crypto and stock markets: when both crash, we just have to hope his bubble bursts as well.
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An article on Naked Capitalism today by Yves Smith on Bitcoin and associated companies in which Yves writes that companies “have been buying crypto, borrowing against it, then sold interests in it to investors as exchange traded funds”.
The fall in Bitcoin prices is causing financial problems.
Is this another example of unregulated secondary banking?
Yves includes a a comment by Jake Broe that ” the average cost of mining a single Bitcoin is over $90k. The share price of a Bitcoin is $67K, everyone mining Bitcoin as the moment is losing a fortune”.
A simple observation how can crypto replace money at this cost? I can’t imagine that it costs say £7 to print each single £5.00 note.
Seems to me that crypto is pure gambling and must be stopped from infecting the rest of the financial system.
Much to agree with
I have said for years that Crypto is just the latest incarnation of the Dutch Tulip bubble. The only difference is that, even when they lost a fortune, people could still eat the tulip bulbs!
On your last line, unfortunately, much of the rest of the financial system is also pure gambling.
John, I agree with your post, but in answer to your question about how can crypto replace money if it costs $90k to mine a bitcoin, here is my understanding.
Bitcoin (not all crypto currencies work like this though) is designed to have a finite number, 21 million in total. The algorithm used to mine bitcoins is designed to get exponentially harder as more bitcoins are mined, to cope with advances in processing power. There are about 20 million bitcoins available now, but the last million will take approximately 100 more years!
The mining of bitcoins is how transactions on the bitcoin blockchain are validated, it is a reward to the first person who calculates the correct number that represents a set of new transactions looking to be added to the globally shared blockchain (this public ledger idea). There is also usually a wee transaction fee added as well.
Once all the bitcoins are mined, then I would guess transaction fees will have to increase to cover the processing costs to validate further transactions, and probably by quite a bit given it already costs as you say, around $90k to validate a smallish set of transactions and be rewarded bitcoins.
You can probably work out the massive waste of processing inherent in this design. All the miners are competing to be the first to validate a set of transactions, and only the first one gets the reward of bitcoins. However the system needs multiple miners just to ensure no-one can game the system or subvert it.
This is my understanding of how it works – I do have more technical knowledge on some aspects, but I believe the above is a good representation of what bitcoin is.
Thanks
The question I wonder about is how long before welfare for the rich extends to bailing them out of their crypto losses? I kid you not……………….
I share your fear
It will happen
The cost fallacy will only get worse. The Bitcoin algorithm is designed so that the cost of mining increases the more coins are mined. It’s inevitable that there comes a point at which continued mining cannot provide a return. At that point the whole thing collapses, because without miners there can be no transactions. The seeds of its own destruction were built in from the start (one has to muse whether that was deliberate). Maybe we’ve reached that point?
Easy come, easy go.
Some people might have doubled, quadrupled their money, perhaps more – but it is only paper money until they realise their gains.
Others might have seen the value of their holdings halved and face huge losses. If they have borrowed to invest, that could be a disaster. And not just for them – potentially, for the lenders too.
Interestingly enough, Michael Burry (of ‘The Big Short’ fame) made a similar comments the other day.
Not the only people to see it because I’ve read that billions have recently been sold by investors. Also, the AI boom has led to the price of the NVidia chips and RAM used for ‘mining’ bitcoin to catapult upwards which means that many of the miners will most likely be making a loss right now. As bitcoin is just effectively a worthless asset which these people are speculating on, there’s a good chance they will dump what they have before the price falls any further and we know what will happen then…
Or are we seeing a classic pump and dump operation? Having pumped the price high those “in the know” take their excessive profits while the “suckers” take the hit.
The only question is whether the same medium is used for the next cash extraction wheeze or whether Bitcoin is so tainted they need to find another worthless vehicle.
You could at least plant tulips!
This will also impact stablecoin, which investors buy to track the dollar but in all likelihood will become de-pegged with high risk of contagion
Agreed
I have a friend, a mere 23 yrs old who trades in bitcoins said he never follows narratives, just the graphs. Having been in bitcoin for several years he sold the lot in October 2025. He now does shorts on them, as he says they have past their sell-by-date, for the foreseeable future.
No idea how he has acquired his understanding at such a young age.
How long does it take to learn to gamble?