It's over.
Friday June 5th, 2026 - Issue # 135
(Any views expressed below are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.)
I’m kidding, it’s not over. I just had to do something to grab your attention because it’s bleak out there.
Bitcoin is getting smoked, everyone is miserable, and the timeline is once again convinced bitcoin is irrelevant. Good. AI, quantum, defense and biotech stocks are the market’s favourite toys, crypto sentiment is in the gutter, and once again bitcoin has gone from “inevitable global reserve asset” to “maybe this is over…for real this time” in about fifteen minutes. Good. If you have been around long enough, this is usually how this goes. Price goes up and everyone suddenly discovers monetary history. Price goes down and the same people start acting like they were forced into a cult against their will led by a rocket scientist from MIT broadcasting sweet sweet nothings from his Villa Vecchia on Miami Beach.
I was really struggling on what I was going to write about this week. It seemed inevitable that I was going to have to do a deepdive on Mr. Saylor hitting the sell button on a rounding error amount of BTC from Villa Vecchia which threw the market into turmoil. But then I’d be like everyone else armchair commiserating over price and speculation. Then I saw this tweet below and found some inspiration.
Obviously drawdowns suck — trust me, at least you have a normal job — and it’s always more fun when you’re getting richer on paper but nothing goes up forever and when the tide turns it’s very important that we don’t lose sight of why bitcoin matters.
The institutional era of Bitcoin has been incredible. The ETFs were a massive milestone and a success beyond expectations. Treasury companies brought a new kind of capital allocator into the market — for better or for worse. Bitcoin being discussed seriously in boardrooms, family offices, pension conversations, and sovereign wealth circles is a big deal. I am not dismissing any of it and can confirm first hand that the institutionalization has helped tremendously onboard a new breed of hodlers.
But there is a difference between institutions validating Bitcoin and institutions being the reason Bitcoin matters. That distinction feels like it has been lost. People have become complacent in their thinking that the ETFs will take care of the price. They think treasury companies will buy every dip. They think BlackRock, Fidelity, and corporate treasurers are going to carry the market higher while everyone refreshes their accounts. That is fine as part of the story, and really fun during the good times, but it is not the story.
Bitcoin was not created because the world needed another get rich quick scheme. Bitcoin was created to separate money from the state. To fight against the tyranny of governments and central banks. To give individuals a way to store value in a monetary good that cannot be printed into oblivion, cannot be diluted by policy error, cannot be manipulated by a committee, and cannot be seized. It was created in the shadow of the financial crisis, when the system revealed itself as a fragile, politically protected machine where the people closest to the money spigot got rescued and everyone else got told to be responsible.
This is literally and metaphysically carved into the Bitcoin genesis block.
This is the essence of Bitcoin, and for me it has never been just a trade, even if “digital gold” is still probably the cleanest shorthand for explaining it to people who are new. Bitcoin is a monetary network with a native asset, a fixed supply, no central issuer, and nobody in charge who can wake up tomorrow and decide the rules need to change because the market is stressed, the government is broke, or the incentives suddenly became inconvenient. Twenty-one million coins is the whole point, and you can sleep at night knowing there is no CEO, no founder still hanging around, no central bank, no foundation, no emergency committee, and no random blog post coming next week announcing that the supply schedule has been “updated.” Bitcoin’s immaculate conception is what makes it nearly impossible to recreate, and in a world where almost every other system depends on trust, discretion, and human judgment, that matters more than people realize.
This all matters more than we can appreciate during times like this because the modern financial system is built on the opposite premise. Our money can be created in unlimited quantities by people with high time preferences who will always have an excuse to create more. Sometimes the excuse is a recession, a banking crisis, a war, a pandemic, an election, or simply the fact that governments made promises they cannot afford and would rather debase the currency than admit the math does not work.
This is not some conspiracy, it is widely known and abundantly clear. You work, save, take risk, delay gratification, and then the measuring stick itself keeps changing. Your dollars buy less, your cost of living goes up, and if you are in the lucky minority of asset holders, those assets become more expensive too. As your cash continues to melt away, you are forced to take more risk just to keep up. Then the same institutions that benefit most from the system tell you inflation is complicated, deficits do not really matter, and everything is basically fine because the official numbers say the worst is behind us. They’ve normalized it just like they did masks and isolation during covid. It is insulting.
The problem is that “inflation” in the real world does not always feel like the headline CPI number. Sure, maybe some broad basket of goods can cool back toward 2-3% on paper. But the things people actually care about — homes, rent, insurance, travel, childcare, restaurants, live events, education, experiences, and anything remotely scarce or desirable — seem to live in a completely different universe. That is where debasement shows up. Not always in one clean government statistic, but in the slow, annoying realization that the life you are working toward keeps getting repriced higher.
Bitcoin offers a way out of that game. It gives everyone the ability to save in an asset that is not someone else’s liability, that does not require trust in a central authority, and that operates on rules the entire world can verify. The fact that people now stare at ETF flow dashboards and decide Bitcoin is “working” based on whether Wall Street bought enough this week is understandable but it doesn’t really make sense.
If you’re a Bitcoiner, you’ve likely heard the expression “low time preference” probably too many times. Low time preference means valuing the future enough to make better decisions today. It means saving instead of consuming, building instead of chasing, and thinking in years and decades instead of days and weeks. Real wealth isn’t created by constantly trying to outrun debasement with speculation, leverage, and financial gymnastics. Real wealth is built by accumulating scarce assets, preserving purchasing power, and allowing time to do its thing.
Sound money encourages that kind of behaviour. Broken money punishes you for it (unfortunately). When money is constantly being debased, people are forced further out on the risk curve. They speculate because sitting in cash feels irresponsible if you’re paying attention. The powers that be have created an era of financial nihilism beyond belief. They’ve forced their citizenry to chase narratives, leverage, private deals, altcoins, options, collectibles, and whatever else is moving because the base layer of the system punishes patience. They’ve turned everyone into degenerate traders because nobody can afford to be a saver and they feel like they have nothing to lose. Sad!
Bitcoin reintroduces the possibility of saving.
Fiat supply is discretionary. Bitcoin supply is programmatically scheduled.
This is why I keep coming back to how important it is for individuals to own real bitcoin. Forget the institutions, the treasury companies, the funds for a second. The focus should be, and always has been, on the individual. People saving $50, $250, $500, or whatever they can afford from each paycheck. People slowly building a position over time. People learning self-custody at their own pace. People realizing Bitcoin is not about getting rich overnight, but about refusing to get quietly diluted forever.
That is a much stronger foundation than a market built on people trying to get rich overnight because they feel like the regular path no longer works. The point is not to turn everyone into a degenerate trader. The point is to give people a real savings tool again — a way to build wealth slowly, patiently, and deliberately in an asset that is not being debased underneath them. Institutions can help with adoption and liquidity, but the healthier foundation is millions of individuals choosing to save instead of chase, build instead of gamble, and think in decades instead of days.
Bitcoin is the best monetary alternative humanity has produced.
That is why the current doomposting feels so shallow to me. People are looking at price and missing the point, acting like bitcoin’s value proposition somehow weakens because the Qs are hot, AI stocks are catching a bid, ETF flows slowed, or Strategy is under pressure. But one BTC is still one BTC, the supply is still capped, the network is still running, the monetary policy is still known, and the world that made bitcoin necessary in the first place has not magically fixed itself. Quite the opposite, governments are still trapped under too much debt, fiat currencies are still being debased, and savers are still being punished for doing the responsible thing.
The only thing that changed is sentiment. Good.
Owning bitcoin properly requires understanding what you own, having the patience to let the asset continue monetizing over time, and accepting that volatility is the price of admission for something this early and this important. It also requires zooming out far enough to remember that the weekly price action is not the point; the point is that humanity now has a globally accessible, absolutely scarce, self-custodial monetary asset at the exact moment the existing system is drowning in debt and political incentives make debasement the path of least resistance.
The mission is bigger than ETF flows and treasury company announcements. It is to help people understand they have an alternative. They do not have to store every ounce of their savings in a currency designed to lose value. They do not have to blindly trust governments and central banks to protect them. They can own a monetary asset with rules, not rulers.
This is really good, worth a watch/listen.
That is what we need to get back to. If BTC is down and you feel rattled, good. Use it. Go back to basics and spend time relearning why you bought it in the first place. Think about why Satoshi embedded that newspaper headline in the genesis block. Think about what it means to own an asset that cannot be printed. Think about why self-custody matters. Then ask yourself if the thesis changed.
For me, it has not.
Bitcoin is still the best savings technology ever created. It is still the cleanest expression of low time preference in financial markets. It is still the only liquid asset of meaningful scale with absolute scarcity, global portability, and self-custody. The price will do what the price does.
The mission is the same: stay humble, stack sats.