Bitcoin – Is the party over?

The confession: Sold at the bottom

The starting point of the video is unusually candid. The author TechLead recounts that he had disappeared for months because he couldn’t face his audience. Bitcoin, he says, fell from around 120,000 US dollars in October to the low 60,000s by summer – a decline of roughly 50 percent.

What proved decisive was not just the price collapse itself, but the leverage. Anyone investing on borrowed money quickly approaches liquidation when prices fall. Faced with the choice – sell and survive, or hold on to one’s ideals and be wiped out – he chose to sell.

Being right in the short term counts for nothing. Being right in the long term counts for everything.

This self-reflection is sympathetic, but it shouldn’t obscure the core issue: the losses described are first and foremost a consequence of over-leveraging, not necessarily a verdict on Bitcoin as an asset class. Anyone wanting to learn more about the risks of leveraged trading can find relevant consumer guidance at BaFin.

The central thesis: Attention is liquidity

The video’s strongest argument runs as follows: in an attention economy you don’t trade fundamentals, you trade attention – and attention is liquidity. Price doesn’t depend on how many people buy and hold, but on whether a new buyer shows up tomorrow willing to pay more: the so-called marginal buyer.

NFTs serve as evidence: despite “diamond hands” and hardly any sellers, most are practically worthless today. Holding alone saves no one – only the next buyer does.

Why Bitcoin is supposedly more vulnerable than gold or stocks

The comparison meant to illustrate this:

It’s an interesting rhetorical framing, but it isn’t new: at its core it’s the old greater fool theory, dressed up in modern terms. It’s also worth noting critically that Bitcoin proponents would object precisely here: scarcity, decentralization and censorship resistance are indeed fundamentals – regardless of how much the topic is being discussed at any given moment.

Where has the attention gone? AI and “wrench attacks”

Two developments are meant to explain why the supply of new buyers is drying up.

The crypto influencers have gone quiet

According to the video, many loud crypto voices have vanished – not necessarily from a loss of faith, but out of fear of “wrench attacks”: physical assaults on people who show off their gains publicly. There’s mention of 72 such attacks worldwide in 2025, some carried out by perpetrators posing as delivery drivers or fake police officers. The new mantra: never talk about your own Bitcoin.

The phenomenon is real and well documented; the background on it can be read up on. But whether this implies a causal link to the price decline remains a claim – the phrasing conceded in the video itself, “coincides in time with,” is no proof of cause and effect.

All attention is on AI

The second point: all capital and all attention are currently flowing into artificial intelligence. AI investments are exploding, no one is saving, no one is building a Bitcoin reserve. Whoever has cash spends it on AI immediately.

This too is debatable: attention cycles shift, and the very same logic could be reversed – if AI enthusiasm fades, capital could rotate back. The argument cuts both ways.

The door is narrow: Who still needs to get out?

Another point of concern is exit liquidity. The thesis: the liquidity of the 2021 mania simply no longer exists, and the pool you can sell into today is far shallower. At the same time, many large holders are crowding toward the exit:

• Creditors of the insolvent exchange Mt. Gox, who are finally being paid out after more than a decade – around 35,000 coins
• A large publicly listed holder with around 850,000 coins, largely debt-financed, said to have quietly begun selling
• Early “whales,” digital asset treasuries and even nation states, all keeping an eye on the same door

That’s understandable, but incomplete. On the buy side, since 2024 there have been the spot ETFs, which channel structurally new demand – a factor the video’s liquidity concern largely ignores.

How decentralized is Bitcoin really?

Here the video shifts focus from market dynamics to governance. The criticism in brief:

1. The dominant software Bitcoin Core is said to be controlled by only six people with merge rights.
2. With version 30, a controversial change was supposedly pushed through that allows more arbitrary metadata in transactions – against the will of large parts of the community.
3. In protest, the alternative Bitcoin Knots supposedly grew to around 20 percent of the network within months – maintained, however, essentially by a single person.
4. As early as 2015, during the “block size wars,” Core-aligned moderators allegedly suppressed discussions in the most important Bitcoin subreddit.

So this is your decentralized, global money: six people with the keys to the code, one Reddit moderator, and a backup plan hanging on a single outcast developer.

Governance and the concentration of influence are real debates. For context, a look at the open Bitcoin Core repository is worthwhile: who is allowed to merge code is not the same as who decides which software users and miners actually run. The emergence of Bitcoin Knots shows precisely that the base can diverge – an argument that speaks both for and against the thesis.

Two ticking time bombs: Quantum and miners

Quantum computing

In the long term, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break the cryptography behind Bitcoin wallets. The actual point of criticism is less the technology itself than the worry that no capable developer coordination exists to manage a network-wide migration under time pressure.

The miner problem

Miners secure the network and are paid in two ways: through newly minted coins and through transaction fees. The problem, according to the video:

• Around 95 percent of all Bitcoin has already been mined.
• A viable fee economy has never become established.
• If fees dry up, miners switch off and security drops – a possible “death spiral.”

Both risks are serious technical talking points. However, they are no secret but have been discussed in the developer community for years; the “halving” model and the slow transition to fee-based security have been part of the design from the start. Whether a spiral inevitably follows is an open question – the author himself concedes that no one knows for sure.

Politics and regulation

The regulatory situation is viewed skeptically too. No state, the argument goes, will permanently tolerate a system it cannot control – without KYC, AML, capital controls or sanctions capabilities. China has banned Bitcoin outright anyway; the currently friendly US stance is “political theater,” the strategic reserve a show for which not a single new coin has been bought so far.

On top of this comes a time-horizon argument: if the political climate turns from 2028 onward, the next bull cycle might not arrive until 2032 – another six years of waiting. Current developments can be followed through established sources such as Reuters.

And bullish nonetheless? The author’s conclusion

What’s remarkable is the ending: despite all the criticism, the author remains, by his own account, optimistic in the long term. The technology is real, he says, and Bitcoin gets rediscovered by every generation – often precisely when everyone has declared it dead. With a wink, he describes the video itself as a possible “bottom signal” and himself as a contrarian indicator: just do the opposite of what he does.

I’m not out. I’m just stepping back and watching the door.

Assessment: What remains?

The video is rhetorically strong and, in parts, honest – especially where it names its own mistakes. Its value lies less in a coherent forecast than in a collection of legitimate questions. Our assessment in brief:

Whether “the air is out” cannot be seriously answered from a single video – least of all by someone who declares himself a contrarian indicator. Anyone invested or considering it should know the arguments, but weigh them against the opposing position and invest nothing whose loss they couldn’t bear.