Well, I can promise you one thing… financially speaking, no one is having a worse week than Michael Saylor, the Winklevoss bros, and that one NFL athlete who proudly took his entire salary in Bitcoin thinking that made him the Daniel Boone of finance bros. (Oh, and I can’t forget Mama Cathie and her Bitcoin to $1 trillion by 2026).

Because the truth is, Bitcoin’s having the kind of week that gives you warm, unwanted 2022 flashbacks. The crypto cult leader dipped to $94,491 on Friday, marking its lowest level since May.

And look, Bitcoin hasn’t been this much of a disaster since Sam Bankman-Fried opened the Notes app, took a deep breath, and tweeted out the immortal words: “I f***ed up.” This thing was literally at $107K on Tuesday. Tuesday. Then it spent the next four days sliding down the chart like it got shoved down a water park slide slathered in Vaseline. To make matters worse, Ethereum cracked below $3,100, and Coinbase and MicroStrategy are getting hammered BIGLY (-12% and -19% respectively).

So where did Bitcoin go wrong? Well… grab a seat. This one’s a combo meal.

For starters, Big Tech tanked this week after investors finally snapped out of their AI trance and remembered that building world-eating algorithms costs real money… not just GPUs, hype cycles, and another round of OpenAI demos. And because Bitcoin trades like an emotional support asset for the same crowd piling into Nvidia and Amazon on every AI headline, it got pulled straight into the downturn. When liquidity tightens in tech, Bitcoin is always one of the first things to get dumped… which is what we’re seeing today. 

But don’t think you’re off the hook, crypto believers. Your precious “long-term holders” (the laser-eye disciples who swore they’d never sell) unloaded 815,000 BTC in the last 30 days. Yes, the same people who tweeted “1 BTC = 1 BTC” every day at dawn suddenly decided “1 BTC = rent.” That’s nearly $79B hitting the market from people who swore they’d never even think about selling. (I guess everyone’s getting nervous about their finances going into the holidays.)

(Source: Bitcoin Magazine)

And the damage didn’t end there. Spot ETFs coughed up hundreds of millions in outflows… a clear sign institutions were de-risking, not just taking profits. Futures traders got cleaned out as leverage unwound at warp speed. Funding flipped negative, implying short sellers were suddenly the ones in control. 

On top of that, options desks saw a rush into puts big enough to spike implied volatility. Meanwhile, macro pressure built up from late economic data, tech stocks sagging from AI burnout, and a Fed projecting peak “don’t ask us anything” energy. You’d think the universe would give Bitcoin a break… but nope.

There is, however, a tiny glimmer of hope. JPMorgan analysts pointed out that Bitcoin’s production cost sits around $94,000… historically a pretty firm floor. Bitfinex analysts said the drop matches typical mid-cycle retracements. And even after all this carnage, around 72% of all BTC is still in profit at $100K. 

Translation: the whales are fine. The institutions are fine. The people actually moving the market are fine. It’s everyone else who’s pacing around their kitchen whispering, “I swear I wasn’t going to check the chart again today.”

But in all seriousness, last time we saw the huge cycle play out Bitcoin hit what, $65k or so? Then it retraced all the way down into the high teens… this time, if you want me to play the ultimate pessimist and this baby really drops like a rock, I could see it retracing to what $50k or $60k? But under Trump? Well, that scenario has about the same odds as him passing on a chance to brag.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Amazon as mentioned in the article.