Bitcoin Dropped Nearly 30% This Week. But Why?
5 105Last Sunday, Bitcoin had dropped 13% in three days, to $76,790.
By Thursday it had dropped another 21%, to $60,062.
This morning it's at $69,549 — up from Thursday, down from Sunday, but 44% lower than its all-time high in October of $123,742. In short, Bitcoin "is down almost 30% this week alone," reports CNBC: "This steady selling in our view signals that traditional investors are losing interest, and overall pessimism about crypto is growing," Deutsche Bank analyst Marion Laboure said Wednesday in a note to clients. Growing investor caution comes as many of the sensationalized claims about bitcoin have failed to materialize. The token has largely traded in the same direction as other risk-on assets, such as stocks... and its adoption as a form of payment for goods and services has been minimal... While many in the crypto market have previously credited large institutional investors with supporting the price of bitcoin, now it is those same participants who appear to be selling. "Institutional demand has reversed materially," CryptoQuant said in a report on Wednesday.
But not everyone accepts that answer, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. "The worst part for some of crypto's permabulls is that they aren't sure what exactly caused the crash": The selloff left many of the market's luminaries — those so well-known that they go simply as "Pomp" and "Novo" and "Mooch" — searching for answers... Ether dropped 24% to $2,052, off 59% from its own high of last year. Both tokens staged furious rallies Friday, but the week remained a historically bad one for crypto. And few seem to know what went wrong. Market theories for the selloff ranged from investors' pivot toward the prediction markets and other risky bets, to widespread profit-taking after a blistering bull run. "There was no smoking gun," said Michael Novogratz, who runs Galaxy Digital, a crypto merchant-banking and trading firm...
"If you ask five experts, you'll get five explanations," said Anthony Scaramucci, who served for 11 days as communications director during Trump's first term and is among the best-known crypto bulls at his firm, SkyBridge Capital.
"No, but seriously: What's going on with bitcoin?" reads the headline at CNN, with a story that begins "Bitcoin is acting weird... " Crypto is notoriously volatile, and it's gone through numerous crashes that are bigger than this one. What's strange is this: Bitcoin's four-month slump has come at a time when, in theory, it had everything going for it.
Economist Paul Krugman points out the price of Bitcoin is now lower than it was before America's 2024 election, when candidate Trump promised to make cryptocurrency "one of the greatest industries on earth."
CNN seems to agree with CNBC that what's behind this new crypto winter is "Mostly doubts that bitcoin is 'digital gold,' after all..."
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.
5 comments
And this is the problem. (Score: 5, Insightful)
by jd ( 1658 ) on <imipak AT yahoo DOT com> on Saturday February 07, 2026 @02:41PM (#65974866)
The doubts will last for as long as the depression, during which the wealthy will be buying up bitcoin like mad. Once Bitcoin heads back into the 100k region, everyone will decide it IS digital gold, and push it up higher, at which point the wealthy will sell off, causing a collapse that the "everyone elsers" essentially pay for, and the cycle will continue.
And that is all bitcoin is. It's all the stock market is, too. A tool for pumping money from 401K plans and the gambling poor into the hands of the wealthy.
Re:And this is the problem. (Score: 5, Informative)
by swillden ( 191260 ) on <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Saturday February 07, 2026 @05:10PM (#65975124)
And that is all bitcoin is. It's all the stock market is, too.
You're completely wrong to equate bitcoin with the stock market. When you buy shares in a publicly-traded company you're buying something real, a portion of an actual business that owns real stuff, has real employees, makes real stuff and sells it to real people. Exactly how much that company is worth, so exactly how much your share is worth, isn't really clear because calculating that value requires a lot of guesses about what the company, and its market, and the economy as a whole, are going to do in the future. But it's definitely worth *something*.
That's not true of bitcoin. You won't hear people talking about bitcoin "fundamentals" the way they do with stocks, because bitcoin doesn't have any fundamentals. It's just vibes, all the way down. Oh you can talk about hashrates and work factors and the cost of mining equipment, etc., but none of that has any actual value. If the governments of the world united and successfully banned cryptocurrencies, all those ASIC rigs would be useless. If they were still using GPUs at least you could repurpose them for AI, or graphics.
Re:And this is the problem. (Score: 5, Interesting)
by larryjoe ( 135075 ) on Saturday February 07, 2026 @06:43PM (#65975252)
We should clarify that although stocks often follow "fundamentals" in the long run, it's a very fuzzy thing. First, there's no agreement on what the fundamentals entail. Is that revenue, profit, margins, PE ratio, either trailing or some estimate of future? Second, high-frequency traders account for around half of all stock transactions, and they directly ignore all fundamentals all the time. Third, retail investors (like you and me) account for up to 20% of all trades, but not surprisingly, these investors may not understand what fundamentals are. Fourth, about a quarter of all trades are made by hedge funds that do a lot of shorting and use of derivatives, which greatly muddies up all the talk about fundamentals.
Despite all this fuzziness, stocks are still much easier to understand than crypto, which is pure speculation with no inherent value.
Because it's mostly used for money laundering (Score: 5, Interesting)
by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday February 07, 2026 @02:54PM (#65974890)
And there's absolutely no point in caring when there's virtually no enforcement of money laundering laws going on right now.
If you're a white collar criminal you can rip off pretty much anyone you want anyway you want as long as you don't go after the really really rich people like Bernie Madoff and Elizabeth Holmes did.
So there's a lot less demand for crypto because it's a lot easier to commit white collar crime and will be for the next at least 3 years.
Meanwhile the AI data centers are sucking down all the compute power so cryptocurrency is having a rough time competing.
And finally of course we are in a massive massive recession that nobody is talking about because the news media has been ordered to keep quiet about it by their owners. That recession is inevitably affecting scams like Bitcoin because they are Ponzi schemes and when the economy gets bad Ponzi schemes start to collapse because there aren't enough suckers who have money left to keep them going
At this point I would just ban it (Score: 5, Insightful)
by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Saturday February 07, 2026 @03:36PM (#65974952)
It's been what, over 10 years now of Bitcoin and crypto and what has been the net utility to society or even humanity? I would say outside of a few select people getting wealthy it has overall been a net negative for 99% of humans alive.
It eats electricity, it eats labor which could be used on more useful things (how many talented coders are in crypto shit?) it eats money, it eats investments which could otherwise go into new companies or other ventures, it's just a big fat distraction for everyone, the fact we are talking about it here is even a net negative.
Now how you "ban" it is a tricky thing but at least as far as I am concerned I would say the SEC or whomever should declare it illegal to exchange any crypto for USD. Would that create a black market? Sure but that already exists, at least lets acknowledge that's all it is an ever was.
We've held our tongues and played nice for far too long than anyone involved in the crypto space deserves, it's stupid, it's a waste it adds almost nothing, probably worse than nothing, it has made all our lives worse.