sport football: The Bitcoin Vultures Are Back

Bitcoin is getting pummeled. It has collapsed 52% from its all-time high of $126,000 set late last year. And the vultures are flying overhead, declaring bitcoin "dead."

It happens in every bear market. Since 2010, critics have declared bitcoin dead 467 times. And every time, it comes back stronger.

If you've been in these markets for as long as I have, you already know volatility is par for the course in bitcoin. It's the nature of the asset. It's the admission price for life-changing gains.

But if you're new to crypto, it probably has you second-guessing your decision to own bitcoin. That's why I want you to take a look at the chart below.

Every circle represents an instance where naysayers announced the end of bitcoin, going back nearly two decades. The green circle marks where we are today…

Like clockwork, naysayers are out again.

Since the end of January, author Nick Huber has said he "can't see any reason" why people would hold bitcoin. Bloomberg reporter David Pan claimed bitcoin has "failed."

And conservative talk show host Buck Sexton is "certain that Bitcoin has no long-term value, and a floor price of zero."

But here's what the naysayers are missing, and why you should ignore them: If you'd put just $100 into bitcoin every time it got an obituary, you'd be sitting on $69,194,667 today.

That's a 149,759% gain. It would take more than 74 years to see similar returns in the S&P 500.

Now, I want to be clear: We're in a crypto bear market. And we could see bitcoin prices drop much lower from here. That's just the reality of investing in this asset class. You can't have euphoric highs without some nauseating lows.

I don't have a crystal ball to say how long it will take before the next bull market lifts off. But I've been through several gut-wrenching drawdowns like this, so I feel your pain.

That's why today, I want to share with you what I've learned from Daily editor Teeka Tiwari.

His lessons have gotten me – and thousands of his readers – through every crypto bear market since 2018. It's what allowed me to go from six figures in debt… to seven figures in the bank.

You'll want to keep this essay handy. Because, as Teeka showed you in last Monday's Daily, there could be more pain for bitcoin investors in the weeks ahead.

The Cardinal Rule of Bitcoin Investing

When I first started working with Big T eight years ago, he drilled a single idea into my head: Price is the least important part of understanding the bitcoin story.

What matters is adoption.

Bitcoin's supply is capped. Its demand is not. When adoption increases, the long-term price direction becomes inevitable. And that direction is up and to the right.

That framework saved me during the brutal stretches of the 2018-19 Crypto Winter, the pandemic crash in 2020, and the FTX implosion in 2022.

Those years were filled with drawdowns that would've scared anyone out of crypto. But behind the scenes, something far more important was happening. Institutions were building the financial rails for mass adoption.

The market didn't reward any of it at first. It rarely does. But over time, the people who stuck with Teeka's simple blueprint, like I did, were the ones who ended up with the chance to make life-changing gains.

Let me walk you through all three of those drawdowns and what happened after.

First, we'll rewind to Christmas Eve 2018, when the market was bleeding out. I was doing everything I could to convince my friends and family that walking away from bitcoin would be a mistake.

While it was getting slammed with pullbacks of 45%, 52%, and 70%, both Wall Street and Silicon Valley were stepping into the arena. Here's what was happening below the surface around that time:

Robinhood, one of the leading brokerage platforms, launched crypto trading.
The New York Stock Exchange had announced plans for a bitcoin trading platform.
And Goldman Sachs was helping Circle launch USDC, a stablecoin that anyone could use to send and receive digital dollars on the blockchain. (Today, USDC is one of the most popular stablecoins in the world with a market cap of nearly $74 billion.)

From the depths of that Crypto Winter to the next cycle high, bitcoin exploded 2,105%.

It was a similar story during the 2020 pandemic crash when bitcoin dropped 58% in seven days. Yet that same year, in the background:

Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones told his clients he believed bitcoin will serve as a hedge against inflation.
Block (formerly Square), a financial technology company, invested $50 million in bitcoin. The publicly traded company said at the time, "We believe that bitcoin has the potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future."
We also saw firms like Stone Ridge, MassMutual, and Ruffer announce $114 million, $100 million, and $750 million investments into bitcoin, respectively.

Then 2021 came along, and everything that had been happening under the surface finally burst into the open. Bitcoin went from a low of $3,858 to a high of $69,000 – and the entire crypto market cap increased 2,704%.

The same script played out again in 2022.

The FTX exchange imploded – and wiped out roughly $8 billion in customer funds. The headlines were terrifying. Bitcoin plunged 30%.

But adoption didn't just continue – it accelerated. That same year:

Fidelity, one of the world's largest asset managers with $4.9 trillion assets under management, had launched a crypto platform.
Google announced it would start accepting crypto for payments.
Even ExxonMobil – yes, that ExxonMobil, the world's second-largest oil company – announced it was testing bitcoin mining.

If you'd held on through the volatility of 2022, you would've seen bitcoin rise from a low of $15,460 to a high of $126,300. That's a 717% gain after one of the most spectacular crashes in history.

That's why Teeka never gets tired of repeating this cardinal rule: Don't lose sight of the big picture. Anyone who failed to follow that rule would've been shaken out in the pullbacks… and missed the historic rallies. I don't want that to happen to you.

The Adoption Story Is Stronger Than Ever

Over the past 12 months, bitcoin investors have gotten the tar beat out of them.

Bitcoin plunged 32% during last spring's tariff tantrum… 13% in a matter of minutes during the leveraged wipeouts of October… And 52% in the last four months alone.

Yet, over that same period, the mass adoption trend is stronger than ever.

On the government side:

In November 2025, the Czech Republic's central bank publicly announced it added bitcoin to its reserves.
In December, Russian banking giant VTB announced it's set to become the country's first to offer spot crypto trading next year.
And just last month, Bermuda announced its plans to become the world's first fully on-chain national economy.

This is just the beginning. Teeka has said for years that virtually every major central bank will hold bitcoin as a reserve currency.

Deutsche Bank agrees with him. In a research report from last September, it stated: "There is room for both gold and bitcoin to coexist on central bank balance sheets by 2030."

On the institutional side, we've shown you how Bank of America and Vanguard launched new crypto initiatives of their own last year.

And they're not the only ones.

Goldman Sachs agreed to acquire Innovator Capital Management for about $2 billion. Innovator provides bitcoin-structured ETFs. JPMorgan is also accepting bitcoin and Ethereum as collateral and building crypto-backed instruments.

And just this month, BlackRock announced it'll route its $2.4 billion tokenized Treasury fund through Uniswap.

This is a big deal.

BlackRock is the biggest player in global finance. For the first time, it's using DeFi (or decentralized finance) trading infrastructure for a tokenized product. Tokenized government bonds, no less.

That means people will be able to trade government bonds on the blockchain. And it tapped Uniswap – one of the OGs of DeFi – to do that.

This all points to growing global adoption. And, if the past is any guide, bitcoin will break through its previous all-time high of $126,000 once the bull trend reasserts itself on the back of this adoption.

Look, I've been in crypto for nearly a decade, so I don't deal in hopium. Bitcoin won't rally to new highs overnight. I've prepared myself mentally for that. And you need to as well.

A lot more people will crawl out of the woodwork to declare bitcoin "dead" in the weeks ahead.

When they do, you can arm yourself with the knowledge that bitcoin has come back from the grave 467 times already. This time will be no different.

Don't Watch the Future Happen. Own It!

Houston Molnar

P.S. I have another message from Teeka I want to share with you today. This time, it's an important market warning he wants everyone to hear:

Investors around the world are making a huge mistake. They're buying wildly overvalued AI companies in the hopes of making a stock market fortune. But they're buying the wrong stocks.

According to Teeka, the next round of AI winners will come from one of the most under-owned corners of the market – blue-chip stocks using AI without having to pay for AI's buildout.

The market is already awakening to this warning. Popular AI stocks like Palantir and Broadcom are showing red flags. Palantir shares have dropped 35% over the last four months. And Broadcom is down nearly 20% over the past three months.

Before you put another dollar into Palantir, Broadcom, or any other "name brand" AI stock, get the full details first on what Big T says you should be buying instead.