So, Bitcoin's doing the limbo again, dipping below $100K. Cue the usual suspects screaming about "crypto winter." Give me a break. This ain't about weather patterns; it's about whales playing games.
Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan, bless his heart, is out there saying retail investors are at "max desperation." Oh, really? Max desperation or max manipulation? I mean, come on. They want us to panic sell so the big boys can scoop up more cheap coins. It's the oldest trick in the book. And Hougan's spinning it like some kind of buying opportunity because "institutions are still bullish." According to Hougan, the Bitcoin retail investor is at 'max desperation,' but he doesn't believe a crypto winter is coming. Bitcoin retail investor at 'max desperation,' says Bitwise CIO, but crypto winter not coming
Institutions are ALWAYS bullish. That's their job. They have to be. They can't come out and say, "Yeah, we're terrified, too, so we're dumping everything." That wouldn't exactly inspire confidence, would it?
Hougan's talking about a "tale of two markets"—desperate retail vs. bullish institutions. What a load of carefully crafted PR. It's all one market, and the institutions are preying on the retail chumps, as always.
He says crypto trading is shifting to an "institutionally driven market." Translation: they want to control the narrative and the price. They're tired of us little guys making a few bucks.
And this line, "an asset class that if you pan back and look over the course of a year, is still delivering very strong returns." If you "pan back"? What am I, a goddamn cinematographer? And what about the last month, Matt? Or the last week? Suddenly, those "strong returns" don't look so hot.
Let's be real, Hougan's job is to pump up Bitcoin. He's a Bitwise CIO; what else is he gonna say? "Sell everything, it's all going to zero?" He'd be out of a job faster than you can say "blockchain."
He even goes as far as to say a new record high for Bitcoin before the end of the year isn't "unreasonable." Unreasonable? Dude, it's delusional. Unless, offcourse, by "unreasonable" he means "we're gonna pump it up with billions of dollars of institutional money and screw over anyone who dares to bet against us." Then, yeah, maybe it's "not unreasonable."
But wait, are we really supposed to believe that these institutions are acting out of the goodness of their hearts? That they actually care about the little guy getting rich off crypto? Please. They care about one thing: lining their own pockets.
And the crypto ETFs? Don't even get me started. Another way for Wall Street to get their grubby hands on the crypto market and extract fees from everyone involved. It's like they saw the Wild West of crypto and thought, "How can we regulate this and tax the hell out of it?"
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe Bitcoin really is going to the moon, and I'm just too cynical to see it. Maybe Hougan is a visionary genius, and I'm just a bitter old columnist who's missed the boat. Nah.
