Bitcoin — The Asset That Has Survived Everything

That is not a figure of speech. There is a website called Bitcoin Obituaries that has tracked every serious article, column, or public statement declaring Bitcoin finished since 2010. Governments banning it. Exchanges being hacked. Founders selling. Competing technologies launching. Regulatory crackdowns. Crashes of 80%. Crashes of 50% in a week.

More than 470 times, someone credible said this is the end.

Each time Bitcoin recovered. Each time it eventually made new highs. Each time the people who sold at the point of maximum fear, at the point when the obituaries were most convincing, missed the subsequent recovery.

This is not an argument that Bitcoin will always recover. Nothing is guaranteed. But it is an argument that Bitcoin has a track record unlike any other asset in the history of financial markets, surviving every crisis, every technological competitor, every regulatory threat, and every market cycle it has encountered. Understanding why it has this resilience is the foundation of understanding Bitcoin as a trading instrument.

Not approximately 21 million. Exactly 21 million. Written into the code of the Bitcoin protocol at its inception. No company can change this. No government can change it. No vote can override it. The number is fixed by mathematics.

Think about what this means against the backdrop of traditional currencies. The US Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet from under $1 trillion in 2008 to over $8 trillion by 2022. The European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, all expanded their money supplies dramatically in the same period. Each unit of currency in existence became a smaller share of a larger pool. The purchasing power of each unit was diluted.

Bitcoin cannot be diluted. The total supply is fixed. The only variable is demand. When demand for Bitcoin rises, from retail investors, from institutions, from companies holding it on their balance sheets, from governments considering it as a reserve asset, price rises because the supply cannot expand to meet it. When demand falls, price falls. There is no central authority that can create more Bitcoin to dampen the price rise or print more to compensate for lower demand.

This is why Bitcoin is called digital gold. Not because of any similarity in how they are used, but because both share the property of fixed or near-fixed supply in a world of expanding fiat money.

When Bitcoin launched in 2009, miners received 50 Bitcoin per block. After the first halving in 2012 it dropped to 25. After the second in 2016 it became 12.5. After the third in 2020 it was 6.25. After the fourth in 2024 it became 3.125. This is the rate at which new Bitcoin enters the world. And every four years that rate is cut in half.

The halving matters for one fundamental reason. If demand for Bitcoin stays constant and the daily supply of new coins entering the market is cut in half, basic economics suggests upward pressure on price. The historical record has broadly supported this. Each of the four halvings has been followed by a significant bull market, not immediately, the relationship is not mechanical, but within the one to two years following each halving Bitcoin has historically reached new all-time highs.

The halving is unique in financial markets because it is perfectly predictable in advance. You can calculate the exact block at which the next halving will occur. You know approximately when it will happen in calendar terms. You know exactly what the supply reduction will be. This makes it one of the very few genuinely anticipatable structural drivers in any financial market.

The narrative around Bitcoin, digital gold, inflation hedge, store of value outside the traditional financial system, suggests it should behave like gold. Rising when currencies are debased. Rising when geopolitical stress increases.

In practice, since institutional investors entered crypto markets in meaningful size around 2020, Bitcoin has behaved like a high-beta risk asset. An amplified version of the S&P 500.

In March 2020 when COVID fear triggered a global market selloff, Bitcoin fell over 50% in 48 hours, steeper and faster than the equity market. In 2022 when the Federal Reserve raised rates at the fastest pace in decades, Bitcoin fell from nearly $70,000 to below $16,000, a drawdown of over 75%, while the S&P 500 fell approximately 25%.

Why? Because the institutional investors who now own a significant portion of Bitcoin also own equities and other risk assets. When they need to reduce risk exposure they sell everything. Bitcoin is not yet separated from their risk portfolio in the way gold is. For traders this means watching the same macro signals that drive equity markets, Fed policy, the VIX, credit spreads, risk appetite broadly, is as important for trading Bitcoin as understanding anything specific to crypto.

When a new crypto bull market begins, when institutional and more conservative investors start entering, they almost always buy Bitcoin first. It is the most understood, the most liquid, and the most institutionally accepted. Bitcoin dominance rises as the bull market begins.

As the bull market matures, confidence builds and retail investors start looking for higher returns than Bitcoin alone can provide. Money begins rotating from Bitcoin into Ethereum, then into larger altcoins, then into increasingly speculative smaller projects. Bitcoin dominance falls as the wider market grows faster than Bitcoin itself.

When the bull market ends and the bear market begins, the rotation reverses. Investors sell the most speculative assets first. Capital either moves to Bitcoin as a relative safe haven within crypto or exits crypto entirely. Bitcoin dominance rises again.

Rising dominance in a rising market suggests early cycle. Falling dominance in a rising market suggests late cycle euphoria. Rising dominance in a falling market suggests the bear market is deepening and capital is consolidating.