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Posted by hn_acker 1 day ago

Bitcoin gets a zero price target in wake of Burry warning(seekingalpha.com)
52 points | 66 comments
ArchieScrivener 1 day ago|
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but PoW is going to become a liability in a world of energetic production. It is irrational to spend the same amount of energy on mining a digital token when it can be used to build and power actual productive robots.

If Bitcoin Core decides this is true and alters the algo to save the chain, it too will lead to collapse as a Balkanization will occur across the mining pools. The most likely outcome is disintegration.

extraduder_ire 1 day ago||
Economically, the amount spent on electricity for PoW mining will be close to and generally below the payout for that mining.

The price in US dollars for either block rewards or electricity can go up or down, but this comparison always stays the same.

ben_w 1 hour ago||
Sure, but which direction is the forcing, and what drives that direction and magnitude? The stated relationship is also true when the energy cost to mining the next block is 1 joule at whatever money/kWh.
woleium 1 day ago|||
I have no idea if it’s true, but i did see some estimates that the visa and mastercard systems also use the same order of magnitude of energy.
dghlsakjg 1 day ago|||
Not sure if its true, but even if it is, those two corps transact nearly the same amount as the US GDP every year.

Bitcoin's entire market cap is right now at a less than 1/10th of US GDP. Hard to say what the payment volume is since by all accounts, most movement in BTC is speculative rather than transactional.

Ekaros 1 day ago||||
Even if they use same order of energy. They process many many more orders of magnitude transactions.

And I doubt they use that much power. Modern developers are incapable of efficiency, but there is not that much processing to do.

bulbar 18 hours ago||||
Hard to imagine to be true as the whole point of Bitcoin is to use up resources to secure the ledger.
JumpCrisscross 1 day ago||||
> i did see some estimates that the visa and mastercard systems also use the same order of magnitude of energy

I strongly believe they don’t, but I’d love to see the math and be proven wrong.

fmobus 1 day ago|||
I hate having to defend Visa and MC, but at least they using that energy to enable day-to-day transactions that real people actually use.

Also, and a bit harder to overlook... Visa/MC are able to work thousands of transactions per second in the US alone. Bitcoin can do like 7. Not seven thousand, just seven. Worldwide.

It's not even a competition, really. BTC has no future without some radical changes.

usrnm 1 day ago||
> It is irrational to spend the same amount of energy on mining a digital token when it can be used to build and power actual productive robots

It's just as irrational as it was 10 years ago, there have always been more productive uses for energy, but it doesn't really matter, people will always chose their own short-term profit, expecting anything else is delusional

ArchieScrivener 1 day ago|||
No, 10 years ago the threat was from financial collapse given the past 16 years of bubble induced recessions, energy usage was a store of value hedge against inflation. 10 years ago the first approved ETF was still 5 years away and institutional buyers were nonexistent.

People will not always consider short term profit; thinking such is an irrational expectation.

jszymborski 1 day ago|||
Further to this point, it's not like non-PoW coins like Ethereum are doing better at the moment.
aresant 1 day ago||
Top comment of one of the standout Bitcoin-culture memes ->

"The best technical analysis anyone has done on bitcoin."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg

kristianp 1 day ago||
https://archive.is/eS2Q3

> [Burry] warned that if prices fall another 10%, Strategy (MSTR) would be billions in the red and could “find capital markets essentially closed".

According to bloomberg [1] mstr is still trading at a 9% premium to the btc it owns. Why would bitcoin falling another 10% make a difference?

[1] https://archive.is/jQPYk

donavanm 1 day ago|
I suspect the issue is they still need cash for 1. dividends 2. Further dilution, er acquisition. They have some put away for the near term dividends. But you can see the negative feedback loop if they cant make those payments/acquisitions. Having a huge hole in the books wont help for raising cash through lending, or asset sales realizing the loss.

Re: 10% specifically, i havent checked but Im guessing thats a floor on their cost basis for a bunch of holdings going negative.

kristianp 1 day ago|||
Yes their pattern is to issue bonds/equity to buy more btc and fund debt repayments. If people are no longer buying it causes problems. Not an unexpected outcome at all!
latchkey 1 day ago|||
"As of early 2026, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) holds approximately $2.3 billion in cash and cash equivalents, including a $2.25 billion USD reserve specifically for covering preferred stock dividends."

Everything is documented on their website...

https://www.strategy.com/

kristianp 16 hours ago||
If you subtract those 2 numbers you're left with $50 million. Does that mean they only have enough cash to pay 6 months of dividends? They still need to come up with more cash to maintain the dividends after that.
garciasn 1 day ago||
> Bitcoin, down more than 40% from its October peak, is now “exposed as a completely speculative asset.”

“Now”? No; it’s always been a speculative asset. The only folks who didn’t think that were those who didn’t know any better.

JumpCrisscross 1 day ago|
To drive home the ridiculousness of this, Bitcoin traded around $126k in October. It’s now at $60k. Even if it recovers, that’s an 87% annualized loss.

That’s a 669% inflation rate.

caminante 1 day ago||
If you want the snark to go to 11, checkout /r/buttcoin.
malshe 1 day ago||
Excellent recommendation! The top post right now is "Bitcoin just hit $66,000. Strong support at $0."
caminante 20 hours ago||
The one that got me was the RETIREMENT wealth advisor who advised people to plow into MicroStrategy and arrogantly bragged about only needing 100 hours to pick the stock.[0]

> That said, as a Wealth Advisor, I do NOT recommend clients investing in the stock if they are not willing to do the requisite 100+ hours of studying Bitcoin before yet another 100+ hours studying MicroStrategy.

Ouch!

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/1qx2qs2/photos_ta...

thousand_nights 1 day ago||
after seeing the recent surge of meme stocks, 0dte option trading, sports betting, prediction markets and funny internet coins, one thing is apparent is that people just love to gamble

so i don't believe it will ever go to zero as it has intrinsic value as a casino, if nothing else

kilroy123 1 day ago||
My prediction has always been that as soon as Tether is proved to be a fraud, the game is over. All of it will experience a massive sell-off.
singularity2001 1 day ago||
Tether has already proven to be a fraud it's only a question when someone will act on that
conorcleary 19 hours ago||
llol
abrookewood 1 day ago|||
I've in the same boat and can't believe it hasn't happened already.
latchkey 1 day ago|||
Tether actually has one of the better business models out of all of it. They take real dollars, print fake dollars, then buy bonds/treasuries (and gold) with the real dollars.

https://x.com/diogomonica/status/2019452516786925756

donavanm 1 day ago|||
… and keep the interest from those and their “high value commercial paper.” Now, why this is better than a money market fund, and regulated similarly… no idea.
Ekaros 1 day ago|||
I am too sensible for financial markets. As such I just do not get why money would keep getting poured into the system. And not enough would exit...

At best you are buying a dollar with dollar. Just doesn't compute for me.

csa 1 day ago|||
> At best you are buying a dollar with dollar.

There are at least two scenarios in which “just a dollar” is a great outcome for someone purchasing a stable coin (assuming that it’s actually stable):

1. You want the convenience of digital coin transfers/payments without the variance of price swings (e.g., recent Bitcoin). This can be especially useful when you have access to a phone but limited or no direct access to modern banking facilities.

2. It’s easy to get your local currency onto an exchange, but it’s not easy or advisable to have a dollar bank account or keep large amounts of dollars in cash in your locale.

3. (I guess for completeness) You want to engage in activities that are of questionable legality (e.g., drug sales in certain places, online poker in most of the US, etc.).

latchkey 19 hours ago||
4. Collateral for lending/borrowing protocols.
cykros 11 hours ago|||
It doesn't make sense for Americans, or anyone with access to a dollar denominated bank account.

For the other 80% of the planet though, it's a game changer. Rough estimate, but feels fair, as outside the US most people can't have one without substantial access to capital.

At the end of the day, it's just another IOU, much like a bank deposit, except instead of getting the 0.1% yield and FDIC (IF you're in the US), you get the ability to transact 24/7 across borders in a much faster manner than even bank wires, let alone ACH payments.

latchkey 11 hours ago||
Still one of my favorite comments along these lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410
extraduder_ire 1 day ago||
More specifically, that it is (or was) fraud or that it's insolvent?
thomassmith65 1 day ago||
FSB mirror: https://archive.ph/eS2Q3
cal_dent 1 day ago||
This implies there is underlying fundamental analysis that can be applied to Bitcoin price. There wasn't when it was going up. There isn't when its going down. It has always, and still is, based on pure vibes. The price could be anything.
jqpabc123 21 hours ago|
This implies there is underlying fundamental analysis that can be applied to Bitcoin price.

The underlying fundamental analysis is rejected out of hand by anyone who chooses to speculate in Bitcoin --- the fundamental value may not be $0 but it's safe to say that is way less than it's currently price. Once the mining networks are no longer profitable, the value will be $0.

Bitcoin is not a good currency or a store of value. Fundamentally, it's just another version of a non-fungible token (NTF).

To see where BTC is ultimately headed, just look at NFT's --- aka the Bored Ape Yacht Club. These are now selling for about 4% of their all time high. And they are much more "rare" and "collectible" than Bitcoin.

andirk 1 day ago||
Since I've been in it, this has happened in:

- early 2018

- March 2020

- Summer 2021

- Summer 2022

- mildly in Q1 2025

- now in early 2026

This has never happened before!

skybrian 1 day ago|
I'm doubtful that Bitcoin true believers will give up after a crash and expect that there will be buyers. At what price, though?
ajkjk 1 day ago||
on the one hand I can't imagine it will ever go fully to zero because then people will buy them just for fun, keeping the price at least a bit up.

on the other hand there is a price where the network no longer has any incentive to operate. Whereupon... doesn't it just stop working / become easily forkable? in which case it seems like Bitcoin is perhaps uniquely unable to recover from crashing out of all things that can crash (a thesis which is consistent with it having no intrinsic value, lol)

Ekaros 1 day ago||
On other hand. At some point you can't transact on it for good while. What is the price of currency you can not "physically" move? Yeah numbers of exchanges can move. But if no one spends energy mining and getting lucky there is no movement of bitcoin itself.
JumpCrisscross 1 day ago||
> At what price, though?

When they’re personally financially desperate. Bitcoin is, in many senses, a measure of the excess capital in the economy.

andirk 17 hours ago||
Wholeheartedly agree. Bitcoin bro here. The amount of fiat that most people can put in to such a speculative and confusing investment is most likely the small % of their $ they can label as "risk capital".
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