Bitcoin falls 13% in a week and reignites the debate

Bitcoin sheds 13% in a week and there is no civil war

A currency doesn't plunge 10% in a week. Nor 13%, which is where bitcoin's correction ended up as the discussion went on. That makes it a speculative asset, and that's where the argument starts: if something loses an eighth of its value in seven days, the store of value label holds up poorly. The trigger isn't the figure, it's the definition. Believers reply quickly: 10% is nothing after a 135% annual gain. The problem is that both can be true at once, and that is exactly what no one manages to settle.

The fall you don't see in gold or silver

The central argument is comparative. A major currency doesn't fall at that pace unless civil war breaks out in the issuing country. Silver has had ugly weeks, but it was reacting to something specific. Gold, the illustration goes, with an ounce at 2.700 dólares could lose 270 in a bad stretch, and there is almost always a monetary policy move or a geopolitical scare behind it. In bitcoin's fall neither of those appears, and for skeptics that absence is the whole proof.

Hence the most repeated example: the supermarket. A business with a 1% margin can't accept payment in an asset that sheds 13% in seven days. You'd sell goods for a 1% profit and receive money worth an eighth less. The math doesn't add up. The reply comes from another angle and is just as simple: no one pays for a coffee with an ounce of gold, so demanding from bitcoin what isn't demanded of the metal is unfair.

What backs bitcoin if it can't be used to buy in the market?

Commodities, it is said, serve a food or industrial purpose. From corn to platinum. Platinum and palladium are in decline because their main use, emissions catalysts, is fading with the electric car. There lies the healthy relationship between those who use and those who hoard. In bitcoin, most of those who hoard it use it for nothing, and that imbalance fuels the suspicion of a bubble.

On backing, gold has its own: it was the original money. Banknotes were metal certificates and for decades carried the printed promise that they were payable in silver to the bearer. The more technical reply is that no asset is backed by anything, only by the confidence of whoever exchanges it, and that fiat money depreciates every year without anyone demanding guarantees.

Whales, BlackRock and who moves the price

Here the tone hardens. Bitcoin's monetary policy would depend, by this reading, on a handful of anonymous holders who could control a huge percentage of the total —some speak of 60%— and crash it at will. With BlackRock and other big funds involved, some describe the manipulation as structural: whoever mines controls and sets the price.

The correlation is also underlined. When the Nasdaq has several days of sharp falls, bitcoin usually trinc. That brings it closer to a tech risk asset and further from the uncorrelated store of value the story promised. Some reply that institutional entry is precisely what can consolidate its status if big funds and states themselves start storing part of their reserves there.

Unrealized gains: winning on paper and winning for real

The most cited case is an investor who bought at 1 euro and one who got in with El Salvador at 40.000 dólares. On paper, scandalous multiples. The objection is the usual one: a gain only exists when you sell high. Whoever doesn't cash out has a number, not a profit, and in that bitcoin resembles Spanish housing in 2009, when everyone took for granted that property never fell. No one disputes that many have made money; what is disputed is that this makes it money.

The replies get more precise: there are yields collected daily with staking, pools and airdrops, cashable instantly, and that doesn't need to wait for the price to rise. The discussion thus shifts from buying and selling to the ecosystem's real use. The full detail of those yields, with their conditions, is where the debate becomes more technical and less flashy.

The quantum chip as an underlying threat

The other front emerging is technological. The Google quantum chip is cited as a reminder that the cryptography protecting the network isn't eternal. The scenario posed isn't immediate, but it is uncomfortable: the day states can track transactions with that capability, part of the utility attributed to it fades.

The reply is that traditional banking systems work the same way and no one declares them dead. And on the regulatory front, other data are noted against the doomsayers: according to one of the participants, China has lifted the ban, Segarro is moving closer and BBVA is entering the business.

Bitcoin in the supermarket: where the analysis gets stuck

Everything returns to the same place. Those who defend the asset ask for patience: gold took thousands of years to be used as money, and no one demands that it be in every cash register. Those who distrust reply with a simple condition: they'll believe it when you can buy in the supermarket. There the conversation stops, because adoption as a means of payment isn't advancing at the pace the price demands. And the 13% drop, in the end, resolved nothing.