Bitcoin has lost half its value since October, sliding from record highs to trade well below the $100,000 mark investors once treated as a floor. For Strategy founder Michael Saylor, the crypto industry’s loudest permabull, this is just Tuesday.
“We’ve lived through more brutal drawdowns,” Saylor said, pointing to a 75% collapse in 2021-2022 that dwarfs the current slide. Since his firm started buying Bitcoin in August 2020, he counts five major drawdowns in five years. This one, he argues, barely registers by comparison.
The Pitch: Ignore the Chart, Watch the Institutions
Saylor’s argument skips past price action entirely. He wants investors thinking in four-year cycles, minimum, ideally ten. His preferred gauges are the four-year and 200-week moving averages, not the daily chart that has crypto Twitter in a panic.
What’s changed, he says, is everything underneath the price. Two years ago, no US president, Treasury secretary, or bank regulator would touch Bitcoin publicly. Now the White House, the Fed chair, the SEC, and the CFTC have all voiced support. Roughly 75% of major banks back Bitcoin in some form, Saylor claims, up from essentially zero. About 100 Bitcoin ETFs now hold more than $100 billion combined, a market that simply didn’t exist before 2024.
The Dominance Argument
Saylor’s favorite data point is Bitcoin dominance, its share of the total crypto market. It cratered to 41% in 2021, down from a peak near 70%, back when altcoins were supposedly going to “flip” Bitcoin and render it obsolete. That thesis died. Dominance has climbed back to roughly 68%.
“It’s been copied 10,000 times,” Saylor said of Bitcoin’s code. “It hasn’t been hacked. Everything else has been hacked.”
Comparing Bitcoin to Amazon’s Ugly Years
Here’s where Saylor gets interesting. He doesn’t compare Bitcoin to gold or to other cryptocurrencies. He compares it to Amazon in 2010.
Back then, he says, conventional investors dismissed Amazon’s delivery-heavy retail model as a bad business destined to fail. A decade later, nobody questioned it. He makes the same case for the iPhone circa 2012, when he publicly predicted a billion users and was met with skepticism he now considers a footnote.
The pattern, in Saylor’s telling: transformative networks look obvious to early adopters and absurd to everyone else, until suddenly they don’t. He invokes Warren Buffett’s famously late, and famously massive, $50 billion bet on Apple as Exhibit A for how slowly conventional capital catches up to inevitable technology.
“We’ll have that Warren Buffett moment with Bitcoin,” he said. “Not this year. Maybe not next year. It doesn’t matter.”
What Could Actually Turn Things Around
Saylor isn’t calling a bottom. He’s naming catalysts. An eventual end to the geopolitical conflicts weighing on markets. A shift away from today’s restrictive, flat yield curve toward looser monetary policy. And what he calls a “massive AI black hole” currently sucking capital out of every other asset class, one he expects markets to eventually rebalance away from, sending some of that money back into Bitcoin.
The Skeptic’s Read
None of this is neutral analysis. Saylor’s company holds a Bitcoin position worth tens of billions of dollars, and his public comments have moved markets before. His Amazon and Apple comparisons are selective, survivorship bias runs through the entire pitch, and “it worked eventually for two unrelated companies” isn’t proof it will work again for a fundamentally different asset class.
Still, the underlying claim, that institutional infrastructure around Bitcoin has genuinely expanded while retail sentiment has soured, is at least measurable, and worth watching regardless of which side of the trade you’re on.
“Ask me in a decade,” Saylor said. “Then we’ll have real data.”
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