In the spring of 2025, Bitcoin (BTC) quietly broke through $100,000. As of August 16, 2025, the latest price is about $120,000. Bitcoin has never been officially recognized as 'legal tender' or 'official reserve asset' by any sovereign state (although a few countries like El Salvador have attempted to legalize it, it still remains a 'marginal experiment' in the overall international financial landscape). Why has it risen so fast? On what basis?
Every surge seems to come without warning. But looking back afterward, there are still traces to follow. In 2013, Cyprus experienced a banking crisis. Banks froze accounts, and depositors were helpless. At that time, capital began to flee to Bitcoin for the first time. In 2017, global liquidity flooded, ICOs became popular, and a group of people became rich by 'issuing air', with Bitcoin soaring as a result. In 2020, the pandemic spread. The Federal Reserve performed unprecedented unlimited money printing, institutions finally entered the game, and Bitcoin jumped from $10,000 to $60,000. By 2025, the Federal Reserve stopped raising interest rates, global inflation continued, the debt crisis loomed, geopolitical tensions rose, and capital hedge sentiment surged. Thus, Bitcoin began to rise again.
It seems that every time it surges, it is because our confidence in the old order is peeling away layer by layer.
For the past few decades, people have generally believed in the big container of 'national credit'. If you trust the country, you trust the currency; if you trust the currency, you trust that the future is guaranteed.
And now, taking Europe and America as examples, every fluctuation, every crisis, the government's response is the same: print money, inject liquidity, intervene. Housing purchases are limited, stocks are regulated, and currency is diluted — people are not buying assets, but 'things that policies allow you to own'.
In this structure, Bitcoin has no rivals. It is transparent, cold, and ruthless. It makes no promises of stability, takes no responsibility for appreciation; it is like a mirror reflecting what you truly fear, what you want to escape from, and what you long for.
In high-inflation countries like Turkey and Argentina, it has become the only means for ordinary people to withstand currency devaluation; in the eyes of institutions in Europe and America, it has become a 'hedging tool unrelated to the dollar'; under authoritarian governments and geopolitical divisions, it is a ghost ship for capital transfer.
Many people think that Bitcoin is the madness of retail investors and the speculation of young people, a 'decentralized' utopia. But those who truly control its rhythm have never been this group of people.
When giants like Grayscale, BlackRock, Bridgewater, and ARK start allocating Bitcoin, it seems people have received some inspiration — things outside the system are also worth hedging against the system itself?
Inflation is just a cancer cell in the monetary world, while debt, political intervention, and geopolitical conflicts are far more lethal. So they choose something that no one controls. It belongs to no one, yet everyone needs it. It's like water — impossible to grasp, yet can fill the world's anxiety. And while these people quietly build their positions, there are still ordinary people arguing: 'Is it a scam?'.
People can never price it using traditional methods. It sounds like a bubble. But in this era, isn’t the bubble also the main theme? And people are increasingly inclined to believe in things that do not belong to any country, any company, or any organization. In an era where commitments can turn into 'exceptions' at any time, what remains unchanged is itself a rarity.
The surge of Bitcoin actually reflects the fragility of human economy and society. Bitcoin, although ruthless, is very honest. Whether people believe it or not, it is always there.
Nothing is eternal; even faith can change, let alone code. The price of Bitcoin today reflects a kind of emotional density of the whole world. The aftershocks of inflation, anxiety over debt, fatigue of the system... are all the despair that people dare not speak of. And in increasingly uncertain times, people need an anchor that does not ask for belonging, does not require permission, and will not change.
Perhaps Bitcoin is not the answer at all. It cannot solve employment, cannot rebuild trust between people, nor has it made this world fairer. But at least it makes us acknowledge —
In this era, some old logic has reached its end.
There are many interesting things in this circle, and each round of bull and bear is very tumultuous. Global liquidity comes and goes quickly, often rising with great momentum, with positive feedback from incremental funds pushed to the extreme, and when it crashes down, it can drag hundreds of coins down to unfathomable depths.
The wealth effect of this round of altcoin season is indeed the weakest. You might still be holding onto spot assets that are stuck, still holding onto TRUMP bought at 50U in mid-January, and the world coin hanging at the 10U peak has halved, and BANANA, which has lost half its value, while buying BTT which has dropped a zero due to Sun Ge. Speaking of Sun Yuchen, he has always been a 'topic generator' in the crypto world. He previously bid on a lunch with Buffett but then canceled at the last minute, being called 'Sun the Harvester' by many, and even the SEC has sued him. But you see, he can walk out of so many controversies and send Tron to the US stock market.
However, you can listen to Sun's words, but do not approach Sun's coins with faith, 'the preacher' and 'the harvester'.
There is a thin line between them, and this line is called 'trust'.
Let's take a look at Fil, once the leader of the storage industry. I believe three years and three years, many people are stuck holding it, from a peak of $238 in 2021 to a range of $2.5-3 in 2025, and the miner market crashed accordingly. Early miners sold for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands (e.g., a 96T miner was about 140,000).
Some of its miners are suspected of false advertising, such as Hubei Blizzard Cloud and others being exposed for overselling computing power by more than ten times. Users' actual mining returns are far lower than promised, and there are even issues with the transparency of miner delivery and operation. Such incidents severely damage FIL's market reputation, and institutions and large holders generally avoid it, but currently, second-hand miner prices have dropped to 800 yuan with no one interested. Daily selling pressure of 500,000 FIL (about $1.25 million) is hard to sustain in a bear market, leading to liquidity exhaustion, a typical capital harvesting! FIL's ideal of a storage revolution is still worthy of respect, but as an investment target, it has entered a death spiral. In the wave of financial reform, you either become a wave rider or are drowned by the tide!
Everyone should have noticed the recent hotspots, meme launch platform pump and bonk are rising. Pump's first buyback was $2.1 million, expected annual buyback is $200 million, and the buyback pump is meant to offload to large exchanges. The bonk series meme's useless, ani, and others surged before nearly halving. Among them, ani is an AI meme concept by Musk.
Faith and structural games intertwine, with institutions and retail investors having different mindsets. During this period, some people will enjoy the tremendous compounding of time. However, due to human greed for more and faster, coupled with various uncertainties, few retail investors can reap the dividends.
So what I want to say is that the so-called 'good start and good finish' is never about predicting high and low points, but whether you have a mature methodology to cope with a bull market.
