The suits are here, and Bitcoiners are the new hype in financial markets.
That’s been the story for most of this year, culminating spectacularly in the bitcoin price plunge during Bitcoin Asia 2025. Bitcoin, the most vocal vote-of-no-confidence in the permissioned fiat monetary system is now rushing headfirst back into traditional finance.
Cypherpunks, morphed into suitcoiners, have found their ultimate expression as stonkcoiners.
The rebellious teenagers repented their sins. The lost son has returned — in glamorous, greedy glory.
We, the nerdy outsiders who were once dead-set on building a new and improved world have become cheerleaders for regulated, permissioned securities — neatly levered up and financially engineered for maximum bitcoin-per-share. The laws of financial gravity rudely shoved aside, even the staunchest rebellious hacker has given up most of their principles now that Wall Street is paying $2, $3, or $5 for a dollar of bitcoin.
And at Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong, everything else was upside-down, too. The crowd came out, not for the self-custody or cypherpunk-y Bitcoin talks, but for the political hotshots and financial engineers. (The word “sycophants” comes to mind.)
The balance sheet is becoming the P&L, said Alexandre Laizet, CEO of Europe’s largest treasury company on stage. He wasn’t merely saying that treasury companies are now banks, using their balance sheets to eke out profits; he meant that the only thing that matters to bitcoin treasury companies is the balance sheet itself. Profits are of no consequence when you’ve got bitcoin-per-infinitely printable share.
“This is what you should do as a rational player in the market.”
Some 200 companies, with Strategy and Metaplanet (the main sponsor for Bitcoin Asia) as the most vocal poster boys for the movement, are vacuuming capital markets for cheap fiat to plunge into bitcoin. Everyone is hitting records everywhere — of audiences and viewers, of attendees and sales. Everyone who’s been around Bitcoinland feels the energy, the building, the never-ending factory floor of shipping and building. It’s never been easier to grasp Bitcoin and we’ve never had as many people here…
…yet the price keeps meandering its way down from a hyped $125,000 to the $118,204 entry point for Nakamoto’s 679-million-dollar purchase to $111,000-ish around conference time, before plunging to a low of below $108,000 — in direct tandem with the bullish speakers on stage.
The drone show on Thursday, lighting up the Hong Kong evening with awesome Bitcoin graphics in the sky, couldn’t have been more symbolic for how everything is upside down. Displaying a powerful 21-divided-by-infinity sign that made absolutely no sense, it was a directly inverted version of Knut Svanholm‘s famous everything-divided-by-21-million claim:
All 20,000-odd of us in attendance need urgent bitcoin price therapy after days on end watching bullish proclamations on the Nakamoto Stage disproven and undermined by the large-font price chart behind them.
From the Nakamoto Stage in Hong Kong, David Bailey sat confidently and celebratory, applauding our great efforts and successes as Bitcoiners — while the audience stared at the large, SALT-sponsored bitcoin price on the screen behind him continually plunging downward, eradicating an ungodly amount of wealth with each downward flick.
The dissonance couldn’t have been greater between the bullish words said on stage, the impressive and plausible-sounding gospel from the dozen or so treasury companies present, and the harsh reality of an ever-decreasing price.
It’s almost like the more David Bailey et al. talk and pump their bitcoin-acquisition vehicle stocks, the worse our market becomes and the lower the price goes.
Maybe Mr. Bailey just has much bigger cojones than me, or a YOLO recklessness far surpassing anything humanity has ever seen, but had I just burned some $60 million of investor money with nothing to show for it, I’d be more humble and skittish, downtrodden and skeptic.
Price is in the pudding, and it’s really not that nice a cake.
It’s symbolic, too, that here in Hong Kong, 2025 is the year of the snake — and we get the cypherpunks’ crowning achievement slithering its way across financialized treasury companies, eating their own tails in the process.
We’re out here on the latest stop of the Bitcoin festival tour, astonished to see how all that was once sacred has been profaned: Everything is upside down.
This is Joakim Book, reporting from a world that no longer makes sense.