The suits have arrived, and Bitcoin enthusiasts are the latest sensation in financial markets.
This has been the narrative for the majority of this year, culminating dramatically in the bitcoin price drop during Bitcoin Asia 2025. Bitcoin, the loudest expression of discontent with the regulated fiat monetary system, is now diving headlong back into conventional finance.
Cypherpunks have transformed into suitcoiners, achieving their ultimate representation as stonkcoiners.
The rebellious youth have acknowledged their transgressions. The wayward son has returned — in dazzling, avaricious splendor.
We, the geeky outsiders who were once determined to create a new and enhanced world, have morphed into supporters of regulated, permissioned securities — meticulously leveraged and financially engineered for optimal bitcoin-per-share. The principles of financial gravity have been unceremoniously set aside; even the resolute rebellious hacker has surrendered most of their beliefs now that Wall Street is offering $2, $3, or $5 for a dollar of bitcoin.
And at Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong, everything else was turned on its head as well. The crowd gathered, not for the self-custody or cypherpunk-themed Bitcoin discussions, but for the political luminaries and financial strategists. (The term “sycophants” springs to mind.)
The balance sheet is becoming the P&L, remarked Alexandre Laizet, CEO of Europe’s largest treasury firm on stage. He wasn’t merely stating that treasury firms are now banks, utilizing their balance sheets to generate profits; he implied that the only aspect that holds significance for bitcoin treasury firms is the balance sheet itself. Profits become irrelevant when you possess bitcoin-per-infinitely printable share.
“This is what you ought to do as a rational participant in the market.”
Approximately 200 firms, with Strategy and Metaplanet (the primary sponsor for Bitcoin Asia) as the most prominent advocates for this movement, are siphoning capital markets for inexpensive fiat to plunge into bitcoin. Everybody is breaking records everywhere — in audiences and viewers, in attendees and sales. Anyone who has traversed Bitcoinland senses the energy, the construction, the perpetual assembly line of shipping and building. It has never been easier to comprehend Bitcoin and we’ve never had such a crowd here…
…yet the price continues to wander down from the hyped $125,000 to the $118,204 entry point for Nakamoto’s 679-million-dollar acquisition to about $111,000 around the conference time, before plunging to a low of under $108,000 — directly correlating with the optimistic speakers on stage.
The drone display on Thursday, illuminating the Hong Kong night with stunning Bitcoin imagery in the sky, couldn’t have been more representative of how everything is inverted. Showcasing a powerful 21-divided-by-infinity symbol that made absolutely no sense, it was a directly reversed interpretation of Knut Svanholm’s renowned everything-divided-by-21-million assertion:
All 20,000-odd of us present are in dire need of bitcoin price therapy after several days of observing optimistic declarations on the Nakamoto Stage being disproven and undermined by the sizable price chart displayed behind them.
From the Nakamoto Stage in Hong Kong, David Bailey sat assuredly and celebratory, applauding our tremendous efforts and achievements as Bitcoiners — while the audience gazed at the large, SALT-sponsored bitcoin price on the screen behind him perpetually declining, erasing an absurd amount of wealth with each downward tick.
The dissonance couldn’t have been more pronounced between the optimistic statements made on stage, the impressive and plausible-sounding gospel from the numerous treasury firms present, and the stark reality of a continually decreasing price.
It seems that the more David Bailey and his associates promote and hype their bitcoin-acquisition vehicle stocks, the worse our market deteriorates and the lower the price sinks.
Perhaps Mr. Bailey just possesses much larger cojones than I do, or a reckless YOLO attitude that exceeds anything humanity has ever witnessed, but had I just squandered around $60 million of investor capital with nothing to exhibit for it, I’d be more modest and anxious, downtrodden and doubtful.
Results are in the outcomes, and they aren’t quite appealing.
It’s also symbolic that here in Hong Kong, 2025 is the year of the snake — and we witness the cypherpunks’ crowning achievement slithering its way across financialized treasury firms, consuming their own tails in the process.
We’re out here on the latest leg of the Bitcoin festival journey, astonished to observe how all that was once revered has been desecrated: Everything is upside down.
This is Joakim Book, reporting from a realm that no longer aligns.