00:00Okay, let's just dive right in.
00:04The crypto market is, well, it's a sea of red right now, and you can feel the fear out
00:09there.
00:10Now look, this explainer isn't about giving you advice or telling you what to do with
00:13your money.
00:14Not at all.
00:15The goal here is just to give you some information, some real perspective, so we can try to understand
00:19what is actually going on behind the scenes.
00:22So you're looking at your portfolio and man, it feels like the floor just dropped out from
00:27under you.
00:28It is a really tough feeling, and it brings up that one huge question.
00:33Why?
00:34Why is this happening?
00:35Let's walk through the big forces at play here, because what's going on is a whole lot
00:39more complex than just a simple price did.
00:42Alright, so the first major reason we're seeing all this pressure on crypto, well, it's
00:46actually coming from a very, very old place.
00:49For the first time in what feels like forever, precious metals are back in a huge way.
00:54They're performing so strongly that they're not just competing with crypto anymore.
00:58In a lot of cases, they're actually outperforming it.
01:00Now, what's so fascinating here is the trigger.
01:04It all goes back to 2022.
01:06When the U.S. froze hundreds of billions in Russian assets, it sent this massive shockwave
01:11through the entire global financial system.
01:14You had central banks all over the world, especially places like China, looking at their
01:19own holdings of U.S. dollars and thinking, wait a minute, could that happen to us?
01:24That thought sparked this historic global rush into gold, a neutral, safe asset that they
01:30could actually control.
01:32And this chart, wow.
01:34It just shows you the sheer scale of that shift.
01:37Before 2022, central banks were buying, you know, a pretty steady 450 tons of gold a year.
01:45After that trigger event, boom.
01:46They started buying over a thousand tons a year.
01:50We're talking about a massive fundamental surge in demand, and it's being driven by
01:54the biggest players on the planet.
01:56So here's the bottom line.
01:58When an asset class like gold is suddenly seen as not only safer, but is also giving you
02:02these crypto like returns.
02:04Well, it just sucks all the air out of the room, a huge amount of capital and just as important,
02:09the market's attention that probably would have flowed into Bitcoin is now chasing gold and
02:14silver instead.
02:15Okay, so let's move on to the second big factor here, and this one's a little more
02:20out there.
02:21It's more technical.
02:22It's forward looking.
02:23We're talking about the looming shadow of quantum computing.
02:26Now this isn't a problem that exists today, but the fear of what it could do down the
02:30road is absolutely having an impact on prices right now.
02:34So what even is it?
02:35Well, to put it simply, quantum computers are this theoretical next generation of supercomputers.
02:40They're so unbelievably powerful that they could one day break the very
02:43encryption that keeps everything safe online, from your bank account to, you guessed it,
02:48your crypto.
02:49So you might be asking, okay, but why is this such a specific threat for Bitcoin?
02:53Well, it's because of this number.
02:55A staggering 20 to 25% of all Bitcoin is thought to be lost forever.
03:00We're talking about Satoshi's original stash of a million coins, plus all the Bitcoin
03:04from people who lost their hard drives or forgot their keys over the years.
03:08And here's the story that's spooking the market.
03:11The fear is that a quantum computer could one day be powerful enough to basically reverse
03:15engineer the private keys for all of those dormant lost wallets.
03:19A hacker could suddenly unlock millions of these lost coins and just dump them onto the
03:23open market.
03:24That kind of supply shock, well, it could completely crash the price.
03:28It's a future threat for sure, but it's creating fear today.
03:33Okay.
03:34So we've talked about the bears.
03:35Gold is pulling money away.
03:37Quantum computing is this scary future threat.
03:40It sounds pretty grim.
03:41I know.
03:42But now I want us to pivot.
03:43Let's put all this panic into a much, much bigger historical picture.
03:48Just take a look at this.
03:49Amazon.
03:50It crashed 95% during the dot-com bust.
03:5495%.
03:55Meta dropped to 76% just a couple of years ago.
03:58Nvidia, the darling of AI right now, fell 66%.
04:03And Microsoft?
04:04People called it dead money for more than a decade.
04:07Every single one of these giants, they all had moments where the market basically left them
04:11for dead.
04:13So what was their secret?
04:14How did they survive that and become the titans they are today?
04:17They tuned out the noise.
04:19They ignored their collapsing stock prices and just stayed absolutely laser focused on
04:23building their product, on delivering on their core mission.
04:27The real value was in what they were building, not in the day-to-day chaos of the market.
04:31And this idea right here.
04:33This brings us to what I think is the single most important takeaway from this whole explainer.
04:38If you really want to understand what's happening with Bitcoin, you have got to learn
04:41how to separate two totally different things, the price and the protocol.
04:46So the price, that's what you see on the charts every day.
04:49It's messy, it's emotional, it's driven by news cycles and fear and greed.
04:53But the protocol, that's the technology itself.
04:56It's the code, the actual rules of the network.
04:59You see, one is just chaotic noise, the other is the steady underlying signal.
05:04And that is the crucial thing to remember.
05:06No matter what the price is doing, the Bitcoin protocol is just working.
05:10It's doing exactly what it was designed to do.
05:13The network has never, ever been hacked.
05:15The hard cap of 21 million coins?
05:17That hasn't changed.
05:19That global, decentralized network of miners and nodes?
05:22It's still running, processing blocks about every 10 minutes, day in and day out.
05:26The technology is fine.
05:27So I guess I'll just leave you with this one question.
05:30When you look at the market right now, it is so easy to see the short-term horror movie
05:34that's playing out on the price charts.
05:35But if you zoom out, if you look at the underlying technology, its history, its consistency, you
05:40might start to see a very different long-term story unfolding.
05:43So the question is, which movie are you choosing to watch?
05:45So watch.
05:46So watch.
05:47So watch.
05:48So watch.
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