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One second. Okay. Bitcoin dropped below 60,000, leaving everybody to wonder what could possibly be the reason. We're going to unpack some of the theories and tell you why bottom may be in something like that. All right? Oh, no, it's fine. I just want to make sure. I like to make sure it aligns with the title for the algo. Yeah. All right, tell me when. Bitcoin dropped below 60,000American dollars, taking us well back into prices from last cycle, leaving everyone to wonder, what's the catalyst? What's going on? Why did this happen? And is the bottom possibly in? I'm going to go through a few of the theories and a few of my thoughts right now. It's a solo show on Fridays. Let's go. Let's dope. Let's do. Good morning, everybody. I hope that you are feeling awesome, amazing, terrific and stupendous today after one of the literal worst days we've ever seen in the crypto market. 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Figure markets is awesome. Highly suggest that you participate and check them out. One of the publicly traded companies in crypto that's been absolutely crushing to the upside while everything else has seen a massive retrace in this quote unquote bear market. Well, let's dive into it a bit just to give some context of just how ugly it has been out there. We've got. It's official. Let me resize that right now for you. It is official. Bitcoin just posted its first ever Daily decline of over $10,000. Not even the record 19.5 billion liquidation on October 10 came close to today. It appears that someone big was liquidated there. You can see it. As I said, price dropped below 60,000. Started the day trading, I believe, above 70. Absolutely savage price action. And what was notable to me was the velocity of it, right? We had the highest volume that we've seen all year, even since mid last year. We saw selling just continually pressing down. No wicks, no bounces, no nothing. Just systematic selling. I dove into this yesterday with Gareth Soloway and Mike McGlone on Market Mavericks. And before we dive in any further, I would just like to say that all of you assholes owe Mike McGlone a huge policy apology. I've been dealing with you people. I'm looking at you, with you people telling me to get rid of Mike McGlone. Make retard, as he called himself, get rid of Mike McGlone. On Macro Monday, we need another bitcoin bull. We don't want a bearish opinion to tell us the price could possibly go down. We don't want that. We need another person in the echo chamber. I would like to remind you that Macro Monday exists because of Mike McGlone. If we didn't have Mike McGlone, none of you would watch that because there would be nothing to debate, nothing to argue about and no other opinion. If listening to someone be bearish, even if they're wrong, or early, if literally listening to someone be bearish and present their case makes you feel emotionally triggered, then you need to look in the mirror and, like, pull a Taylor Swift. It's me. Hi. I'm the problem. It's me, right? Because Mike McGlone, whether he was early or whether he was wrong, he's been really, really right about a lot of things. I mean, he said Silver was going to 50 bucks when it was at 120. It got into the 60s in less than two weeks. It's very important that you listen to the veterans who tell you whether it is working or is not working, how it should be and how markets have been in the past, because eventually those people tend to be right. Well, he's definitely right right about now. Do I think bitcoin's going to 10,000? No. But did he also say, yeah, we were going to see a 50% retrace, there was going to be a lot of pain? Yes. So I think that it's very worthy of paying attention. But let's dig in right now to why people might be selling We've had this narrative roughly forever. Let me, for some reason this is not sharing correctly, let me try that one more time. But we've had the narrative forever, obviously about OG selling, right? The big whale selling. Here you go. A friend of mine who is an OG bitcoin maxi from the very beginning messaged me a year ago to tell me he was out, dumped all his bitcoin and was out of crypto forever. When I asked why, he said because bitcoin is dead, financial markets will print fake bitcoin and everything that gave it value is destroyed. He was right is a good explanation. I can't say whether he was right or wrong. This sounds pretty floodgate to me. But on chain data don't lie. Just like Shakira's hips, those don't lie either. And when you take a look, we've seen tens of thousands of bitcoin being sold every like five seconds by wallets that had never moved their coins since the very beginning, right? So you see these massive moves on chain, they go to exchanges or they go to OTC to XTC, 10,000 at a time. We saw another 50 or 60,000 of those OG wallet coins being sold this week as price accelerated down. Those are people who could have sold above 100. But it seems that among the original libertarian community for bitcoin there's a sentiment that f this, this is not what I signed up for. I don't want to cheer for the government or care about legislation. I certainly don't want to worry about the regul. I don't want to cheer for fed cut so that my precious bitcoin can go up. This was a hedge against all that. I'm a libertarian, I'm a billionaire and I'm out onto my solar yacht in the middle of the ocean where nobody can mess with me, right? I've heard it over and over and over and over and over again and clearly that is part of what has been going on. Now has that reached a fever pitch now are all those coins sold? It remains to be seen but clearly some of those guys were still willing to sell this price down at $60,000. Now taking a look, there's a very reasonable argument right now. I can't say that non specific to the actual theory, but if you take a look at options volume, many people have said, listen, the introduction of massive options could be the top for bitcoin or at least could be a problem. Now we know that Was it the 2017 high or one of the all time highs was when futures 21 was when futures were introduced, literally like to the day, and all of a sudden Wall street could short Bitcoin. Well, IBIT has futures on it and the volume on IBIT has been absolutely insane. Yesterday it was over 10.7 billion. I mean, just absurd numbers when you're diving into this. And as you dig into it, there are a lot of funds that have basically created a segregated account that's just for IBIT options, which is very smart actually, not cross margin so they don't blow up entirely. Because obviously if Bitcoin goes down massively and there's risk, you don't want to blow up the rest of your portfolio. Well, it seems that a lot of these based in Hong Kong may have blown up badly tomorrow and that a lot yesterday. And that aligns very well with the systematic selling that I talked about. I mean, when you see it just pushing down and no price going up, that's kind of what we've been seeing, this strange selling action where it seems like a huge entity. We thought maybe it was someone from 1010. Well, maybe now price got below 74, which was like the last key level, probably where these liquidations just started to push. And speaking of liquidation, I mean we're doing like a half a billion every few hours, right? I mean 500 million here, 500 million there, 5 billion here, 2 billion here. Every day for the last few months, it seems is an FTX level event of liquidations. I don't understand how you guys have money left. Understand how literally anyone has money left. I, I have some money left. I'm buying. But who is using leverage right now? Like what? Jackass is like, you know what, we've gone from 126 down to 80. I'm going to get that 100x leverage. If we go down 1%, I'm toast. I mean, people were getting liquidated before this on 1, 2, 3% moves in a tight range. Well now at least there, I mean it makes sense to get liquidated or you should be getting stopped out, not liquidated, on a move that goes down over $10,000 in a day. But it is very, very likely that we've seen some entities blow up. As we've said, even from 10:10. We haven't seen the bodies float to the surface yet. We don't know who did. But it's very clear that with price action like this, liquidations this high and the way that these options are structured, that's very likely that somebody has gone belly up. And when you go belly up, you're forced to sell everything that's left. Obviously. Speaking of those liquidations, we also have massive BTA Bitcoin ETF outflows. Bitcoin ETFs reported 40434 million in outflows yesterday. I bet was 175 million of it. Year to date, net outflows 2.2 billion. Ouch. And the total since collapse is around 8 billion. Still more than 90% of AUM. Hanging tough. Forced to weather what feels like a Cat 5 hurricane. I think that's a great description. It's been bruised and battered this market and we've all just been kind of holding onto a tree and praying for the best. Like those idiots from the Weather Channel who go outside in the middle of hurricanes to show us how windy it is. Never understood those people, to be honest. Like, I get it, it's windy. But either way, we know that we've had massive outflows. This is primarily probably retail selling. We haven't really had that much retail involvement in this market. But the clear answer here is that whether it's institutions, whether it's ETFs, whether it's liquidations, there's been a lot of forced sellers or people who have just given up and said, I am done with this crap. I'm getting the texts all the time, friends who weren't really in it for the passion. But as an investment, this thing trades like shit. It's going down, it's going to zero. We're getting all those classic bottom signals. And listen, I don't know if the bottom's in, but it feels like a bottom is in based on sentiment and the insanity of yesterday's price action that felt like the same you would normally expect from a blow off top. It's felt like a capitulation bottom to me. But listen, it's very important to go back and give a post mortem to all the bad ideas that we had. So this guy, James Bull, I don't know who he is, but he's got a sweet avatar. So this was all useless, Useless bull. Market peak indicators sell at the top, right? We went through these, everyone was like, there's 20 classic indicators that will tell you when the top is in every time. And we haven't seen any of them fire. Therefore bitcoin's going to $250,000. I still don't know what a pie cycle top indicator is or the pool multiple. I do know what the bitcoin rainbow chart is. I've seen them. I don't know how they're calculated. But it's important to remember that especially in a nascent market like bitcoin, just because something has worked two or three times in previous cycle is not statistically relevant and doesn't mean that it's likely to happen again. And it's really not right. Every indication we had for that not being the top was wrong, right? I'm not, by the way, I'm not saying that was the complete top. I can make the argument that this is a bull market retrace. But everything that was supposed to show us the sentiment, the blow off price was supposed to go much higher. Every single indicator. They all turned out to be completely useless so far. That said, I tweeted something about this yesterday. People seem to forget that in the year that we probably view as the most bullish, one of the most bullish ever for most people who have been here a while, but not since the beginning. 2021, right? MicroStrategy bought Bitcoin in 2020. We saw that as a catalyst and price started to rise. We had this insane alt season through the first half of 2021 that I'm sure you all remember. Things were going 100x is 50x's, throw a dart, next thing, throw a dart, next thing. Which all ended on the China fud and Tesla not taking bitcoin anymore to buy a car. But what people don't seem to remember, we went from 65,000 down to 28,000 in a matter of weeks. That was like a 55% retrace. We got 52 here. Okay, so at that time there was a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt. But when you look back, everyone goes, oh yeah, that was just a, you know, big retrace in the middle of a bull market because price went back to 69 and altcoins continued to go crazy. We haven't even gotten an alt cycle this time. It's like we got completely scammed, right? But what if there's a $52,000 retrace just in the middle of a bull market as price continues massively up? I'm not saying that is the case, but we've literally seen this movie before. So the size of this retrace doesn't mean that the ultimate top is in. Maybe there's still a blow off top yet to come at a much higher price. But important to remember, we had all these indicators that hadn't fired. We had the huge price predictions from everybody and once again, almost everyone was wrong. But I want to bring up kind of an idea that I Like to share a lot of times. So people have been very, very upset about price predictions as I said, or saying that the bottom might be in. But I would just like to remind you when talking about whether the bottom could be in. When everyone is looking for price to bottom at a specific level, one of these two things usually happens. Either price bounces above it with smart money front running the crowd or price nukes through the level. The crowd rarely gets what they want. Okay, so I've talked about it. I'm not going to show the charts. Doesn't matter. We know that the 200 ma on the weekly is at about $57,000. It's been visited every time. The 50 ma on the weekly is broken and in every bear market and tends to be a good bottom area. The monthly 50 ma is right in the same area around 55. A lot of people think there was a ton of Support right under 60. So if everyone's expecting 57, is it likely that price bounces right at 57? Does the crowd usually get what they want or do you get 59 and a big bounce and that's the bottom and people can't believe it and you climb a wall of worry, of disbelief or you nuke down to like 50 and everyone who tries to buy that bottom that everyone's buying at the 50 ma or the 200 ma, they get liquidated before price goes up. I'm just saying we got to 59,000 just above that level. That could be sufficient for those who are fishing for a bottom right around 57,000 or $58,000. And to put a little more, put a little more exclamation on that idea, Bitcoin. Last two cycle bottoms happened above electrical cost. Current electrical cost 58,470. This is obviously like the price to mine a bitcoin. We talk about minor capitulation, miner floor, all those terms. Basically the idea here is that miners are in big, big, big, big trouble and really start to blow up below this and will likely defend this area. So there it is. 58,004 70. We got right down above that as we've seen in the past. And it's not all doom and gloom. There are actually people out there. Bitcoin crash. JP Morgan sees long term upside versus gold. First of all, JP Morgan doesn't see shit. He's dead. But JP Morgan, when we say JP Morgan, it's like one of the hundred thousand people that work there, has an opinion and gets put on Yahoo Finance, syndicated here from B in crypto. But there Are people who say, listen, like this is, this is insane. This price move down is probably mechanical. There's no reason that bitcoin is down this bad and it should eventually catch up to gold, which it has done in the past. Now I've pushed back on the idea of a rotation, but I do think obviously that there's plenty of people out there who see this fear and insanity and this sell off as irrational and are ready to go up. Holy crap. Mike McGlone is right there staring at me. I had no idea that was going to happen. Look at him. What a chad. I just, I think I'm going to remind you guys need to apologize to Mike McGlone. Mike. Love that guy. Love that guy. You got to have people around to keep your insanity in check. So yeah, we obviously have people like JP Morgan and many others saying, listen, there's fundamental reasons for this to rise. You know, obviously there's a lot more institutions coming in. All the things I talked to with Mike about with Matt Hogan the other day, important to remember that none of those news stories that should be so big are moving price now. But when price starts to move, they're gonna become very important once again. Now, one of the biggest pieces of FUD obviously is strategy, right? Michael Saylor famously down bad. Now Obviously I think it's 77,000 ish is his cost basis for bitcoin, give or take few thousand bucks. Saylor's crypto project. What a headline. Bloomberg Saylor's little art project that he's doing. You know, his Saylor's science fair project failed to give the anticipated result. Saylor's crypto project pounded after $12.4 billion loss. Yeah, that is pretty brutal. Obviously couldn't have aligned worse with the earnings call being yesterday. So he had to go ahead and take that loss. But I also think that this is a capit. Is the capitulation type selling and insanity for strategy. Now we do have. I'm going to show you this movie. What? What Fong Lei, this video the CEO of MicroStrategy just had to say about the idea that MicroStrategy is going to be insolvent or get liquidated. Check this out. Coin needs to go down to $8,000 a coin and sit there for five years up until 2032 before we really have a problem being able to satisfy the convertible note. So thank you for pointing that out. I want to play that again because that's mind blowing. Let's see. Bitcoin needs to go down to $8,000. $8,000 and stay there for five years. Even Mike McGlone isn't that bearish. That's 20% below Mike McGlone's target. And look at this, like, crew of absolute gods right here. We got Lynn Alden, Larry Lepard, Michael Saylor. I mean, Fong Le, Tom Lee in the house right there being told, $8,000. So remember last cycle, Bitcoin broke below 30. It went ultimately down to 17, and people were like sailors. Cost basis, $27,000. It's being hunted by Wall Street. He's got commitments. And price went, like, down 50% more. And he laughed and said, bitcoin's gotta go down to 3,000 and chill for a while for me to even start to think about having a problem. $8,000. Last I checked, we were in the 60s. Anybody think we're going down another 80, 90% from here? I don't. So stop talking shit about microstrategy. Now. One of my favorite. One of my favorite indicators that we sometimes see in a bear market when we're actually about to turn around. And I wrote a newsletter about it. Maybe I'll show the newsletter first. Here you go. Here's my newsletter. It's free for all of you who don't sign up. You're the worst. But pack your bags, you're going home. Exchange retrenchment might be the bear market. Tell that. Nobody tracks. Yes, we can look at it from last cycle. How many exchanges were forced to fire how many people? Right, so this is obviously in reference to the news that the Winklevoss twins. Gemini, Gemini, Gemini crypto exchange cut 25% of workforce as bitcoin slumps. So obviously volumes are down. Bitcoin's down bad. They start firing people, they're leaving the eu. I mean, they're leaving the uk, Europe, and I think Australia. I don't want to quote it wrong, but I know that they're leaving. Yeah, European Union, UK and Australia, they're leaving entirely right now because they just hate those places. I don't know. I don't. I don't think they hate those places. Nobody really likes Europe or the UK right now, at least on our side of the pond. I'm just being honest, but I don't think that was the reason behind their business decision. They're just not making money over there. Right. Those markets are pretty much dead for this. But, yeah, 25% layoffs. But if you dig in, last cycle, last cycle we saw these. Coinbase, 2000 employees cracked in 1100. Robin Hood, a thousand employees, you know, like 30%, 36%, 40% of their workforce. And check out when they did that. This was where that happened at the depths, the absolute depths of the bear market, the total bottom. This is much like when you saw miners that were paying like $20,000amachine when Bitcoin was 69,000 at the end of 21. And by the time they got them online, those machines were like $3,000 and price was 20 grand. Right. This is the opposite thing. They're forced to do this at the dead bottom. It's the same. And there's nothing against Gemini, by the way. It's a smart business move for their business. But I'm saying that this is the same kind of capitulation behavior that you see in markets, even with retail, who's just forced to sell at the bottom. They got to bill to pay it, finally. That's always, always, always, always the dead bottom. And listen, speaking of markets and bottoms, I really don't get what all the fuss is about. Okay? I mean, we've been talking about silver forever. Here you go. Bitcoin dropped 52% from the October peak to the current bottom. Silver dropped 47% from the recent top to the current bottom. Four months for six days. Bitcoin is clearly not too volatile. I get it. I get that we have capitulation and fud and months and months and months of a downtrend, but silver went down just as much. And everyone's optimistic about silver that I can find. And nobody seems to think that silver is in a desperate bear market of death and winter and it's all over and everybody's going to die. Right. So it's worth remembering that there's a specific kind of hatred and FUD about our market that is very different from other markets. And it's also important to remember that nothing can go parabolic without taking the elevator down. Silver wasn't supposed to go up 5x in a matter of months, so of course it had this massive retrace. Oh, and by the way, both myself and Mike McGlone Silver to 50 bucks. Where did Silver get to 60 something? I mean, absolute insanity. So listen, at the end of the day, there's a lot of reasons price could go down, but it doesn't really matter. Also, it's important to remember that if you're actually here because you believe in bitcoin, long term, you'd rather be buying at 60,000 than 126,000 A&B, the price action that gives us all this anxiety and stress and Fear, it doesn't really matter. You should be just buying bitcoin as your savings account if that's what you believe it is. That's my approach. Just buying it and remembering that for you, one bitcoin is one bitcoin. Now, if you have rent to pay and you're buying bitcoin instead of doing that, then you might be mc. You're allowed to say that as long as you put Mick in front of it, you might be that right? Don't do that. But if this is the money that you were going to save and you believe that bitcoin is a better savings account than cash, then you're not selling your savings tomorrow because of the price action. Can you imagine if every time you thought about the value of your house, you had to look at a chart? You would puke your house when the housing market got bad, even though you have to live in it, just because you couldn't take the fact that the value had gone down, even though that value on that day is irrelevant to you because you're going to live in that house for the next 10 or 15 years. View Bitcoin like your house. And if shit goes bad enough, honestly, I'm going to tell you, just move into your bitcoin, live there, live in your bitcoin. You don't need a house. You heard it here first, guys. That is all we have for you today, Bitcoin. A very nice bounce. I could see how this could be the bottom or certainly a bottom for quite a while. I personally have been buying very, very aggressively. And if it goes lower, I will be doing the same because I deeply, deeply believe that bitcoin will trade much higher in the not so down distant future. I hope you guys have a wonderful weekend. Take a deep breath. Don't even check the price. It doesn't matter. And we will see you back with Mike Malone on Macro Monday. Bye, guys. Let's do.
Episode: The REAL Reason Bitcoin COLLAPSED? (Not What You Think)
Host: Scott Melker
Date: February 6, 2026
Scott Melker hosts a solo episode to unpack the dramatic recent crash of Bitcoin below $60,000, exploring possible causes, dispelling popular myths, and offering perspective on what the bottom might look like. With trademark candor and humor, Scott navigates through market dynamics, institutional behavior, technical analysis, and community sentiment, all against the backdrop of one of crypto’s ugliest days.
Historic Drop:
Velocity & Volume:
Old Guard Exit:
Ideological Frustration:
Options & Leverage:
Ongoing Liquidations:
ETF Outflows:
Market Memory:
Failed Top Indicators:
Crowd Logic & Support Levels:
Mining Economics:
Layoffs and Exchange Retrenchment:
Comparing Silver & Bitcoin Volatility:
Scott on debate and open-mindedness:
On OGs selling and changing Bitcoin:
On leverage and liquidations:
Sentiment on price predictions:
MicroStrategy actual risk:
Final advice:
Scott Melker blends sharp analysis, market skepticism, and irreverent humor throughout the episode, poking fun at herd mentality, technical analysis “cargo cults”, and the emotional rollercoaster of crypto trading. He calls for resilience, perspective, and a long-term approach, offering both tough love and consolation for battered listeners.
In Summary:
Scott Melker offers a spirited, clear-eyed take on the Bitcoin collapse—highlighting the complex technical and psychological factors behind the decline, urging listeners to ignore panic and focus on long-term conviction, and warning not to trust easy answers from memes or pundits. This episode is essential listening for anyone trying to make sense of Bitcoin’s wild swings and the mood of the crypto community.