BITCOIN: HAS THE MARKET FORGOTTEN WHY IT EXISTS?

Bitcoin is falling, and the market is once again talking as if everything has suddenly become incomprehensible. Oil is rising. US rates are tightening. Bond yields are becoming attractive again. Risky assets are declining. Traders are liquidating. ETFs are trembling. Analysts are pulling out their charts with the gravity of a coroner discovering a red candle on a Bloomberg screen. And, as always, the question arises: Is Bitcoin really a hedge if it also falls when the world panics? The question is legitimate. But it is often asked backward.

In the short term, Bitcoin still often behaves like a risky asset. When rates rise, when the dollar strengthens, when bonds become attractive again, when oil reignites inflation fears, investors reduce risk. They sell what moves quickly. They sell what has gone up. They sell what they don't understand well. They sometimes sell Bitcoin, not because Bitcoin has changed, but because their portfolio needs to survive the week.

This is exactly what we just saw again. Bitcoin slipped below $77,000 amid an oil shock and rising US Treasury yields, two forces that directly weigh on risk appetite. Market data from several sources indicate that BTC was trading around $76,700, with heavy long liquidations over the weekend, as oil and US yields fueled fears of inflation and monetary tightening.

The market's reflex is simple: more expensive oil means potentially more stubborn inflation. More stubborn inflation means higher rates for longer. Higher rates mean more attractive bonds and less attractive risky assets. In this mental model, Bitcoin is not treated as a monetary disruption. It is treated as a volatile line in the "risk" pocket of a portfolio. When risk contracts, Bitcoin is sold with the rest. But here's the problem: this reasoning explains short-term price movement. It does not explain Bitcoin. And that's where the market reveals its amnesia.

Bitcoin was not created to rise every day the system shows a crack. It was not created to react mechanically like gold in every minute of panic. It was not created to reassure leveraged traders, nor to guarantee ETFs a clean and progressive curve. Bitcoin was created because the modern monetary system rests on a permanent contradiction: it claims to protect value while organizing its dilution. It claims to ensure stability while accumulating debt. It claims to control inflation while depending on a political machine incapable of living without monetary expansion. When oil rises, when rates tighten, when markets panic, Bitcoin can fall in the short term. But in the long term, it is precisely these tensions that explain why it exists. The market looks at the red candle. Bitcoin looks at the system that produces the red candle.

The rise in US yields is at the heart of this mechanism. Reuters reports that US bond yields have reached worrying levels, with the 10-year rate around 4.631%, its highest level since February 2025, amid inflationary fears linked to rising energy prices and Middle East tensions. These higher yields weigh on stocks, particularly sectors sensitive to financing costs and future growth prospects. This is not a macroeconomic detail. This is the heart of the old world.

When rates rise, the whole system trembles because the whole system lives on credit. States, businesses, households, real estate, stock markets, banks, funds, technology valuations, public balance sheets: everything depends on the price of money. When this price increases, illusions become more expensive to maintain. Debt does not disappear. It simply becomes heavier. Bitcoin, however, has no debt. The protocol refinances nothing. It rolls no bonds. It does not depend on a central bank to make its model sustainable. It does not need the Fed to cut rates to produce the next block. It does not ask the bond market for permission to exist. This is precisely what makes it so strange in a world where almost everything rests on credit.

And yet, its short-term price remains influenced by this world. This is frustrating, but not contradictory. Bitcoin is a monetary exit quoted in a casino still dominated by the system it criticizes. It can be right in the long term and sold in the short term by people who do not understand its raison d'être. It can be a response to debt and fall when rates rise. It can be a hedge against monetary degradation and fall during an initial inflationary shock. The market is not a philosopher. It is a nervous crowd with algorithms. This tension must be accepted.

Most investors do not yet hold Bitcoin as hard money. They hold it as an exposure. A risk pocket. An option on liquidity. An alternative asset. An ETF line. A diversification thesis. A tactical position. So, when oil rises and bonds scream, they cut. They don't ask if Bitcoin is an answer to the fragility of the energy, monetary, and geopolitical system. They ask if their VaR will explode before closing. That's human. That's even professional. But it's not profound.

Energy is at the center of this story. Oil is not just a commodity. It is the black blood of the industrial economy. When its price rises sharply, everything becomes more expensive: transport, production, heating, food, delivery, manufacturing. Energy inflation spreads everywhere like a bad smell in a closed room. Central banks can talk about rates, but they don't drill for oil with press releases. They can break demand, not create cheap energy.

Bitcoin, however, is often criticized for its relationship with energy. It is accused of consuming electricity, as if securing an open global currency should be free, as if the existing banking, military, real estate, and monetary system operated on prayers and a few LED bulbs. But energy crises remind us of something essential: money and energy are linked. An economy cannot lie about its energy forever without eventually lying about its money.

Bitcoin makes this relationship visible. It transforms energy into monetary security through proof of work. This is not a peripheral flaw. It is its truth mechanism. In a world where currencies can be created by political decision, Bitcoin forces payment of the physical cost of monetary production. It is brutal. It is imperfect. It is demanding. But it is precisely what distinguishes it from fiat, whose marginal cost of creation is politically disguised. When oil rises, the market sees a threat to risky assets. Bitcoin sees further confirmation that energy is the deep layer of the system.

And when rates rise, the market sees a threat to valuations. Bitcoin sees further confirmation that cheap money has built a world too dependent on permanent refinancing. The problem, therefore, is not that Bitcoin falls in this context. The problem is that the market interprets this fall as an invalidation, whereas it can also be seen as the noise of an asset still being monetized. Bitcoin is not yet fully understood as a global reserve. It is still traded as a hybrid asset: a bit tech, a bit gold, a bit macro, a bit speculation, a bit flight, a bit casino, a bit insurance against the gradual collapse of trust.

This hybridization creates confusion. One day, Bitcoin rises because ETFs are buying. The next day, it falls because rates are rising. One day, it is presented as digital gold. The next day, it is sold as a growth stock. One day, companies accumulate it as a reserve. The next day, traders liquidate leveraged positions because oil has risen 3%. It is not Bitcoin that changes its nature every twenty-four hours. It is the market that does not yet know which box to put it in.

And perhaps Bitcoin is not meant to fit neatly into a box. It is a currency without a central bank, but not yet a dominant unit of account. It is an emerging store of value, but still very volatile. It is a global asset, but treated by many as an American trade sensitive to Treasury yields. It is an exit from the fiat system, but often bought via ETFs in the traditional financial system. It is a promise of sovereignty, but many hold it with custodians. It is a radical technology, but Wall Street transforms it into a product.

Inevitably, the market becomes schizophrenic. But this schizophrenia must not obscure the essential. Bitcoin exists because the fiat system is structurally unstable. Not because it collapses every morning. Not because it is unable to survive much longer. Sick systems can last a very long time, especially when they control the rules of the game. Bitcoin exists because this system demands increasing trust in institutions that have less and less room for maneuver.

Let's look dispassionately. States are over-indebted. Central banks must arbitrate between inflation and recession. Markets depend on low rates but claim to be robust. Bonds, supposed to be the bedrock of security, themselves become a source of stress when yields rise too quickly. Energy remains geopolitically fragile. Trade wars, Middle East tensions, supply chains, global fragmentation, all fuel a regime of lasting uncertainty. In this world, Bitcoin does not promise to eliminate volatility. It promises something else: a monetary rule that does not depend on the political management of this volatility.

This is much deeper. A short-term investor wants Bitcoin to protect them immediately. A long-term Bitcoiner understands that Bitcoin primarily protects against monetary arbitrariness. This is not the same timeline. In the short term, the price can be crushed by liquidity. In the long term, the thesis relies on scarcity, verifiability, portability, censorship resistance, and the inability of a central authority to create more to save the system. The confusion comes from the fact that many want the benefits of long-term insurance with the psychological comfort of a stable asset in the short term. Bitcoin does not provide that. Not yet. Perhaps never in this perfect form.

Bitcoin is insurance that can lose 30% just when you start to doubt your insurer. It's violent. It's absurd for classic investors. It's also the consequence of a free, liquid, global, still young asset, with no central bank to smooth shocks, no official lender of last resort, no committee to suspend the market when emotions get too loud. Bitcoin does not protect you from volatility. It protects you from the ultimate dilution of the rule. That's a huge difference.

The market, however, forgets this difference with each correction. It asks: if Bitcoin is a hedge, why does it fall when oil rises? But the right question would be: why is oil rising? Why are rates rising? Why are markets so dependent on Fed expectations? Why does a rise in yields put so much pressure on supposedly solid assets? Why does the system need so much cheap credit to sustain itself? Bitcoin is not an answer to the daily symptom. It is an answer to the structural disease.

The daily symptom is the fall below $77,000. The structural disease is a world where money, energy, debt, and monetary policy form an increasingly unstable machine. The symptom makes headlines. The disease builds history. And history remains favorable to Bitcoin, precisely because states have no clean solution to their own debt. They can raise rates to fight inflation, but they make debt more expensive. They can lower rates to relieve the economy, but they risk reigniting inflation. They can print, but they dilute. They can austerize, but they break politically. They can promise, postpone, disguise, refinance, rename, but they cannot make scarce what is designed to be flexible. Bitcoin, however, is inflexible.

This is its strength and its discomfort. It does not adapt to human crises. It does not create more BTC to save markets. It does not modify its issuance because an oil shock shakes portfolios. It does not lower its rates, because it has no rates. It does not promise a soft landing. It doesn't even have a communication department, which is probably its biggest competitive advantage. It continues. And this continuity is underestimated in a world obsessed with intervention. Markets want to know what the Fed will do. What the Treasury will issue. What OPEC will decide. What banks will anticipate. What states will subsidize. Bitcoin answers: none of this changes the rule. This is almost incomprehensible to the old world.

The old world is a world of steering. Bitcoin is a world of verification. The old world asks who will adjust. Bitcoin asks who can modify. The old world wants a monetary policy "adapted to circumstances." Bitcoin proposes a monetary policy that rejects circumstances. When circumstances become bad, the market panics. Bitcoin, however, becomes more necessary. That's why corrections linked to oil, rates, or inflation are educational. They remind us that many holders are not yet believers in monetary scarcity, but tourists of performance. They enter when ETF flows are positive. They exit when yields rise. They call Bitcoin "digital gold" as long as it rises, then "risky asset" as soon as it falls. They want the revolution without the pain of the journey.

Bitcoin sorts these people out. It sorts them out with calm cruelty. It falls. It liquidates leverages. It erases the certainties of the previous week. It forces everyone to ask: why am I here? For the price? For the exit? For speculation? For sovereignty? For scarcity? For an analyst's next tweet? For fear of missing out? To no longer depend on political money? This sorting is healthy. A market that rises without asking why becomes dangerous. A market that falls forces one to rediscover the thesis. And Bitcoin's thesis is not that every macro shock must produce an immediate rise. The thesis is that repeated macro shocks reveal the impasse of a system based on debt, fragile energy, and manipulable money.

The market may forget why Bitcoin exists. Bitcoin, however, does not forget. It exists because trust has been too often abused. It exists because banks can freeze, lend, re-hypothecate, fail, and be bailed out. It exists because states can finance the impossible through monetary issuance. It exists because national currencies are political tools. It exists because individuals' savings are continually exposed to decisions made far from them. It exists because a digital world needed digital property that was not simply a promise in a private database.

Oil, rates, and inflation do not contradict this story. They illuminate it. When energy becomes expensive, we see the fragility of the real economy. When rates rise, we see the dependence on debt. When markets panic, we see the superficiality of liquidity. When Bitcoin falls with the rest, we still see its market immaturity. But when it continues to function without asking for help, we see its fundamental difference. That's where we need to look. Not just the price. The functioning. Blocks continue. Nodes verify. Miners arbitrate their energy, their costs, their strategy. Long-term holders move little. Speculative exchanges are agitated. ETFs breathe. Traders suffer. The media dramatizes. And the protocol advances, block after block, without comment, without panic, without bailout.

In an increasingly unstable world, this indifference is a form of power. So yes, Bitcoin can fall when oil rises. Yes, Bitcoin can suffer when US yields climb. Yes, ETFs can exit. Yes, traders can liquidate. Yes, markets can treat BTC as a risky asset. It would be foolish to deny this reality. But it would be even more foolish to conclude that Bitcoin is useless. That would be like watching a lifeboat violently toss in a storm and concluding that the sea does not exist.

Bitcoin is not the promise of a comfortable journey. It is the possibility of another ship. The market may have forgotten why Bitcoin exists. That's normal. The market forgets everything beyond the quarter, the yield curve, or the next inflation data. The market is amnesiac by design. It remembers when it is afraid, forgets when it rises, panics when it corrects, and calls that analysis. Bitcoin, however, is a coded memory.

It remembers 2008. It remembers the genesis block. It remembers that banking trust has a cost. It remembers that states never resist the temptation to dilute for long. It remembers that money must be verifiable, not just promised. It remembers that scarcity without central authority is a historical invention. And that is why it exists. Not to avoid every correction. To survive the system that makes them inevitable.

To understand Bitcoin in depth, from its creation by Satoshi Nakamoto to its role in the global economy, it is essential to master its foundations. Here are the essential pages to discover Bitcoin, how it works, its importance, and its evolution: