I’m not going to sugarcoat it — watching your portfolio bleed is painful. Every time I check the charts and see another red candle, there’s that gut-level reaction that says stop buying, you idiot. But I’ve been through enough cycles now to know that the gut is usually wrong at exactly the moments it screams the loudest.
So yeah, I’m buying all the way down. And here’s why.
The Pain Is Real, But So Is the Thesis
It hurts losing money on stuff I’ve already bought. That’s just the truth. But I think you have to suck it up when you don’t know how far down it goes. I believe in crypto — not as a get-rich-quick trade, but as a fundamental shift in how value moves around the world. And if you believe in something long-term, you don’t panic-sell when the market corrects 50% from highs. You keep accumulating.
I wrote a few weeks ago about dollar-cost averaging into this downturn, and I haven’t changed that approach. If anything, I’ve leaned into it harder. The prices I’m getting now on assets I was buying at 2x or 3x these levels.. I mean, either the thesis is broken or this is a gift. I don’t think the thesis is broken.
What Fuels the Next Push?
This is the question I keep coming back to. And honestly, I think there are two scenarios for how this plays out.
Scenario one is the sudden catalyst. Someone like a Mark Cuban comes out and says crypto isn’t just at a discount — it’s BEYOND a discount. Michael Saylor keeps doubling down, which he’s doing. Institutional money that’s been sitting on the sidelines sees the risk/reward has flipped and starts deploying capital aggressively. You get a sharp V-shaped recovery and everyone who sold the bottom kicks themselves.
Scenario two is the slow grind. Crypto languishes through the summer. No more massive dives, but no exciting rallies either. Just boring sideways action that drives away the short-term speculators. And then one day — probably September, maybe October — people look up and realise things have quietly crept up 35% from their bottom. That’s when the next wave of buying kicks in, and by then you’ve either been accumulating or you’re chasing.
I’m positioning for both scenarios by just buying consistently. I don’t need to time the exact bottom. I need to be in the market when the turn happens.
The China Problem (Again)
Now, we can’t talk about this market without talking about China. The Chinese central bank has been making noise again about cracking down on crypto trading. And I’ll be honest — I think there’s something deeper going on here than the usual regulatory posturing.
Here’s what annoys me: this is essentially the SAME rule they issued back in 2014. It’s old news. So why do they keep ramping down the markets with it? Every time China “bans” crypto, the market tanks, and then it recovers, and then China bans it again. It’s like a cycle within a cycle.
But I think this time the motivation is different. I believe the Chinese are trying to kill the crypto “currencies” — specifically their use as settlement assets — to make room for the digital yuan. They want THEIR digital currency to be the international settlement mechanism, not Bitcoin, not stablecoins, not anything decentralised. And the way you clear the field is by making it as difficult as possible for your 1.4 billion citizens to use the competition.
Sadly, that narrative doesn’t seem to help the price in the short term. Markets react to headlines, and “China bans crypto” is a pretty powerful headline — even if it’s the fourth or fifth time they’ve done it.
The Storytelling Problem
And this brings me to something that genuinely frustrates me about crypto markets. A LOT of what drives price action is storytelling. Not fundamentals, not adoption metrics — stories.
The bull story goes like this: you want to own crypto when central banks are debasing their currencies and allowing inflation to run. That’s the Saylor argument, and it’s a pretty compelling one. But here’s the problem — post-Fed, a lot of the market now thinks the Fed is getting a handle on things. If that’s true, if inflation expectations are coming down and the Fed is seen as credible, then that UNDERMINES the very narrative that brought institutional money into crypto in the first place.
The other thing that bugs me: in any other market, you get bulls AND bears. That’s healthy. People publicly take opposing views, and the market finds price somewhere in between. In crypto, the big guys almost never publicly come out and say they’re bearish. It’s all bullish all the time — with maybe one or two exceptions. And when the only public voices are saying “buy buy buy,” you lose an important signal about where real sentiment sits.
The Futures Wrinkle
There’s also the end-of-month dynamic that I think people consistently underweight. Futures contracts expire, and the period from roughly the 21st to the 28th of each month tends to get weird. Price suppression around options and futures expiry is a well-documented phenomenon in traditional markets, and it’s arguably even MORE pronounced in crypto where the market is thinner and easier to push around.
Is it possible this latest dip has less to do with China and more to do with the usual end-of-month pressure? Absolutely. Which is another reason I’m not panicking.
The Bottom Line
I’m still buying. The short-term pain is real, but the long-term thesis hasn’t changed. China is playing a strategic game with the digital yuan. The storytelling problem means sentiment can flip faster than fundamentals warrant — in BOTH directions. And the next push, whenever it comes, will reward the people who were accumulating while everyone else was panicking.
Suck it up and keep stacking. That’s my plan.
