Bitcoin's Great Dichotomy
- Andrew B. White
- Nov 27
- 4 min read
Bitcoin is what it is not what they think it is
In the world of Bitcoin, a fundamental schism exists, separating two distinct types of holders. This divide is not just about strategy, but about a fundamental understanding of the asset itself.
On one side, you have the accumulators, the “Hodlers”. This group understands what Bitcoin is at its core.They accumulate it with a long-term horizon, not because they expect to flip it for quick gains, but because they grasp its fundamental nature: a decentralized, absolutely scarce, censorship-resistant, borderless digital bearer asset that serves simultaneously as a store of value and a peer-to-peer monetary rail.For them, Bitcoin is the future digital monetary infrastructure — not a trade. Their strategy is simple: acquire and hold for the long term, largely indifferent to the short-term noise of price swings. They are playing a game of years, measured in satoshis per dollar, not dollars per bitcoin.
On the other side, you have the speculators. They are agnostic to Bitcoin's underpinnings. They see it as a volatile ticker symbol, a vehicle for exposure to price action. They trade based on technical charts, momentum, algorithmic triggers and narrative flows, often treating bitcoin as just another high-beta tech stock. Their game is one of weeks, days, hours, and minutes.
Understanding this divide is essential, because it reveals a deep contradiction in how bitcoin trades versus what Bitcoin fundamentally represents.
This leads to a critical, and often misunderstood, point: bitcoin, by its inherent nature, is not correlated to traditional risk assets like equities, like the MSM financial media want you to think it is. This does not mean bitcoin is immune to the real macro environment. Two forces do matter:
Monetary expansion / contraction (liquidity, M2, global dollar conditions)
Inflationary expectations and monetary debasement
These influence all forms of money, Gold and bitcoin included.But they have nothing to do with the correlation games financial markets project onto bitcoin.
In a rational world, bitcoin’s price should reflect bitcoin’s monetary reality, not Wall Street’s risk-on / risk-off narratives.
And yet, when you look at the short-term price charts, a different story is told. bitcoin appears to gyrate in near-lockstep with the Nasdaq. Why?
Financialization has given powerful actors — institutions, trading desks, funds, and automated systems — the ability to impose their own worldview onto bitcoin in the short term.Their worldview is simple:
bitcoin should behave like a high-beta tech stock.
Not because this is intellectually justified — it isn’t — but because this framing creates profitable volatility. This is a profound and convenient mispricing of reality which has created a golden opportunity:
Volatility creates liquidations.
Liquidations create forced sellers.
Forced sellers create cheap coins.
Cheap coins create accumulation opportunities for strong hands with deep pockets.
Once bitcoin became entangled with equities, futures, ETFs, and derivatives, its price became susceptible to short-term engineering — whether intentional or simply emergent from tightly coupled markets.
This is why cross-asset shocks, equity-driven narratives, and algorithmic flows can push bitcoin around even when those events have zero connection to bitcoin’s actual value proposition.
It is not bitcoin changing. It is the market structure around bitcoin that distorts the signal.
By forcing bitcoin into a correlated, high-volatility box, these powerful players have engineered a market where an absolutely scarce asset can be acquired on the cheap. If you are big enough, you can create the very conditions for the price swings that pry bitcoin from weak hands. You can spread FUD about a major corporate holder, engineer a cascading liquidation in the derivatives market, or manipulate the options landscape—all based on a narrative that is fundamentally untrue to bitcoin's essence.
This is the grand irony of bitcoin “financial” markets: an asset that should be a haven from traditional financial system risk is being traded with the leverage and correlated logic of that very system. Every move is amplified by an interconnected web of algorithms that trade not on "what bitcoin is," but on short-term noise, creating violent transfers of wealth from those who do not understand the asset to those who understand it all too well.
The Strategic Game: Extract Bitcoin From Weak Hands
Bitcoin is absolutely scarce — only 21 million will ever exist.If you are large enough and sophisticated enough, any mechanism that can:
introduce volatility
trigger liquidations
create panic in speculators
or correlate bitcoin with irrelevant asset classes
becomes a mechanism for extracting scarce coins from weak hands into strong hands.
This is why price manipulation — explicit or implicit — is so valuable.Because every liquidation event is a transfer of satoshis from leveraged, impatient, short-term players to long-term holders who understand the asset.
The irony is that bitcoin, which is engineered to be immune to human manipulation at the protocol level, is regularly manipulated at the market microstructure level by those who exploit liquidity, leverage, and narrative asymmetry.
Therefore, the ultimate defense for the long-term holder is clarity of vision. You must focus relentlessly on what bitcoin is, and ignore what they want you to think it is. This philosophy must extend to action: self-custody your coins, hold them in your own wallet, avoid lending them out, and resist over-collateralizing them. By doing so, you opt out of their game. You ensure that when the artificial storms are created, you are not one of the "weak hands" being ripped off of your precious, absolutely scarce bitcoin. You become the unshakeable strong hand, patiently waiting for the fog to clear, knowing that in the long run, substance will always defeat noise.
In summary, if you have a long term view, the only rational stance is:
Focus on what bitcoin is, not what short-term markets pretend it is.
Self-custody your coins.
Do not leave them on exchanges.
Do not lend them out.
Do not over-collateralize them.
Do not give trading venues the leverage to liquidate you.
Because during every panic, every engineered swing, every correlation shock, the same thing happens:
Bitcoin does not change but the smart holders change.
Strong hands accumulate and weak hands capitulate.And the long-term trajectory remains driven not by noise, but by bitcoin’s fundamentals: scarcity, decentralization, monetary entropy, and global adoption.
Comments