Decent Newsroom
Sign In

One Year After the Top: Bitcoin at $80,000 and the $40 Trillion Bill

By Roger October 26, 2026
Bitcoin sits 36% below its October 2025 high. Gold is flat, the S&P is up 12%, Brent is above $114 and US federal debt has passed $40 trillion. What this drawdown is clearing, and what it is not.
One Year After the Top: Bitcoin at $80,000 and the $40 Trillion Bill

Bitcoin trades at $80,209 this morning. The all-time high was $126,080 on 6 October 2025, which puts the price 36.4 percent below the record, set almost exactly one year ago.

The tape, before the theory

Down 2.97 percent over seven days, 4.43 percent over fourteen, 4.63 percent over thirty. Slightly up over sixty days, down 29.9 percent over twelve months measured from 26 October 2025. Between $79,332 and $80,825 in the past twenty-four hours, so nothing is breaking. Turnover was $19.3 billion against a market value of $1.61 trillion, which is 1.2 percent. That is a market which has stopped arguing with itself.

Sentiment sits where you would expect a year into a drawdown. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index reads 50, neutral, after printing 68 on 22 October. CoinMarketCap’s altcoin season index is 50, down from 60 on 20 October. Bitcoin dominance is 60.1 percent, and that is the number to hold on to: capital did not leave the asset class, it retreated to the only thing in it with a fixed supply.

Bitcoin price, October 2025 to October 2026

Then the flow data, which is more informative than the price. US spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $301 million last week, ending two consecutive weeks of outflows, according to Farside figures reported by Cointelegraph. Two weeks before that: minus $228 million, then minus $680 million. October is still negative on the month at roughly $314 million.

Inside the week sits the real story. Plus $1.08 billion from Monday to Wednesday, when Bitcoin touched $84,777. Then minus $774 million on Thursday and Friday as it slid back toward $80,000. Money arrived at the high and left at the low. That is not accumulation. That is a position being unwound.

What fell was a claim, not a coin

Austrian economics makes this almost embarrassingly simple. The price of bitcoin is a valuation of a future claim. The supply of bitcoin is an accounting fact. Nothing moved in the second number this year.

Block 973,216 carries 3.125 new coins. At 144 blocks a day that is 450 coins, about $36.1 million of new supply daily, $13.2 billion a year. The stock-to-flow ratio sits near 122. That schedule was written before most people reading this had heard of Sam Bankman-Fried, and it does not take calls.

So a third of the price came off the claim, and the claim was levered. Mises described the sequence a century ago in Human Action: credit that is too cheap makes projects look profitable that were never profitable, the projects get built, and then the bill arrives as a correction. The liquidation is not the disease. It is the cure being administered late.

Everything in the advance to October 2025 was financed. Borrowed money, structured products, treasury companies buying a scarce asset with debt, ETF wrappers sold to people who wanted a quarterly number rather than a monetary thesis. When the marginal buyer is levered, the marginal seller sets the price on the way down. Thirty-six percent is what that looks like from the inside.

The ETF data makes the point better than any theory. DWF Labs examined every Bitcoin sell-off of 15 percent or more since the funds launched in January 2024 and found net outflows during seven of eight of them. Their verdict, quoted by Cointelegraph: “ETF investors aren’t the dip buyers people think they are.”

Read that in time-preference terms instead of market terms. A wrapper does not change what a holder wants. It lets someone own the asset without owning the thesis, and the person who owns without the thesis sells first when the number stops going up. The money was real. The conviction was rented.

Miners bent. They did not break.

The network’s answer to a one-third price decline is the most useful fact in this entire picture, because it is the one thing a fiat system cannot do.

Hashrate, smoothed over thirty days, runs near 1,010 EH/s. Twelve-month peak: 1,245 EH/s. Mining is roughly 19 percent off its record while the price is 36 percent off its own. Difficulty stands at 140.6 trillion. Put together: enough machines switched off to matter, the protocol then cut the cost of the next block, and the rest kept hashing near record pace.

Hashrate and price, twelve months

That adjustment is the entire mechanism. Gold mining answers a lower price by closing marginal shafts and waiting, while the above-ground stock keeps growing at whatever rate the survivors manage. Bitcoin answers by lowering the difficulty for everyone, on a schedule, with no committee, no bailout and nobody deciding in advance who deserves to survive.

The network pays $36 million a day in subsidy to miners. At $80,000 the least efficient of them are losing money, and they are supposed to. Losing that money is the audit. Anyone who claims the network is dying should be asked to explain the difficulty number first.

Where the new money actually went

Cantillon noticed in the 1730s that new money enters an economy at a point, not everywhere at once. Whoever stands at that point buys at the old prices and sells at the new ones. Everybody downstream pays for the difference.

In 2020 and 2021 the injection point was financial assets, and bitcoin went vertical because it sat exactly where the new money landed. This year the injection point moved. It went into government deficits and into a capital spending race in artificial intelligence. Brent crude is $114.30 and WTI $100.63 this morning, both up sharply on the risk of renewed US strikes on Iran ahead of the midterms, while equities are soft because the AI spending is being questioned: the S&P 500 fell 0.6 percent on Friday, the Nasdaq 0.2 percent, the Dow 1.4 percent.

Bitcoin has no seat at that table. There is no privileged first recipient, no primary dealer, no bank that receives the new coins before the price moves. New supply goes to whoever burns electricity, and the market decides what that is worth. That design is why bitcoin cannot be debased. It is also why bitcoin does not capture a credit injection the way an asset with friends inside the banking system does. The feature and the bug are the same line of code.

None of that money vanished this year. It went somewhere else first. Sound money waits for the second-order effects, and the waiting is not pleasant while it lasts.

The bill: $40.4 trillion at 3.53 percent, rolled into 5

Here is the number the price chart is not about, and probably should be.

Total US public debt outstanding reached $40.44 trillion on 22 October, of which $32.60 trillion is held by the public, according to the Treasury’s Debt to the Penny dataset. The average interest rate the Treasury pays across all interest-bearing debt stood at 3.531 percent at the end of September, from the same source. The ten-year note yields 4.995 percent this morning after touching 4.939 percent on Thursday, the British gilt pays 5.36 percent, and Japan pays 2.80 percent.

The arithmetic needs no forecast. Every percentage point of extra average rate on $40 trillion is about $404 billion a year, before a single new dollar is borrowed. Existing debt was financed at 3.53 percent. New money costs five. Each maturing bond is a small repricing upward, and the roll never stops.

That is the tax nobody votes on. It is also why an asset with a fixed supply and no counterparty stays interesting even in a year when it loses a third of its price. A debt of this size does not get repaid in money that holds its value. It gets repaid, or rolled, in money that does not.

The honest part: gold did its job. Bitcoin did not.

Twelve months, three assets, base 100

Twelve months, three assets, each indexed to 100 at the start of the window. Gold futures sit at $4,032 this morning, 0.3 percent higher than a year ago. The S&P 500 is at 7,624, up 12.3 percent. Bitcoin is down 29.9 percent across the same stretch.

If the test of money is what holds its value while everything else is repriced, gold passed and bitcoin failed. There is no clever way around that sentence and I am not going to manufacture one.

Explaining it does not rescue the result, but it does describe the mechanism. Menger’s point was that money emerges from salability, and salability has two halves that get confused constantly: how easily a thing can be sold, and how stable its price is once you sell it. Bitcoin scores near the top of the first and near the bottom of the second, because it is not yet two decades into price discovery while gold is five thousand years in. During a margin call, the asset you can sell at three in the morning on a Sunday is the asset that gets sold. That says more about liquidity than about monetary properties.

Thiers’ law holds that good money drives out bad when people are free to choose. A forced sale is not a free choice. Keep the two apart before declaring which money won.

The halving clock, without the prophecy

Bitcoin is 925 days past the April 2024 halving and 533 days from the next one at block 1,050,000, which lands in spring 2028 at ten-minute blocks. Issuance drops from 450 coins a day to 225. Anyone who hands you the date of the next top from that calendar is guessing and charging you for the guess.

The halving does exactly one thing: it halves the flow of new supply. It says nothing about demand, and demand set this year’s price. What the event does change is the cost floor of production, because miners who cannot cover electricity at 225 coins a day eventually leave, and the survivors define the marginal cost of a coin. That is a slow force, measured in quarters, not in weeks.

What would have to be true

Not a target. Conditions, roughly in the order they would appear.

Flows have to stop being a weekly bounce. Three hundred million in, after $228 million and $680 million out, with the month still negative, is noise. Four consecutive weeks of net inflow while the price goes sideways is what accumulation looks like when it is not a trade.

Hashrate has to stop falling before difficulty does. A miner who switches off is a seller who has stopped selling, and the adjustment that follows rebuilds the floor.

Rate pressure has to ease without a recession forcing it. A ten-year at five percent turns every risk asset into a funding trade. Bitcoin’s drawdown lining up with the long end repricing is not a coincidence.

And the borrowed money has to be gone rather than rolled into a longer maturity with a friendlier name. Deleveraging that gets interrupted returns later and larger. That is the Austrian reading of 2008 and nobody has repealed it.

I do not know where the bottom is. Nobody who tells you that they do is giving you information.

What the ledger says

Four hundred and fifty coins a day. One block every ten minutes. A supply schedule that has never missed a payment, sitting opposite a bill of $40 trillion that has to be rolled at a rate higher than the outstanding stock pays.

The price this morning is $80,209. It will be something else by the time you read this, and the ledger will not have moved.

Sources

Write a comment