Bitcoin shows early bottoming signals while entrenched bears claim victory.

As crypto markets tumbled again this week, bitcoin’s most steadfast critics wasted little time declaring victory.

The latest selloff accelerated a months-long downturn into something closer to panic, leaving bulls searching desperately for signs that a final bottom might be near — whether in technical indicators, forced liquidations, or rumors of a leveraged hedge fund collapse. Yet one of the more reliable historical signals of a market low may be the sudden confidence of bitcoin’s longest-serving skeptics.

Few institutions have been as consistently hostile to bitcoin as the Financial Times. Over more than a decade, the paper has maintained a firmly skeptical stance even as bitcoin climbed from zero to six figures. That posture reached a memorable peak in 2025, when columnist Katie Martin joked that her teeth should be worth billions, given that they are far scarcer than bitcoin.

This weekend, the FT leaned back into familiar territory. In a Sunday column, Jemima Kelly argued that “Bitcoin is still about $69,000 too high,” a headline later nudged up to “$70,000 too high” after prices rose slightly overnight. Kelly wrote that bitcoin’s journey would ultimately end “splattered on the ground,” claiming that the supply of “greater fools” propping up the asset is finally running dry. Recent price action, she argued, shows investors beginning to recognize that there is no inherent floor beneath an asset “based on nothing more than thin air.”

Earlier in the week, the paper also turned its attention to Strategy, the corporate vehicle built around massive bitcoin accumulation. As bitcoin fell below the firm’s roughly $76,000 average purchase price, FT columnist Craig Coben published a scathing assessment titled “Strategy’s long road to nowhere.” With the stock down roughly 80% from its late-2024 highs, Coben argued that management faces no good options, only “different paths to destroying shareholder value,” likening the company to a mastodon trapped in the La Brea tar pits.

Longtime bitcoin critic and gold advocate Peter Schiff joined the chorus. With gold continuing to trend higher despite recent volatility, Schiff mocked claims that bitcoin remains the best-performing asset of the modern era. He pointed out that Strategy has spent more than $54 billion acquiring bitcoin over the past five years and remains modestly underwater on that investment. Measured in gold terms, Schiff added, bitcoin is down nearly 60% from its 2021 peak and remains stuck in a long-term bear market.

Former hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry once cautioned against trying to time exact bottoms, quipping that “monkeys spend all their time picking bottoms.” Still, the renewed bravado of entrenched bitcoin bears has historically been more common near market lows than highs.

Other developments this week reinforce that impression. Investor appetite for Tether appears to be cooling. Late last year, reports suggested the stablecoin issuer was considering a capital raise of $15 billion to $20 billion at valuations approaching $500 billion. According to a Financial Times report this week, investor resistance has since tempered those ambitions, with current discussions centered closer to $5 billion.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino dismissed earlier reports of a massive fundraising effort as a “misconception,” telling the FT that interest at the higher valuation remains strong. Even so, the report noted that private concerns around valuation persist, with sentiment highly sensitive to any renewed rally across crypto markets.