As crypto’s multi-month downturn accelerated into a sharp selloff last week, longtime bitcoin skeptics wasted little time declaring victory.
With prices sliding rapidly, bulls were left searching for bottoming signals—whether in technical indicators or speculation about the forced unwinding of leveraged hedge funds—that might suggest the worst of the bear market was over. Yet one of the more reliable contrarian indicators may be the renewed confidence of bitcoin’s most persistent critics.
Few institutions have been as consistently skeptical of bitcoin as the Financial Times. For more than a decade, the London-based paper has maintained a firm no-coiner stance, often expressed through sharp commentary from its opinion writers. A high point came in 2025, when columnist Katie Martin quipped that her teeth were scarcer than bitcoin and therefore ought to be worth billions.
That tone resurfaced this weekend in a column by Jemima Kelly, originally headlined “Bitcoin is still about $69,000 too high”—later amended to “$70,000 too high” after bitcoin ticked up overnight. The headline neatly summarized the FT’s long-running view.
“Ever since its creation, bitcoin has been on a journey that will end, splattered on the ground,” Kelly wrote, arguing that the market relies on an ever-growing supply of “greater fools” that is now drying up. The narratives propping up crypto, she added, are being exposed as fairy tales, with investors waking up to the idea that there is “no floor” beneath an asset based on “thin air.”
Earlier in the week, as bitcoin fell below the roughly $76,000 average cost basis of Strategy’s massive BTC holdings, another FT columnist, Craig Coben, took aim at the company itself. In an essay titled “Strategy’s long road to nowhere,” Coben argued that management faced “no safe choices—only different paths to destroying shareholder value.”
With Strategy’s stock already down about 80% from its late-2024 peak, Coben said it was difficult to justify investing in a vehicle that had merely broken even on its bitcoin strategy over five years. He likened the company to “a gigantic mastodon stuck in the La Brea tar pits… flailing for a way out.”
Schiff joins the chorus
Gold advocate and longtime bitcoin critic Peter Schiff also seized the moment. With gold still in a broader bull market despite recent volatility, Schiff used bitcoin’s weakness to revisit familiar arguments.
“According to Michael Saylor, bitcoin is the best-performing asset in the world,” Schiff wrote on Tuesday. “Yet Strategy invested over $54 billion in bitcoin over the past five years and is now down about 3% on that investment. I’m sure the losses over the next five years will be much greater.”
He added that bitcoin, priced in gold, has fallen sharply from its 2021 peak. “Bitcoin below $76,000 is now worth 15 ounces of gold, down 59% from its November 2021 high,” Schiff said, arguing the asset remains in a long-term bear market when measured against hard money.
Other signals
Former hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry once warned against trying to time market bottoms. “I refuse to pick bottoms,” he said. “Monkeys spend all their time picking bottoms.”
That caution still applies, particularly when reacting to headlines like those published by the FT this week. Still, it is often the case that such confidence from entrenched skeptics emerges closer to market lows than highs.
Other developments reinforce that impression. Interest in Tether, one of crypto’s most entrenched pillars, appears to be cooling. Late last year, amid buoyant markets, reports suggested the stablecoin issuer was exploring a $15 billion to $20 billion capital raise at a valuation as high as $500 billion.
According to a Financial Times report this week, investors are now pushing back on those terms, with discussions reportedly centered on a much smaller raise of around $5 billion. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino told the FT that reports of a $15 billion to $20 billion raise were a “misconception” and said the company had seen strong interest at the $500 billion valuation.
Even so, the report noted that some investors have privately raised concerns about that figure. As ever in crypto, sentiment remains fluid—and could shift quickly if prices rebound.
For now, the enthusiasm of bitcoin’s most reliable critics may be one of the more interesting signals to watch.
