Blain’s Morning Porridge Part 2 Feb 9^th, 2026 – The Conflabulation that is Bitcoin finally dies in a pool of disinterest.

“Rat Poison Squared”

Well, it was interesting while it lasted. Bitcoin has given me plenty to write about these last 15 years. Up, down, up, down, and shake it all about. This tumble feels different. No one is trying to seriously defend it. The walls are down and Bitcoin may be about to vanish in a puff of logic… or will it?

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Once you have them, Cockroaches are extremely difficult to exterminate.

It’s a special day indeed… 2 Morning Porridges. That’s unusual. I’ve been meaning to write about the collapsing Bitcoin conflabulation for days, but important stuff has been happening.

History is littered with sudden collapses. Seemingly invulnerable fortresses suddenly fall to a gaggle of rag-tag guerillas, empires tumble overnight, and dictators are omnipotent one moment and dead in a ditch the next. It might be the same for Bitcoin. It feels like the wind has completely gone from its sails.

“So apart from that Cathy, how’s your wallet?”

Just over a year ago… it felt very different. November 4^th, 2024, was a bad day for my personal wealth. Having faith in America, I’d convinced myself Kamela Harris could win the US presidency – despite her obvious limitations. I was in Washington, and went into the election with large, levered shorts on Tesla and Bitcoin, expecting both to tumble when Trump lost. I was wrong and both rallied spectacularly. My positions were both wiped out. Trump had promised us the future was Crypto and he would make it so…

I knew the risk and shrugged. You win some, you lose some. But…. what goes around, comes around.

This morning the world has already forgotten its shocked bewilderment that Trump posted Obama as a monkey on Truth-Social last week. Someone else will take the blame. There will be little in the way of a reckoning or punishment. He has turned insult and grift into an art form. And he cares little for crypto – made him rich but who cares? Last week we were reading about Abu Dhabi quietly buying 49% of Trump’s crypto venture, and we shrugged. Trump ain’t daft – he’s spread the risks of his efforts to cryptonise the US economy to his own personal benefit.

Today, the world feels distinctly meh about BTC.  I feel a bit like a Canadian seal-clubber as I write about Bitcoin … these sad-eyed millennials and GenZs wondering why they aren’t rich… but Trump is? I almost feel sorry for them as I swing the club, telling them; “you’ve naebody to blame but yerself.” Thwack!

The truth is it’s well past closing time for Bitcoin, one of most improbable and corniest ideas ever in global finance. Like Trump it was interesting but fundamentally a mire of contradictions. Like Trump, Bitcoin no longer excites us, but has become boring, repetitive and lost the lustre it once had… Like any good Ponzi scheme, it worked because although it was entirely speculative it seemed to be a magical money tree! Not anymore – ignore Michael Saylor when he tells us it’s going up as his head goes under the water for the third time.

Today the meme-stock markets and bitcoin fan-boys are growing up. They are beginning to understand that there are real assets, like gold and stocks, that not only also provide real upside, but are genuine and grounded in way Bitcoin never was. If you want to speculate to get rich… there are real assets to realise upside from. You don’t need to play pixels some cyber-crim has his eye on.

I’ve been writing about Bitcoin since 2010. If you are a subscriber you can find everything I’ve written about Bitcoin since 2018. The only thing positive I’ve ever said about is I’ve been very happy to trade the stupidity of others. (Yep, I’ve made some money playing Bitcoin sentiment – not as much as lost on my election trade mind you.)

I’ve consistently said Bitcoin was a daft idea. I’ve therefore repeatedly been told I’m an idiot, that I don’t understand it, and my qualifications to call myself a market strategist without embracing crypto makes me a liar and a fool. I’ve stuck to my guns.

I’ve never doubted the strength of my gut feel that crypto is utter bunkum, but I’ve been repeatedly surprised by the resilience of the frankly ridiculous narratives and promises that have thrived around it. The reality was I underestimated the gullibility of people, and the Bitcoin shills’ ability to attract greater fools versus common sense, logic and facts. Which I guess explains its longevity.

This will be the 6^th collapse in Bitcoin I’ve written about. This one feels different. There is little of the usual “puff” of influencers and crypto “experts” arguing to HODL, pointing at charts sloping ever upwards to $1 million dollars, or not even much noise about buying the dips. Some of the more thoughtful crypto analysts are still on the wires – and they are warning there is more trouble to come.

It feels like much of the crypto-verse has quietly walked away. Some of crypto’s big names have very publicly expressed their renunciation of the false money, justifying their newfound disinterest because of the imminence of quantum computing, it’s failure to be accepted as digital gold, the collapse of the economics of bitcoin mining, that it trades like a levered Nasdaq death slider. Mining is the big issue – its critical miners keep mining to keep the BTC market beating. But most folk get it – Bitcoin is technologically obsolete. Its clunky and without miners, it dies.

There is exhaustion among the shills who pumped and dumped the concept. They’ve given up making noise and telling lies around institutional adoption (which actually meant Blackrock was happy to sell retail BTC ETFs), and the need to hold it in a “balanced” portfolio. Bitcoin has lost its mojo. Enthusiasm for crypto has not waned – its walked away!

I suspect many former Bitcoin shills and barkers have moved into selling AI – check out your socials and Linked-in feed for offers to AI your business, sell you Agents, advice and experience, all with the same breathless “I’m and expert and you know nothing” pitch the BTC shills employed. I laugh out loud.

Back in 2010 I was quite excited about the concept of digital money – I couldn’t find any way to buy it when I first I heard about it. As I read more, I became more concerned about the insane libertarian nonsense around it. It was clever – but so was Stalin. I understood proof of work, but concluded mining would be terribly wasteful.  I saw absolutely no basis or need for libertarian money. I was no fan of QE, but I rather thought global Central Banks and Treasuries had coordinated a rather effective defence against the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.

Increasingly I saw Bitcoin as a bad case of Emperor’s New Clothes risk. One day it would be exposed as bollchocks naked. I doubted everything Bitcoin claimed to solve about the supposed evils of fiat money.

Yet by the mid 2010s Bitcoin was catching on. I watched a new type of young, aggressive guys started touting Bitcoin as the ultimate financial asset. I watched it facilitate illegal trading. I watched multiple scandals. The shills talked with great confidence, spouting absolute crap-trap about digital gold, scarcity, future values, trading patterns and transactional security. Maybe they’ve all grown up?

It was 2016 when I first offered $1000 for anyone who could explain me a single genuine unique use-case for Bitcoin that wasn’t illegal. One guy tried to sue me for not accepting his proof it was better than gold. No one has ever presented anything even close to anything beneficial and better crypto currencies deliver.

And now it is over.

Except it won’t be… somewhere, in a dark forgotten corner of an abandoned crypto mine… someone will remove the wooden stake rammed through the lifeless computer, press the red button and it will all begin again… oh well. If it does, I will trade it and dump it.

Out of time, and back to writing about real stuff tomorrow.

Bill Blain

Author of the Morning Porridge

CEO Windshift Capital

Advisor – Spitfire Strategic Capital