The Bitcoin market bleeds the fall of its idol

«In the world there are more idols than realities.»

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The decline of the idols

On the stage of BTC Praguein June 2025, Michael Saylor was introduced to a packed house as “the man who never sells.” He went up, recited his twenty one rules and he left one for last, almost like a commandment: don’t sell your bitcoin. Bitcoin is energy, he said, Bitcoin is life; Don’t let the fire go out. The room gave a standing ovation. For five years, Saylor had been the priest of that liturgy, and a good part of the market knelt to listen to it.

Almost a year later, his company sold thirty-two bitcoins.

The 8-K report with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission arrived on June 1 and confirmed the figure: 32 BTC sold between May 26 and 31, at an average price of USD 77,135, for a total of about 2.5 million dollars. Against a treasury of 843,706 bitcoins, that’s 0.004%. A grain of sand.

The market reacted as if the roof had fallen. Bitcoin broke through $70,000 and continued to fall to touch $61,500 in the following days. And although the sale of Strategy was just one of several factors at play, the coincidence is difficult to ignore since the decline accelerated the same day the news was made public.

The warned war did kill the soldier

Here’s the first lesson, and it’s not about supply. Thirty-two bitcoins do not move a market where nearly USD 50 billion is traded daily—hundreds of thousands of bitcoins changing hands every day. What moved was not the offer but faith. The market was not discounting an asset; I was discounting a narrative about that asset, and narratives do not erode but break suddenly.

What is notable is that the narrative had been warning of its own breakup for a long time. Strategy had already sold bitcoin in 2022, even if it was as a tax maneuver. Saylor had announced in April that they would do it again “to inoculate the market and send the message that we did it.” And above any conference speech, there was a registration with the SEC—a legal document worth more than a thousand applauses—where the possibility of selling was contemplated. The market had all the evidence on the table, but chose not to read it.

It is the behavior of the voter who re-elects the politician who promised, without embarrassment, to take public money, and is only scandalized the day he sees him transfer the funds to his own account. There is no worse blind man than he who does not want to see. The warning was made, repeated and signed before the regulator. This time the warned war did kill the soldier.

There is an irony that sharpens the case. “Don’t trust, verify” is one of Bitcoin’s oldest mantras, and it describes exactly what the market decided not to do. Saylor himself brandished it in January 2024 to alert his followers against scammers who cloned his face with artificial intelligence. Check, don’t trust blindly, he told them. One year later, on stage in Las Vegasrejected on-chain reserve tests as a security risk. The man who asked to verify refused to have his reserves verified, and the market, far from demanding proof, gave him its complete faith.

Nick Szabo formulated it two decades ago: trusted third parties are security holes. The market turned a single man into its trusted third party, and his word into certainty.

That an idol makes a mistake does not condemn the asset it guards, and monetary history proves it. On May 7, 1999, then-British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown announced that the United Kingdom would sell more than half of its gold reserves: 395 tons in staggered auctions. Not a single gram was sold that day. Only the announcement was enough. The price of gold fell by about 10% before the first auction, to two-decade lows, and the episode was dubbed by the operators as Brown’s BottomBrown’s background.

The announcement weighed so much because the United Kingdom was not just any holder: the Bank of England guarded reserves of more than forty central banks. He was the trusted third party of gold, and when that symbolic guardian lost faith, the market read a sentence.

But it was no sentence. Shortly after, gold began a bull market that multiplied it by more than eight, and today it is trading near all-time highs. Faith in gold did not collapse; The prestige of Brown collapsed, and he went down in history as the man who sold the exact bottom. The metal continued its course, indifferent to the custodian. It’s the same mistake that the Bitcoin market just repeated: confuse the conviction of a guardian with the value of what is kept. The idol can sell poorly, change strategy or lose faith; the asset does not belong to you as much as the market believed.

Otherwise, The fall of these days is not the exclusive work of Strategy. It was a multi-pronged storm: record outflows from spot bitcoin ETFs for eleven days in a row, for more than $3.4 billion; the military escalation around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, which sent oil soaring and revived inflationary fears; and billions in leveraged positions liquidated in a cascade.

Strategy was not the quantitative cause, but the symbolic trigger. And mass psychology did the rest: you don’t have to feel betrayed to sell; It is enough to fear that others will feel betrayed and get ahead of themselves. Thus, everyone sells so as not to be last, and the prophecy of collapse fulfills itself.

Bitcoin has no idols to kill, because it never needed them

It should be said bluntly: that Strategy has sold is healthy, and that it has sold so little, even more so. The sale dismantles a dangerous myth—that of the indispensable actor, that of the fork that never fails—and does so at the cheapest possible price. Thirty-two bitcoins are a gifted lesson compared to what it would have cost to learn it with a larger sale, or worse, discover it suddenly in a crisis.

This does not mean that Strategy is going to stop buying. The most likely thing is that we will soon see a major purchase that will lower its average acquisition price and rekindle the usual enthusiasm; the company has bought bitcoin every quarter since 2020 and there is no sign of him abandoning his thesis.

What changed is that, unburdened by the weight of the promise to never sell, it can now move its pieces with the coldness of the company it always was. As the company’s former Product Manager, Leopoldo Bebchuk, told us in dialogue with CriptoNoticias, Strategy was never a temple of believers, but rather a capitalist tool to make more money, comfortable with relegating Bitcoin to the role of reserve of value and reluctant to use it as the money for which it was designed. Those who never fully believed in the ethos did not deserve the faith that the market gave them.

An uncomfortable doubt remains, and honesty forces us to leave it raised: the timing chosen was terrible, in the midst of market weakness, which could be read in a more cynical way—sell a little to push the price down and buy cheaper later. We do not affirm it; we write it down.

Two years ago we wrote that Saylor had changed the game and saved his company from irrelevance. It was true then and it still is. But the market confused a company’s move with a prophecy, and the strategist with a prophet. The mistake was never in Strategy doing what companies do. He was in the market, which centralized in a single man the spokesperson for a system whose founding principle is that no man is necessary.

Should the market stop trusting Bitcoin because Strategy betrayed its trust? The answer is no, because that trust should never have rested there. Bitcoin is today identical to what it was before the sale and what it will be after the next purchase: a neutral tool that does not ask for faith, only verification. What’s more, Bitcoin is becoming more and more each day: more advanced, more adopted and increasingly better serving its purpose as a money and financial system.

The optimistic scenario is that the market learns its lesson and stops manufacturing idols. But their memory is short and idols are convenient, because they save the work of thinking; The most likely thing is that the next one will soon be enthroned. And when that one also falls—because they all fall—Bitcoin will continue producing its block, punctually and indifferently, reminding us that in the world there are more idols than realities.