Crypto advocates call for calm after Bitcoin’s ‘volatile’ week ends in modest gains

Crypto advocates say Bitcoin’s price slide is just a temporary blip in an otherwise upward trajectory.

Bitcoin prices continued on a modest upward trajectory on February 8, rising by around 3% day-on-day to just about $71,000 at the time of writing. But this followed a sharp drop on February 6, which saw prices tumble close to the $60,000 mark.

“Every time Bitcoin drops by 10%, the haters jump in, crowing that it’s just a digital pet rock with no value,” the hedge fund manager and founder of the Deep Knowledge Investing research platform founder Gary Brode wrote on X. “Many of them have been saying that since Bitcoin was trading at $1,000 and never seem willing to admit they’ve been wrong on the asset.”

A sweeping sell-off has seen Bitcoin lose 9% of its value over the past seven days, per CoinGecko data, with the US government telling investors it “can’t bail out Bitcoin.” Altcoins like Monero and World Liberty Financial, meanwhile, have seen downward slides of over 30% in the same period.

Volatile days

Brian Armstrong, the CEO of the crypto exchange giant Coinbase, admitted it had been “a volatile few days in the crypto markets.”

But he said this was “nothing new,” as crypto has “gone through many market cycles at this point.”

“This doesn’t change my outlook,” he wrote on X, “I don’t see how you can be anything but long-term bullish on crypto. It’s eating financial services at an incredible rate.”

Brode concurred. “Bitcoin being down this much in just a week is unpleasant and jarring,” he wrote. “But it’s not unusual. Those who have been willing to stomach the always-temporary volatility have been well-rewarded with incredible long-term returns.”

A chorus of well-known crypto skeptics have taken aim at Bitcoin in recent days, including the long-term crypto naysayer, hedge fund manager, and gold advocate Peter Schiff.

During a recent podcast interview, Schiff said in a hundred years’ time, Bitcoin’s price would be “zero,” and predicted that “no one will even remember it.”

But Brode hit back at Bitcoin Cassandras like Shiff.

“Peter Schiff claims the industrial uses for gold give it value. But if that were true, copper and silver would trade at a premium to gold,” he wrote.

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is up 3.5% over the past 24 hours, trading at $71,314.
• Ethereum is up 4.2% in the past 24 hours, trading at $2,127.

What we’re reading

• Bitcoin treasury Strategy posts $12.4b Q4 loss but Saylor tells investors not to panic — DL News
• Epstein files reveal sex offender’s attempts to steer Bitcoin development — DL News
• ‘A Big Deal’—Is This The Real ‘Wild’ Reason The Bitcoin Price Has Suddenly Bounced Back From Its Crash? — Forbes
• The great rewiring of finance: Who wins when finance goes agentic? — Milk Road
• Tether helped Turkish investigators by freezing half a billion dollars in crypto: report— DL News

Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him attdalper@dlnews.com.