I think the market is underestimating what’s taking shape around $BTC. Here’s why I’m bullish from here. ⚠️ Long post: If June marked the end of the bear market, BTC appears to have found support near both the power law’s Q0 floor, around $58.5K, and the 200-week SMA. The power law tracks BTC’s price relative to its age, with Q0 marking the model’s lower historical boundary. I view that boundary and the 200-week SMA as indicators of extreme value. Seeing them converge strengthens my view that June may have marked the bottom. Now, looking back at the BTC bull market in USD from November 2022 to October 2025, it seems to me that the climax of what was, relatively speaking, a muted bull market was an extended period of distribution around and slightly above the power law trend. That period began with the Republican election sweep in November 2024, was briefly interrupted by the “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025, and ultimately ended with the October 10 leverage-driven wipeout. The selling occurred largely between $90K and $125K. Around $100K was a huge psychological price target for many original BTC holders. For people who had held through multiple cycles, it was a natural place to take meaningful profits. Those coins rotated into new hands. The most obvious channels for new demand were the ETFs, particularly IBIT, and corporate buyers, particularly Strategy. We then entered what may prove to have been a comparatively muted BTC bear market, with a drawdown of a little over 50%. Still painful, but considerably shallower than the major bear markets of previous cycles. My interpretation is that leverage was flushed out, weaker hands capitulated, excitement and hot money faded, and more BTC moved into the hands of buyers willing to hold through volatility with long-term conviction. At this point in October 2026, BTC is ranging in the $80Ks, around the Q10 region of the power law model, and looks to me like it is beginning a move back toward the power law trend. The model I’m following puts that trend at approximately $153K by the end of October, and it continues rising over time. How soon could that happen? I believe faster than many suspect. Sellers appear increasingly exhausted, and I suspect many prospective buyers are still sidelined, waiting for lower prices that may never arrive. If that is the positioning, it may not take an extraordinary amount of new demand to move price meaningfully higher. We also see a new narrative emerging as banks and financial institutions adopt digital assets and crypto. My view is that some of this adoption is defensive: they are beginning to recognize how the emerging agentic economy could challenge parts of their business models. That does not mean every development in digital assets translates directly into BTC demand. But it does mean the financial system has increasing reasons to build and support the infrastructure around this asset class. Alongside that, we have continued adoption by large asset managers and clear incentives for those firms to grow their Bitcoin funds. There is also a broader point here. As BTC grows and matures, I expect its volatility to continue declining over time. If that happens, it becomes easier for institutional allocators to hold meaningful positions within their portfolio risk limits. It also becomes more attractive as collateral to support credit, because lower volatility makes the value supporting that credit more predictable. I think that matters for both direct institutional ownership and the growth of digital credit. Additionally, I think the market has yet to appreciate the significance of Strategy’s $STRC and Strive’s $SATA. These markets are still very small compared with private credit and high-yield/junk bonds. Yet, in my view, they offer a far more compelling combination of yield, transparency, public market liquidity, and substantial BTC assets supporting the issuing companies’ balance sheets. The bigger point is what this means for BTC demand. There is an enormous pool of capital looking for income that may never consider buying BTC directly. STRC and SATA give those investors a different way to participate: investors receive income through preferred equity, while Strategy and Strive can use capital raised through new issuance to accumulate more BTC. That creates a bridge between traditional income-seeking capital and Bitcoin, a source of demand that did not previously exist in this form. We have already seen how powerful this can be. During periods of strong issuance, STRC & SATA have raised enough capital to buy several times the BTC mined over the same period. With roughly 450 new BTC mined each day, these channels can absorb the equivalent of the entire new supply and still require existing holders to sell. If sustained, that is what I would describe as a synthetic supply shock: newly issued financial instruments funding BTC accumulation faster than miners create new coins. The effect on price ultimately depends on how much existing holders are willing to sell. And this market is still early. Even a small shift from private credit and high-yield allocations could represent substantial growth for digital credit and meaningful additional BTC demand. These structures have also operated and survived through a meaningful BTC drawdown. Now, cash reserves and, in Strategy’s case, preferred stock buybacks give management additional tools to navigate volatility and support their securities. I see that as an important step in their development. If BTC’s volatility continues to decline, I believe that strengthens the proposition further. A more stable treasury asset makes the balance sheet supporting these preferred securities easier to underwrite, just as it makes BTC easier for institutional investors to allocate to directly. That is the longer-term dynamic I’m watching: a maturing asset becoming more attractive to institutional capital, alongside a growing credit market that gives income-seeking capital a new route into BTC demand. Finally, BTC/gold is becoming increasingly interesting to me after what I view as a multi-year period of consolidation since 2022. A sustained move higher in that ratio would be an important confirmation of the broader thesis. Ultimately, I believe BTC is a better form of gold and is competing with it to become a global, nonsovereign store of value. Look at the scale of gold’s revaluation since 2022. Using rounded estimates, gold now represents approximately $29 trillion in value, compared with roughly $1.7 trillion for BTC. To me, that illustrates how large the opportunity is. BTC does not need to replace gold to become substantially more valuable. It needs to earn a greater share of the demand for a scarce store of value outside sovereign currency systems. So where do I think we are going? Given that BTC never traded meaningfully and sustainably above the power law trend during 2024 and 2025, it would not surprise me to see it reach the upper quantile bands over the next few years. The muted prior cycle does not guarantee that outcome. But it is a scenario I think becomes increasingly plausible if institutional demand keeps growing and the supply available for sale continues to tighten. In the model I’m following, Q90 for January 2028 is approximately $332K, or roughly a $6.7 trillion market capitalization. That is a moving reference point: Q90 is lower at earlier dates and continues rising as we move further into 2028 and beyond. Those levels could also become psychologically important for people who accumulated BTC between 2020 and 2023. Someone with an average cost between $20K and $40K may look at prices between $200K and $400K as an opportunity to realize something close to a 10x return. Others will be looking further ahead, perhaps toward $1 million, and will have little interest in selling at those levels. We cannot know exactly where the next major wave of distribution will emerge. But I think the same process will continue: some long-term holders take profits, and ownership broadens as new buyers arrive with different time horizons and reasons to hold. My view is that we may have just worked through one of those major transfers of ownership. If June was the bottom, BTC is emerging from it with stronger holders, a more developed institutional market, new narratives, and an entirely new bridge to income-seeking investors. That is why I think a return to the power law trend, and potentially a move toward Q90 over the next few years, is worth taking seriously. Power Law Model - porkopolis.io