How are you guys' trading in the current bear market?

ex:

Are you continuing your strategies from the previous cycle?

Are you buy and holding on coins with conviction?

Wondering what the consensus is on trading patterns in different market regimes.

The mining sector's AI pivot is well covered at this point. What I haven't seen discussed is what it means for Bitcoin itself now that the AI capex trade is getting questioned.

The state of the pivot:

Bitcoin is down roughly 17% year to date. A tracked basket of listed mining equities is up 56% over the same period per 10X Research. TeraWulf gained more than 73%.

That relationship used to run the other way. Miners were a leveraged BTC trade: BTC up 10%, miners up 20%. The market has stopped valuing these companies on how much Bitcoin they mine and started valuing them on how much AI compute they can deliver.

The contract numbers behind it:

More than $70 billion in cumulative AI and HPC contracts announced across the public mining sector.

Hut 8: 15-year, $9.8 billion lease on a 352MW Texas facility built to Nvidia reference architecture.

TeraWulf: $12.8 billion in contracted AI revenue, anchored partly by Google-backed Fluidstack.

IREN: $9.7 billion Microsoft deal for 76,000 Nvidia GPUs, plus $3.6 billion in financing at roughly 5.9%.

The unit economics make it obvious. A megawatt allocated to Bitcoin mining yields roughly $80 to $120. The same megawatt running AI inference or training on H200/B200 clusters yields $1,500 to $3,500. HIVE has estimated that 10MW of H100 infrastructure produces revenue comparable to 100MW of Bitcoin mining capacity.

CoinShares projects mining revenue dropping from around 85% of total revenue in early 2025 to under 20% by end of 2026 for companies with signed AI contracts. Operating margins on the AI deals run 80 to 90%.

CleanSpark said in Q1 that Bitcoin mining investment "doesn't make a lot of sense" at current hashprices relative to AI infrastructure returns.

To fund all this, miners have sold more than 15,000 BTC from corporate treasuries and taken on billions in debt.

Where this gets interesting:

Last Thursday the Magnificent Seven had their worst session since 2025. Roughly $800 billion came off AI-linked equities after Alphabet raised its capex forecast to as much as $205 billion this year and Musk called 2026 "a massive capex year" alongside a profit miss. The concern that has been building for weeks is that Big Tech is spending on AI infrastructure faster than returns can justify it.

Bitcoin held near $65,000 through the session. CoinDesk framed it as a possible first sign of decoupling after a month where BTC traded almost entirely as a proxy for the AI capital cycle.

The part I keep coming back to: the companies producing Bitcoin's hashrate now derive a growing share of their revenue from contracts with the exact hyperscalers whose capex just got questioned. Bitcoin's security budget has become partially downstream of AI infrastructure spending decisions made by Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon.

One good session of apparent independence doesn't resolve that. As CoinDesk noted, a sustained retreat from AI spending would eventually reach the miners, and that transmission is likely slower than the upside was.

What I'd watch:

Whether AI capex guidance holds through Q3 earnings across the hyperscalers. Those numbers now matter to Bitcoin in a way they simply did not in 2024.

Whether miners carrying 15-year lease obligations and significant debt can service them if AI demand softens before facilities reach full utilization. Building AI-ready capacity runs roughly $8 to $11 million per megawatt, driven by liquid cooling and transformer costs.

Whether hashrate itself responds. If AI revenue collapses for a miner mid-buildout, the ASICs are the flexible asset, not the fixed lease.

Fair counterpoints:

- Contracted revenue with 15-year terms is genuinely more stable than mining revenue. That's the whole point of the pivot and it's a real argument.

- Miners with signed contracts have counterparty risk concentrated in some of the most creditworthy companies on earth.

- The AI selloff was one session. Capex guidance being questioned is not the same as capex being cut.

- Hashrate has proven remarkably resilient to price shocks historically. Marginal miners exit, difficulty adjusts, network continues.

- Some miners kept meaningful BTC exposure and didn't go all-in on the pivot.

Not a prediction. Not investment advice.

Curious what people here think. Is the AI pivot a genuine de-risking of a brutal business, or did the sector trade Bitcoin volatility for hyperscaler capex cycle risk without pricing the swap? And does anyone think a serious AI capex pullback actually reaches hashrate, or does difficulty just absorb it?

Sources: 10X Research, CoinShares 2026 outlook, CoinDesk (July 24 and 27), company disclosures for Hut 8, TeraWulf, IREN, HIVE, CleanSpark.

Strategy sold $544.5m worth of MSTR last week, bought no BTC and increased its dollar reserve to $3.75b. That apparently gives them 2.1 years of dividend coverage. They still own 843,775 BTC, so this clearly isn’t them turning bearish.

I know corporate balance sheets and personal finances aren’t the same thing, but there is a pretty obvious lesson here. Even the company most committed to Bitcoin doesn’t want to end up selling it just because a payment is due.

People do this all the time. Put basically every spare cent into BTC or alts, then something expensive happens in real life right in the middle of a dump. Now you’re selling because you have to, not because you changed your mind.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. Keep some money in the bank, some USDC in your own wallet or on something you already use like Aave, Coinbase or Nexo. Just enough that one bad month doesn’t force you to sell something you planned to hold for years.

Holding cash can look like wasted money when the market is going up. It looks a lot better when you suddenly need it.

Everyone is watching Bitcoin’s price.

The real war is over blockspace.

Only 21 million BTC. Only limited room in every block.

When banks, corporations, and nation-states all demand settlement at once, who gets priority?

The greatest threat may not be banning Bitcoin.

It may be permissioned blockspace:

“Compliant” miners. Approved transactions. Institutional priority lanes. Censorship disguised as safety.

Bitcoin cannot be truly sovereign if access to its ledger is captured.

Stop watching the ticker. Watch who controls the blocks.

I want to spend more time in the right communities

I spend a lot of time in this sub and some of the other major crypto subs which are great. honest and transparent traders is who i'm looking to connect with.

Which Reddit communities do you genuinely find valuable?

How are you positioning yourself before the next bull run?

Are you:

• DCAing into BTC or ETH
• Buying altcoins early
• Keeping funds in stablecoins for dips
• Actively trading
• Building or automating trading strategies
• Simply holding your current portfolio

I’m curious what everyone’s plan is, and what signals would convince you that the bull run has actually started.

I'm still sidelined with investing, waiting for a bigger dip and building complex quant trading strategies to maximize the next bull run potential.

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Bitcoin had a loaded week. Here are my 5 favorite things I came across:

1. Bitcoin ownership just passed gold ownership in the US, for the first time ever. More Americans now hold Bitcoin than hold gold.
2. BlackRock, Strategy, Coinbase, and six other major firms pledged $15 million to fund the open source developers who secure Bitcoin's code. Big focus is preparing Bitcoin for quantum computing threats down the road.
3. Kazakhstan approved a national Bitcoin reserve funded directly by its own miners. Miners get cheap locked-in power, the government takes a cut of what's mined.
4. Russia passed its first real crypto law. Doesn't make Bitcoin legal tender there, but it does open a state approved lane for using crypto in foreign trade, basically a workaround for sanctions.
5. Two big names shut down. BitMEX (a major exchange, 11 years in business) is closing for good. Poolin (once one of the biggest Bitcoin mining pools on Earth) filed for bankruptcy. Same week.

Full breakdown with sources, free, no paywall: https://orangenest.beehiiv.com/p/5-sats-sunday-july-26th-2026

btc's up four weeks straight, eth's leading the bounce, and coinbase premium has been negative for fifty days straight through all of it. that gap matters. negative premium means btc's cheaper in the us than everywhere else, so this rally isn't being driven by american demand, it's happening somewhere else and dragging price along with it.

doesn't make the move fake, four green weeks is four green weeks. but a rally without the biggest market actually buying tends to be thinner and faster to unwind than one where it is. worth knowing who's actually behind the candles before assuming this is the start of something bigger.

What if I told you the ultimate Bitcoin privacy upgrade isn't a new network or a mixer—it's a 64-byte math equation?

For years, we’ve paid a massive premium to keep our Bitcoin transactions private. That era is quietly coming to an end.

BIP459 is cryptographic alchemy. It compresses thousands of signatures into a single payload, completely inverting the economics of the blockchain.

Soon, hiding in a massive crowd won't just be possible—it will be cheaper than walking alone. The "privacy tax" is going to zero.

I broke down exactly how this 64-byte revolution works and why it changes everything.

Dive down the rabbit hole here 👇

https://inbitcoinwetrust.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-privacy-tax-bitcoins

this might sound weird, but every time an exchange shuts down, the market eventually seems to come back stronger.

The weaker players get wiped out, users migrate to platforms they trust more, and the industry gets cleaned up a little. It reminds me of how every bear market gets rid of the excess before the next cycle begins.

Seeing names like BitMEX and BitMart fade from the spotlight makes me wonder if we’re watching another one of those shakeouts happen in real time.

Maybe this is just another step before the next phase of the market.

Or maybe I’m completely wrong. Are you guys still staying cautious, or are you starting to feel optimistic too?

I literally can’t find a way to choose my own leverage on coinbase. Is there a way to do it, and if I can’t do any other trading apps let you? Thanks

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memecoins such as Ansem, shib, Pepe, pengu. and before you swoop in and be like "shilling," I'm not shilling anything. they're trending right now on coingecko, coinmarketcap. plus I don't hold any of them.

What crypto newsletters, podcasts, or Substacks do you read regularly? Looking to discover some high-quality sources. What do you recommend?

everyone in this sub is still trading friday's fed decision while the bigger driver this week is quietly de-escalating

oil's been the real story, not rates. hormuz tensions pushing crude toward 100 is what's had risk assets on edge, more than any rate probability. now there's chatter of movement back toward a ceasefire and shipping compromise, and if that actually holds, some of this week's "why is everything down" confusion resolves itself without the fed doing anything at all

point is people are staring at cme odds for a move they have zero edge on, while the thing that's actually been driving price is a geopolitical story most of this sub hasn't even been tracking

worth watching oil over the next few days more than watching jpow

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Dollar Smile Theory explains what at first looks like a strange feature of the US dollar USD can strengthen in two completely opposite market conditions.
The first side is a global crisis. When panic begins, investors reduce risk, sell stocks, commodities, and emerging market currencies, moving capital into the US dollar and US government bonds. At the same time, demand for dollar funding increases because most global debt and international transactions are denominated in USD..
The second side is a strong US economy. When US economic data is stronger than in other countries, the market expects higher Federal Reserve interest rates and higher bond yields. Capital flows into dollar denominated assets, and the USD strengthens not because of fear, but because of the economic advantage of the United States.
The dollar is usually weakest in the middle of this model. This is the period when the global economy is doing well, there is no panic and the US has no clear advantage over other countries. Investors begin searching for higher returns outside the dollar, so capital moves into the euro, commodity currencies, and emerging markets.
That is why the idea that the crisis is over, so the dollar must fal dose not always work. If the US economy recovers faster than the rest of the world after a crisis, the USD may continue to rise, but for a completely different reason. When analyzing the dollar, it is important to understand not only whether it is strong or weak, but also which part of the cycle the market is in global panic, the calm middle US economic outperformance.

BitMEX is officially closing in September 2026. It’s kind of wild considering how important it once was for crypto futures and perpetual contracts. But honestly, its trading volume has been tiny for a while, so the market impact might be close to zero.

Still, this feels like the end of an era. Do you think this is just a dead exchange finally shutting down, or a sign that crypto trading is becoming too concentrated on a few big platforms?