Deflationary Money Hits Different: Losing Half Its Price and Winning Anyway

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Originally posted by Bryan Lutz, Contributor at The Sovereign Capitalist: The FUD is back, baby. Bitcoin is down nearly half from its 2025 high. And now, the obituaries are out of cold storage and back in heavy rotation. Sentiment surveys are scraping levels we haven’t seen since the 2022 crypto-winter, and the financial press has rediscovered its favorite genre: the Bitcoin post-mortem. And this time they’ve got a chart to wave around. The Dow just had its best year against Bitcoin since 2022 – the Dow/BTC ratio has more than doubled off its August 2025 low, from 0.36 to 0.84. Here it is. We’ll even draw the red line for them: Anyone holding through it felt every point. If you wanted to write the “Bitcoin is finished (again)” piece, this is the chart you’d lead with. Notice what the line still hasn’t done, though. It hasn’t touched 1.0. After the worst sentiment stretch in years, after a ~45% drawdown, after twelve months of losing to the most boomer-coded stock index on earth, the entire Dow Jones Industrial Average still cannot buy one Bitcoin. Against thirty of America’s biggest companies, the coin wins, with change left over. Flip the fraction. If that seems impossible, it’s because you’re reading the fraction the way CNBC wants you to read it: Bitcoin ─────── $$$$$$$ Bitcoin as the numerator, dollars as the denominator, and the numerator just got cut in half. Case closed, right? Wrong fraction. As Mark Jeftovic laid out in It’s the denominator, stupid, the entire point of Bitcoin is that it ...