It’s been a particularly tough slog for Bertie these last couple of months. Those who have been praying for a big short squeeze to lighten their losses are many. Quite a few were trapped at much higher prices, including some of the biggest crypto bettors in the world. Prayerful losers constitute heavy layers of supply that didn’t exist in bitcoin’s early days. Supply is particularly daunting along the final few, crushing bars of bitcoin’s collapse last spring. Two months of heavy lifting since then have succeeded in hoisting this vehicle only to the midpoint of the last bar (see inset), which saw BRTI free-fall from $32k to below $19k. If and when it rises to the 25,634 low from the swift and devastating down-leg ended in mid-May, buyers may begin to feel like Sisyphus as they shoulder into it for an indefinite period. Why bitcoin should have any value at all was always a fair question. But $69,000 per copy? I asked this question of many experts, some who’d made fortunes on the way up, but I never got a good answer. It came out of nowhere and is not money by any stretch of the imagination, just a secure means of recording transactions.