A Bitcoin fall to five figures sounds dramatic. Almost unthinkable. But the man making that call is not some doomsday blogger chasing clicks on YouTube.
It is Jimmy Wales. The guy who built Wikipedia.
On February 25, he posted a short thread on X that echoed what a lot of quiet sceptics have been thinking for years. Bitcoin is not going to zero, fine. But it could absolutely bleed out to a price that basically nobody cares about. His actual phrase was “hobbyist tinkering.” That line stuck. Hard.
So what exactly is he saying? And does any of it hold up?
Why Wales Thinks a Bitcoin Fall Is Coming
Here’s the thing about Wales. He is not excitable. He does not chase attention. He did not post this to pump gold or sell a newsletter. He just… said it. Calmly.
And the argument he made is painfully practical.
Bitcoin does not work as money. That is the core of it.
He gave an example that is hard to argue with. Sending £10 to a friend in the UK costs him nothing through his bank. Zero. It takes seconds. To do the same thing with Bitcoin, you have to buy BTC and pay the spread, send it and pay transaction fees, and then your friend has to sell it back into pounds and pay the spread again.
Three layers of friction to do something that already costs nothing.
Nobody is doing that. And the reason nobody is doing that is simple: it makes no sense.
The bitcoin fall Wales predicts is not some violent crash. It is a slow deflation into irrelevance. He floated a rough timeline of around 2050, with prices drifting under $10,000 in today’s money. Possibly much lower. Not as a precise forecast, but as a direction of travel.
Also Read: Can Bitcoin Recover In 2026?
The Internet Comparison Does Not Hold Up
Predictably, someone in the replies brought up the internet. It always happens.
The argument goes: people laughed at the internet in 1995, and look how that turned out. Therefore, you cannot laugh at Bitcoin now.
Wales has heard this before. His response was measured but clear.
The internet got laughed at, and then it actually worked. It became useful for billions of people in ways they did not expect: email, search, video calls, online shopping. Real tools that made life easier, cheaper, and faster.
Bitcoin has had fifteen years. Fifteen. And the main thing people do with it is hold it and hope the price goes up.
That is not adoption. That is speculation.
The bitcoin fall argument is not about impatience or bad timing. It is about the fact that the killer use case still has not shown up. Not in payments. Not in commerce. Not in daily life.
Also Read: The Ultimate Strategy To DCA In Bitcoin In 2026
What About Institutional Support?
This is where the bear case becomes harder to make cleanly.
BlackRock launched a spot Bitcoin ETF in January 2024 and pulled in billions. Governments are talking about strategic reserves. MicroStrategy keeps buying. Institutional money is real, and it creates a price floor that did not exist in earlier cycles.
Wales did not deny any of this. But his take was blunt. Institutions are ruthless. They do not have emotional attachment to Bitcoin. If interest fades and price drifts lower, those ETFs will not disappear. They will just quietly trade down. For years.
He compared it to obscure commodity ETFs that still exist but barely get mentioned anymore. They do not collapse. They just fade into irrelevance.
A slow bitcoin fall over decades looks a lot like that.
Whether you find that convincing depends on how much faith you place in the next wave of institutional buying. There is no guarantee it ever materialises.
Also Read: Bitcoin Price Prediction 2026
Bitcoin vs Gold: Is That a Fair Comparison?
A researcher named Tomer Ashur raised a good counterpoint. Why does this argument apply to Bitcoin but not gold?
Gold does not do much either. Electronics use about 7% of global supply. The rest of its value comes from tradition, scarcity, and collective belief.
Wales had an answer.
Gold costs almost nothing to maintain. It sits in a vault and stays there. Bitcoin requires miners. Miners require energy. Energy costs money. If price falls far enough, miners switch off, the network weakens, and the system faces real structural stress.
At the same time, as block rewards keep halving, mining economics will shift. Wales used this to explain why he does not expect Bitcoin to go to zero. There will always be some miners. The network will survive.
But survival and success are very different outcomes.
This part of the discussion was probably the most nuanced, and also the least settled.
Is Wales just a Bitcoin hater?
Not really. He explicitly said Bitcoin is not going to zero. He also said he has no ideological opposition to crypto. He just does not see a convincing practical case.
Has Bitcoin fallen below $10,000 before?
Yes. It spent much of 2020 under $10,000 before the massive bull run. A bitcoin fall back to those levels would wipe out huge amounts of wealth created since then.
What could prevent this?
A genuine mainstream use case. Some people point to AI agent payments as a possible trigger. Wales was sceptical of that too, saying AI systems are not adopting crypto in meaningful numbers right now.
Should I sell based on this?
That is not what this article is for. Wales is talking in decades, not days. Short term, anything can happen.
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