I predicted Bitcoin would fall to $49,000 this year, but January delivered some very worrying red flags.

My $49,000 Bitcoin Bearish Thesis Checks In for January, Plumbing is Flashing While Price Bleeds

I wrote a $49,000 medium-term bear thesis in late November based on one simple idea. Bitcoin is still cyclical, and the next true “this is the low” moment tends to arrive when miner economics and flows line up at the same time.

It’s now January 30, 2026, and here’s the honest update. The variables I care about seem more emphasized than when I published. Also, the tape doesn’t offer panic pricing printouts that indicate those variables matter to everyone at once.

Somewhat paradoxically, my “medium term bear thesis” was intended to be bullish over the long term. The idea is that there will be a short, sharp bear market with the most pain, followed by a sustained, multi-year bull market. However, the price is not fully aligned with the signal at the moment.

As I write this, Bitcoin is hovering around the low $80,000 level (after falling to $81,000 overnight), which means my high $40,000 zone is still out of sight.

That disconnect is the story.

Because below the price point, the parts of the system that provide Bitcoin security and the parts that power the scale of institutions are functioning as if winter has already arrived.

Winter mood comes from fees, not charts

Let’s start with the security budget. Because that was my original “vulnerability” argument.

On January 29, miners generated approximately $37.22 million in revenue per day.

Total daily trading fees paid on the same day were approximately $260,550.

If you do the math, you’ll know the mood music. Fees are approximately 0.7% of miner revenue.

This does not mean “fees are weak”, but rather “fees are essentially non-existent” in the sense that the fee market contributes little to the cost of securing the chain on a day-to-day basis.

The live men pool photo also looks sleepy. Currently, we expect the median fee rate for the next block to be around 0.12-0.14 sat/vB.

So when people ask why I keep coming back to miner economics, it’s because this is what a fee floor failure looks like in real time. The network relies on publishing, publishing is shrinking on schedule, and everything else has to catch up later.

ETF window has been a steady leak with a few ugly swallows

The second part of my framework is flow elasticity, the idea that the ETF era creates a clean, mechanical way to identify shifts in risk appetite.

In January, that elasticity is pointing in the wrong direction.

Farside has shown multiple large outflows in the past few weeks, including -$708.7 million on January 21st and -$817.8 million on January 29th.

Total net flows have also been negative since the beginning of the year, at -$1.095 billion. It is more important than any day because it changes the psychology of the dip. In the soft-landing version of my thesis, the tape is gaining support from sustained bullish buying via the ETF pipe. Water is now coming out of the pipe.

There were big green days at the beginning of the month as well, with January 13th at +$753.8 million and January 14th at +$840.6 million, which are real, but the flow print at the end of the month was more like a desk feel.

Anyone who trades for a living knows this feeling, prices hold up, the insides start to rot, and everyone continues to look for the moment when the charts finally reflect what the plumbing said.

Hashrate is unstable, miners are adapting, and that adaptation changes behavior

Another element of the setup is minor elasticity.

Hashrate is still huge, but it is fluctuating. The daily average on January 29 was approximately 901 EH/s, down from the peak earlier this month.

That in itself is not tantamount to surrender, and I’m not trying to impose a dramatic story on everyday differences. This fits a broader point, allowing miners more knobs to turn.

The most important knobs are AI and HPC hosting, which no one talked about in previous cycles.

Once a miner signs a long-term compute deal, the business starts to look more like an operator of electricity, land, and infrastructure that happens to mine Bitcoin than a pure BTC margin machine.

TeraWulf highlighted this change in bold when it announced two 10-year HPC colocation agreements of over 200 MW with Fluidstack, with Google backstopping most of the debt and acquiring equity, according to the company’s own release.

According to DataCenterDynamics, Riot is exploring similar directions, including a formal evaluation to potentially reuse critical AI and HPC capacity.

This is important to the Bitcoin market structure as it changes the incentives regarding hashrate at low prices.

Miners with a second source of income may behave differently under stress. They may reduce or pivot production capacity without immediate survival pressure, they may protect liquidity for expansion, they may sell BTC more mechanically to fund capital expenditures, or they may simply stop caring about marginal hash prices as pure miners once did.

That’s the resiliency I pointed to, and it’s starting to show in the tone of the data even while prices remain high.

So, what is the current state of the paper?

This is the cleanest way to say it in one breath.

The fee floor appears to be broken, ETF flows have been risk-off for weeks, and miners’ business models have evolved in ways that amplify reflexive behavior during drawdowns.

These are the conditions I wrote.

The missing element is the part that people remember, and the chart enters a zone where panic turns into stock movement.

$82,000 in Bitcoin does not force anyone to make that decision. A print would cost $40,000.

For this reason, this update focuses on tension rather than target price. There is tension in the system.

The human benefit perspective that people miss: miners run two companies at the same time.

If you rephrase this as “fees have gone down,” it sounds like a chart memo.

In real life, operators appear to have to keep the lights on, negotiate power contracts, plan expansions, court AI customers, and juggle shareholders while competing in the most brutal hash race on the planet.

A low-fee environment not only undermines security budgets, but also forces miners to be creative, and creativity brings new behavior to the market.

The base-case bear market I described in November has always been one where the action appears at the same time as flow pressure, and when leverage and narrative mesh, prices eventually take action.

Now, two of those levers have already been pulled.

Why can we say that bears are quickly resolving?

I’m keeping a flip-level framework, and it’s intentionally boring.

• Fees need to stop living in a quagmire and the YCharts fee line needs to rebuild its real bottom compared to the YCharts revenue line.
• ETF flow behavior needs to change and the far side table needs to once again show consistent bullish buying rather than a month-end air pocket.
• The Menpool landscape needs to feel energized again, with fee pressure showing up in the Menpool median in a way that suggests real payment demand.

If this happens while prices remain elevated, the “shortest winter ever” frame will start to win.

Even if they remain weak and prices eventually collapse, the $49,000 style prints will continue to act as liquidity magnets. Because that tends to change the personality of the buyer base.

where I stand today

I don’t have the cathartic conclusion that every market story wants because the market hasn’t given it yet.

The infrastructure shows that winter conditions have already arrived.

If you look at the charts, you can see that the audience isn’t feeling it.

You need to focus on these gaps because they usually don’t last forever.

And when it closes, it closes early.