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Bitcoin Slides Below $60K as Traders Trigger $1.57B Liquidation Wave Across Crypto

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Bitcoin Slides Below K as Traders Trigger .57B Liquidation Wave Across Crypto

Key Takeaways

Liquidations Pass the Billion-Dollar Mark

Bitcoin plunged below $60,000 on Friday amid a market-wide sell-off that shaved approximately $200 billion from the crypto economy. According to Bitstamp data, the cryptocurrency nosedived to $59,743, briefly widening its losses since June 1 to more than $14,000—a decline of nearly 20% in five days.

While it bounced back to $61,000 shortly after tapping the new year-to-date low, the cryptocurrency was still down by nearly 4% in 24 hours. The drop widened bitcoin’s year-to-date losses to 30% and briefly pushed its market capitalization below $1.2 trillion, a level last seen in October 2024. The bearish sentiment extended to altcoins, some of which logged double-digit losses, driving the crypto economy’s aggregate market cap down to $2.23 trillion.

Meanwhile, the market mayhem pushed liquidations past the $1 billion mark for the fourth time in five days. As expected in a declining market, long bets accounted for a disproportionate share of the leveraged positions erased, making up $1.28 billion of the $1.57 billion total. Bitcoin alone saw $381 million in long positions wiped out, compared with $111 million in shorts.

While a handful of critics attribute bitcoin’s downward spiral to Strategy’s disposal of a mere 32 bitcoins, market analysts argue the scale of the capitulation points to deeper structural vulnerabilities. The sheer velocity of the sell-off suggests a broader institutional exit and systemic liquidations that far outweigh the ripple effects of an otherwise negligible corporate divestment.

However, this alternative view did not stop “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer from accusing Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor of “murdering bitcoin.” Saylor, facing criticism stemming from the sale, responded by publishing a comprehensive essay on X detailing what he calls the “Four Ideologies of Bitcoin.” In the essay, Saylor argues that as bitcoin transitions from a technical experiment to a global asset, its community is dividing into four distinct yet overlapping schools of thought that define its future.

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The Four Ideologies of Bitcoin

The first school of thought, championed by maximalists, views bitcoin as a moral and civilizational advance. They emphasize its role as the dominant, incorruptible digital monetary network that provides superior property rights and economic hope to those facing financial misery.

Capitalists, on the other hand, focus on scaling bitcoin by integrating it as “digital capital” into global financial systems. This group advocates for corporate treasuries, institutional custody, and bitcoin-backed credit and securities, arguing that market incentives will ultimately drive the network’s growth and defense.

Saylor identifies technologists as a group that believes the protocol must responsibly and continuously evolve to address future technical threats, such as quantum computing, while improving base-layer privacy, scalability, and usability.

Lastly, the Strategy chairman sees fundamentalists as the guardians of bitcoin’s first principles, such as absolute decentralization, self-custody, running personal nodes, and censorship resistance, aiming to protect the protocol from institutional capture or dilution.

Saylor concluded his essay by arguing that a healthy bitcoin ecosystem requires a synthesis of all four groups. Rather than choosing between purity and adoption, Saylor noted that the network’s ultimate path forward relies on keeping the core protocol sacred and stable while allowing the global economy to build on top of it.

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Bitcoin Traders Dump Long Bets as $636M Gets Wiped Out in One-Day Rout

After a flash crash toward $61,000, bitcoin briefly rebounded to $64,600 before stabilizing just under $64,000. Despite trimming its losses,…

Bitcoin Traders Dump Long Bets as $636M Gets Wiped Out in One-Day Rout
Bitcoin.com News

Bitcoin Traders Dump Long Bets as $636M Gets Wiped Out in One-Day Rout

After a flash crash toward $61,000, bitcoin briefly rebounded to $64,600 before stabilizing just under $64,000. Despite trimming its losses,…

Bitcoin Traders Dump Long Bets as $636M Gets Wiped Out in One-Day Rout
Bitcoin.com News

Bitcoin Traders Dump Long Bets as $636M Gets Wiped Out in One-Day Rout

After a flash crash toward $61,000, bitcoin briefly rebounded to $64,600 before stabilizing just under $64,000. Despite trimming its losses,…

Crypto

Strategy Is No Longer Just Going to “Inoculate the Market,” Selling Crypto May Be Much More Common. Here’s What That Could Mean for the Stock | The Motley Fool

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Strategy Is No Longer Just Going to “Inoculate the Market,” Selling Crypto May Be Much More Common. Here’s What That Could Mean for the Stock | The Motley Fool

When Strategy (MSTR 0.69%) sold a modest amount of Bitcoin earlier this year, it was a noteworthy development given that the company’s business has centered around buying up as much of the cryptocurrency as it can, and vowing to never sell. And it often boasts of being the largest corporate holder of the digital currency.

The company brushed off the sale of 32 Bitcoins, with management saying it simply wanted to “inoculate the market.” Well, now it appears that Strategy is doing much more than just that, and there could be more significant cryptocurrency sales in the future.

Image source: Getty Images.

Strategy unveils a Bitcoin monetization program

On June 29, Strategy released a framework going forward that it says will “enhance liquidity, preserve long-term Bitcoin exposure, and support long-term value creation for shareholders.” Among the notable components is its Bitcoin monetization program.

Within that program, the company says it may sell some of its cryptocurrency holdings for multiple reasons, including to fund a USD reserve, fund dividends or interest expense, or to fund repurchases of digital credit securities or common stock.

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While the company says it remains committed to Bitcoin for the long term and it’s the company’s “primary treasury reserve asset,” it’s a significant change of course for Strategy, which was previously heavily against ever selling the digital asset.

Strategy Stock Quote

Today’s Change

(-0.69%) $-0.69

Current Price

$100.08

The stock is as risky and volatile as ever

Whether or not Strategy buys or sells Bitcoin doesn’t change the fact that this is a highly risky and speculative stock to own. While crypto fans may be disappointed in the company’s change in strategy, selling Bitcoin will likely not be enough to make the business any better or worse as an investment.

In just the past 12 months, the stock has plummeted a whopping 75% as volatility in digital assets has drastically weighed on its earnings, with the company incurring $12.8 billion in losses over the trailing 12 months, on revenue of $490 million.

That’s not likely to change significantly, even if Strategy offloads some of its crypto holdings, because with such a large exposure to Bitcoin, how the cryptocurrency performs will inevitably impact the company’s bottom line in a big way. This year, the leading cryptocurrency is down 28% as investor excitement around it has largely cooled off, which has proven disastrous for Strategy’s stock as well. And at this stage, there’s little reason to anticipate a recovery anytime soon.

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Crypto

An Easy-to-Miss Radio Traffic Jam Is Behind Many Home WiFi Slowdowns

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An Easy-to-Miss Radio Traffic Jam Is Behind Many Home WiFi Slowdowns

Key Takeaways

Your WiFi can feel rock-solid at midnight and oddly sluggish by breakfast, even when you have not touched a single setting. The culprit is often outside your walls: a crowded slice of public radio spectrum where your router has to negotiate space with every nearby network, plus a grab bag of household gadgets that leak interference. Add peak-hours demand and the signal-blocking quirks of building materials and weather, and “slow internet” starts to look less like a billing issue and more like an invisible traffic problem you are forced to share.

When WiFi slows down without warning

One day your home WiFi feels snappy, the next it drags, even though your router hasn’t moved and your internet plan hasn’t changed. That swing is real, and it’s usually not your imagination or a “bad day” from your ISP. WiFi lives on shared airwaves, and those airwaves get crowded, noisy, and sometimes just plain finicky.

Think of your connection as a conversation in a busy room. Your laptop and router may be talking just fine, but the room itself can fill up fast with other chatter. What looks like a mystery slowdown is often the result of invisible competition and interference that changes hour by hour.

The battle of competing networks

Most homes still rely heavily on the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi bands, which are unlicensed spectrum in the US. That “free for everyone” reality is convenient, but it also means your network shares space with your neighbors, their smart TVs, their work laptops, and every nearby router doing the same thing.

Congestion has a rhythm. During common work-from-home and school-from-home windows, especially 8-10 AM, and again in the evening 6-10 PM, more devices are streaming, video calling, syncing, and downloading updates. Even if you pay for fast broadband, your WiFi link can become the bottleneck when the local radio environment gets packed.

Interference inside your home

Your own house can sabotage you. A microwave is the classic culprit because it can leak noise near 2.4 GHz, exactly where many WiFi networks still operate. Older cordless phones, some baby monitors, and even dense clusters of Bluetooth gadgets can add more clutter, especially in smaller apartments where everything sits close together.

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Then there’s physics. Concrete, metal, and even water (think aquariums or thick pipes in walls) absorb and scatter radio signals. A router shoved behind a TV, tucked into a cabinet, or stuck in a far corner forces your devices to “hear” through more obstacles, lowering speeds and making dropouts more likely.

Weather, channels, and what you can do tonight

Environmental changes can matter too. Higher humidity and rain can slightly increase signal loss, and shifting temperatures can change how radio waves propagate around a neighborhood. You might never notice on its own, but paired with congestion it can tip a marginal connection into a frustrating one.

The 2.4 GHz band is also channel-limited. In the US there are 11 channels, but only 1, 6, and 11 don’t overlap. Many routers default to “auto channel,” so nearby networks can hop around trying to escape interference, sometimes creating instability. Practical fixes: prefer 5 GHz (or 6 GHz if you have WiFi 6E/7 gear), place the router centrally and higher up, and use a WiFi analyzer app to pick a less crowded channel instead of leaving it on auto.

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U.K.’s sanctions on cryptocurrency exchanges signal new focus on illicit digital financing – Compliance Week

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U.K.’s sanctions on cryptocurrency exchanges signal new focus on illicit digital financing – Compliance Week

Cryptocurrency exchanges believed to be financing Russia’s war in Ukraine have been sanctioned by the U.K. government in the first attempt to prevent evasion via “dark networks.” The move indicates a new focus on digital sanctions evasion, and compliance teams should expect these rules to develop further, potentially in the EU and other jurisdictions.


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Ruth Prickett graduated from Cambridge University with a BA hons in History and has specialized in business and finance journalism for the past 20 years. She was editor of Financial Management, the magazine…
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