The Bottom Signal
Paul Graham called the 2022 bottom. Michael Burry may have called this one.
If the Bitcoin bottom is in, Michael Burry will be the Paul Graham of this cycle.
The year is 2022. The industry is on fire. Terra and FTX incinerated billions, and every asset in the space is selling off hard.
On November 20th, Paul Graham, respected Silicon Valley luminary (with minimal crypto expertise) tweets:
Bitcoin bottomed the next day, at ~$15,500. Two months later it was up 50% and eventually ran to $126K.
Fast forward to February 2026, and BTC is down 50% from its October highs. It’s failed to live up to its digital gold moniker (as real gold rips to ATH), fear is rampant, and big players around the world are getting liquidated.
On February 2nd, Michael Burry, of “Big Short” fame, warns that BTC could enter a “miner death spiral”, where all miners are forced sellers and the network spirals into collapse.
Bitcoin bottomed four days later at ~$60,000. It’s up 25% from there, back to $75,000.
I call out the PG and Burry calls because they went the most viral, generated the most headlines and the most fear. They’re also both when I personally felt the most shook.
But markets have a funny way of working. When the cousin you only see at Thanksgiving tells you to take out a mortgage to buy a dogcoin, the top is in. Everyone who’s going to buy has already bought.
The same works in reverse. When fear spreads far enough beyond the industry that mainstream voices feel compelled to warn you about crypto, most of the selling is typically already done.
PG was off by one day. Burry was off by four. Not investment advice, but maybe “famous outsider issues dire crypto warning” is its own indicator.