Has Bitcoin Lost Its Narrative? | Fernando Nikolic

**Fernando Nikolic** (0:04)
Maybe it's time to kill your heroes again, and Saylor is now the hero to slay in this cycle. Why did the market react in terms of just emotions, but also price action for 32 Bitcoin sold? And why didn't anything happen when he sold 700? It was because, in my opinion, because of the narrative engineering that Saylor was doing. Somebody like Saylor, or anybody who chooses to engineer their narrative in a way, can actually control markets. Bitcoin is so many different things, that you can literally have a great argument for Bitcoin to somebody who's on the extreme far right, and also the extreme far left. So the customization of Bitcoin is actually pretty cool.
And that will lead to a lot of people from different walks of life to understand Bitcoin in a very deep way and be completely convinced about it. So that's great.
That's like bullish.

**Danny Knowles** (1:00)
Good to see you, man.
We're going to talk all about Bitcoin narratives across the board, breaking down. No one knows which way is up with it anymore. Like it's funny, just before we started recording, I was scrolling through Twitter and like I've seen three posts like, is Bitcoin dead? Is Bitcoin over? Like I feel like we've lost the narrative. But I think there's nothing more apparent as of right now, as to where a narrative has either been broken or lost in everything that's happened with Michael Saylor. And yesterday, you just dropped a big piece on this.
And it has been really interesting to see his messaging change over time. So do you want to start? I'll just leave it open for you. You pick where you want to jump in. Like what you notice when you kind of dug through all of the data around the things that Michael Saylor has been saying?

**Fernando Nikolic** (1:45)
Well, first of all, I think when Strategy sold 32 Bitcoin and the reaction that everybody had, not only in the market and the price action, but just on Twitter and on socials, and everybody has come to this realization that, okay, maybe it's time to kill your heroes again, and Saylor is now the hero to slay in this cycle. And I was like, it's interesting that people react like that after the facts, you know?
Obviously, there are people who have been critical of Saylor and strategy, you know, this section or this cohort of Bitcoiners who are anti-Suite coiners, that has always been part of this. But then it's like, there's a lot of other people as well that really had a problem with what was happening, and they were kind of freaking out. And I was like, what's up with that? Why do people always react after something has happened? And are there any indicators, some signals before anything happened that might have given us a clue in terms of whether Saylor has changed his mind or if he had started saying something that was an indicator of something else? I was like, okay, I just let my agents run through the perception MCP.
For people who don't know, perception is my company. So essentially what we do is we track thousands of sources when it comes to discourse in the entire digital asset industry. So tweets, LinkedIn posts, filings, white papers, transcripts from conferences, podcasts, everything, you name it. I was like, okay, let me just run my agents through the MCP and just track all of Saylor's tweets, interviews, conference panels, whatever he was talking about and say, hey, were there any clues before the 32 Bitcoin sell or anything else? There might have been some kind of a leading indicator of where things were going to go instead of reacting on something that's already happened. So I essentially told my agents to just go back to 2020 up until today and just give me a whole analysis on everything that Saylor has said and whether there's a word or two words or three words that keeps repeating or has he actually had a narrative that was planned and structured and on purpose throughout these years. And it was clear when the analysis came back that there's three phases from 2022 to today that was the first four years after strategy first announced that they were buying Bitcoin in 2020, up until 2024 There was just like this, I don't know, there's like Bitcoin maxi, anti-fiat maxi type of narrative and kind of like propaganda. And I say propaganda because the way that Saylor was saying things was in a very kind of like, I don't want to say calculated mode, but it seems very on purpose. He kept repeating the same talking points and also used the same type of words over and over again. So I was like, that is pretty interesting. And then after 2024, entering 2025, things started to change with the kind of like the introduction of the term credit. And credit in the first cycle of 2020 to 2024 was mentioned, but it was mentioned in a very negative way. It was mentioned as like, okay, this is fiat shit. This is like not good. Credit is bad. We should just hold Bitcoin. So obviously he was trying to appeal or maybe pander to like the Bitcoin mentality, trying to get them on board during these whole four years. And then started to like slowly switch over a little bit, like not as hardcore as the first four years, but in 2025, there was like this little like transitional period where he started like switching things a little bit, like subtly, but it started. And then obviously you take a look at like what happened in terms of like product development or just like the offerings, that strategy started to offer to the market around that time in 2024, 2025 And that's obviously, you know, when stretch, when STRC got introduced, and all of a sudden the credit language or the credit discourse started to switch into something more positive.