Bitcoin was in the news again Monday. Unfortunately.

A couple of days ago, as a reply to the latest Weekly, a reader suggested my foray into crypto ca. 2021 “obviously left a very bad taste,” which I quickly noted isn’t true.

First of all, that adventure of mine was more about getting an inside look at the DeFi casino than it was about Bitcoin, and I gotta tell you: It was an immersive experience.

Web3 — the broader ecosystem in which DeFi operates — can be fun. It can be a lot of other things too, but on some days it made me feel like a kid again and I’m grateful for that. (I even met Al Pacino’s daughter while buying NFTs.)

If you didn’t read “Three Months In Web3: What I Learned,” published here in March of 2022, I strongly encourage you to give it a go. It gives you a sense of what my crypto spelunking expedition was actually about. It had (almost) nothing to do with Bitcoin, which I bought for the first time in 2021 and remain content to sit with whether it goes to $1 million or (back to) $1.

Anyway, Bitcoin funds have shed more than $3.5 billion of AUM this month, which may as well be a record.

The figure above gives you some context. The four-week moving average for all crypto fund flows is now negative. The latest weekly outflow — $2.2 billion in the period ended November 19 — was the second largest ever.

Speaking of context, it’s important to remember that for all the “spillover” talk, crypto’s not widely owned by any stretch of the imagination. BofA puts institutional allocations at less than half of one percent, for example.

Of course, the retail “YOLO” crowd loves it. Total crypto fund inflows in 2025 are still near $50 billion, a record.

Bitcoin’s November plunge — the largest since Sam Bankman Fried was still a financial media superstar and a VC darling as opposed to the Bernie Madoff figure he is today — put it lower for the year.

Frankly, I have a hard time pretending this is complicated, which is saying a lot because part of my whole shtick is overcomplicating simple things.

A lot of what passes for “analysis” in this space is just truisms dressed up as math. “Spot Bitcoin ETFs have become self-reinforcing feedback loops,” Bloomberg wrote Monday, citing Citi research which “quantified” the relationship. “Inflows tend to accelerate when prices rise, while outflows amplify declines when prices fall,” the article went on. (You don’t say?!)

Meanwhile, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook column quoted Morgan Stanley’s Lisa Shalett who, much as she seems like a great asset to the firm from a kind of “radiates respectability” perspective, I’ve learned to ignore, because she’s just a quote machine — someone the mainstream media knows they can call when they need to get a “professional” on the record.

Bitcoin, Shalett said, isn’t just for “hobbyists” anymore. While the cryptosphere doesn’t represent a “systemic risk,” there’s definitely some “bleed-over.” (Thanks Lisa. That’ll work.)

And it’s just on and on with the same vacuous quotables. In the linked Bloomberg article, someone else said, “We could continue to see more outflows [if] markets continue to drop.”

And readers wonder why, after a decade, I’ve concluded that markets simply aren’t that interesting as a subject of inquiry.