"Bitcoin has jumped to nearly $70,000, rising from below $65K as a $1.3B short squeeze," the news account @thedailyblock posted on X on August 19. Binance data backs it up: a $70,000 high on August 19, $71,570 on August 20, the first prints above the level since June 2, and $71,200 at the time of writing.

"First time above $70K since June 2nd. 163,000 traders liquidated in 24 hours," posted the trader behind @dxttools, as the squeeze that started at $65,000 on August 18 kept running. He credited a White House push on crypto legislation and "the US Treasury DOUBLING its long-term bond buyback program to crush yields." Tallies of liquidated shorts varied by poster, from @thedailyblock's $1.3 billion to the $2.7 billion @dxttools cited.

"Before that happens, I think $BTC could make a liquidity run toward $70K," the analyst account @BitcoinIntelX wrote on August 16, three days before it happened. "That's exactly where the trap could be." The account's roadmap: a few days of distribution, a liquidity sweep near $57,000, then a "Final flush toward the ~$44K bottom zone." The conclusion was blunt: "In my view, the final capitulation before the cycle bottom hasn't happened yet."

"I'm still not bullish. I still think there's one final brutal flush coming before the real move begins," the trader @0xPhantomDefi wrote on August 17, sketching his bitcoin price prediction as a fork: a bear path from $64,000 through $57,000 to $49,000 against a bull path through $74,000 to $95,000. "The market is eating every sell order thrown at it," he posted, adding that "for the first time in months, it's making me seriously question my bearish thesis."

'Buy Bitcoin While It's Dirt Cheap'

"AI superbubble crash 50/50 odds within 3 months. Buy Bitcoin while it's dirt cheap," posted @diglloyd on August 14. On August 10, Nvidia announced financing platforms with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to mobilize more than $500 billion, a risk Forbes contributor Jim Osman flagged . BlackRock also runs the biggest spot bitcoin ETF.

"That second one is the real story. This is a liquidity operation, not a demand signal," @dxttools wrote of the buyback move. Maelstrom's Arthur Hayes counts $1.5 trillion of AI debt since 2022 and says it soaked up the money that would have chased bitcoin. The New York Fed's John Williams, per Yahoo Finance, was unmoved: "I don't see this as a bubble kind of situation."

"The shorts are getting overcrowded at the bottom of a massive volume shelf," @mayaivanoff wrote on X on August 14. "Annualized funding rates are dead flat. Retail speculative fever is gone. Perpetual shorts are piling in heavily right into concrete structural support." The post put the fuse at $64,800 to $65,200 and the wall at $67,000 to $68,750, both since cleared. "Markets rarely top out when funding is flat."

"So I hold both thoughts at once. The model says 35k. The conditions that would get us there aren't present," @0xautopsy wrote the same day, noting that "Equities are at all time highs while BTC sits 50% below its own." His base case still sits under the current price: "My own distribution puts the median closer to 48k, and that's where I still sit."

Michael Terpin, the Transform Group founder, put the cycle argument this way on the On The Margin podcast: "We have been following the four-year cycle unbelievably well," he said, and yet in every bear market "the majority of pundits say the cycle is broken."

The US spot bitcoin funds shed $389.7 million in the week through August 14, then took in $189.3 million on August 18, led by BlackRock's IBIT, per Bloomberg and Cointelegraph. As @dxttools put it: "Enjoy the candle, it's a good one. Just know what's underneath it."