Bitcoin at $10K? "You'd Need Nuclear War First

Bitcoin is sitting near $70,000. One strategist says it's heading to $10,000. The industry's response? "Sure — right after nuclear war."

The Bear Case: McGlone's Macro Doom Loop

Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, isn't backing down. In a recent interview with EllioTrades, he reiterated his call that bitcoin could fall below $10,000, arguing the crypto bear market is far from over.

His reasoning isn't about bitcoin specifically — it's about what bitcoin has become. As institutional money poured into crypto over the past several years, McGlone argues bitcoin lost its identity as an uncorrelated hedge. It now moves with other speculative risk assets, which means when those assets reprice, bitcoin reprices too.

His diagnosis: the crypto sector is trapped in a macro unwind driven by deflationary pressures, excess speculative supply, and an unfinished correction in traditional risk markets. "I think it's going to last a while," McGlone said. "Sell rallies."

It's worth noting McGlone has been a persistent bitcoin skeptic — not a permabull who turned sour. He warned of the 2022 crypto collapse. That history gives his calls a certain weight, even when the targets seem extreme.

The Rebuttal: Possible, But Catastrophically Unlikely

The pushback from analysts was swift — and remarkably unified on one point: yes, bitcoin could fall further, but $10,000 requires a scenario most wouldn't survive to trade in.

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Mati Greenspan, founder and CEO of Quantum Economics, put it bluntly: "For an asset like bitcoin, which regularly sees tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in daily trading volume across global markets, to revisit $10,000 we'd need a global liquidity crisis, a nuclear war, and the internet to stop working."

Jason Fernandes of AdLunam offered a more calibrated take. Even a move toward $28,000, he said, would require "a meaningful contraction in global liquidity, widening credit spreads, or a broader financial stress event" — not just a late-cycle slowdown.

Jonatan Randin of PrimeXBT acknowledged the theoretical possibility while calling it "highly improbable." His base case: bitcoin drifts lower, finds accumulation support somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000, and remains range-bound between $60,000 and $70,000 in the near term. Even a bounce toward $80,000, he warned, could be a trap if macro headwinds persist.

Side by Side: Two Visions of Bitcoin's Floor

Has the Bottom Already Passed?

Greenspan thinks it might have. "Trying to pick an exact bottom is a fool's errand," he said, but noted that bitcoin has already cleared its major bear-market cycle from 2022. A ~50% retracement from the all-time high, he argues, is entirely normal for bitcoin historically — not a sign of structural collapse.

The macro backdrop adds texture to this debate. U.S. February CPI data released this week came in line with forecasts, effectively killing any hope of Federal Reserve rate cuts at either the March or April meetings. High-for-longer rates are a genuine headwind for speculative assets. But "headwind" and "extinction event" are different things.

Bitcoin briefly dipped through most of Wednesday's U.S. session before jumping back above $70,000, apparently moving in tandem with a sharp $3/barrel drop in oil prices. That correlation — crypto tracking crude — is itself a data point in McGlone's favor: bitcoin is behaving like a macro risk asset, not a store of value.