They are desperately trying to keep you away from Bitcoin… (i can prove it)

0:00They are desperately trying to keep you away from Bitcoin. Doesn't it all just seem so obvious when you look around, hit piece after hit piece after hit piece on Bitcoin? I just saw another one come out in the New York Times this week, which I'll touch on a little bit later. They are trying so hard to keep normal people away from Bitcoin and to get Bitcoiners to sell their Bitcoin. Meanwhile, while we might be experiencing a bear market in Bitcoin's price, there is no bear market in Bitcoin adoption. While the mainstream media, prominent traditional economists, goal bugs, and everyone else in between seems to be crapping all over Bitcoin and desperately trying to get you to sell and run away as fast as possible, the institutions and the big players. They are buying and they are hodling. That's what this video is about. It's not a coincidence. They're trying to get your Bitcoin on the cheap. Do not give it to them. I can prove this is happening. You're going to want to stick around. Real quick, you're watching the sad stacker show, a Bitcoin show for people who think deeper about

1:02money. I'm your host. My name is John aka the sad stacker. If you want to learn to stack smarter and grow your conviction in Bitcoin, you hit the subscribe button and you can zap me sats via the QR code on the screen using your lightning wallet. But I told you I have proof. Let me tell you how this all clicked into place for me because I was already thinking about the thesis for this video just because of all the negativity I keep seeing. There is so much fun, so much bad sentiment around Bitcoin right now. Whenever something like this happens, I don't trust it. My spider sense is tingly. What I mean is all of a sudden when there's an overwhelming majority of voices coming out of the woodwork to push one narrative. We saw this last year with MSTY. We saw with Bitcoin treasury companies. We saw it with Zcash. How are each of those doing now? By the way, there's this avalanche of people all talking about one thing. I don't care if it's coming from Bitcoin Twitter or crypto Twitter or tradfied Twitter or mainstream media. It's always very sus to me. When suddenly there's an overwhelming amount of people just all saying the same exact thing. So I was already on alert with

2:06just how much fun I've been seeing around Bitcoin in the last few weeks. There's no way to prove that it's coordinated. It just has that smell to it. Some things fishy. Some things not on the up and up. And as usual, what it all amounts to is someone's trying to get your Bitcoin. Someone wants you to freak out and panic sell. And this time around, most of all, it seems like they really don't want any normal people coming to buy Bitcoin. I mean, they want retail as far away from this thing as humanly possible. And for what I can tell, it's working. There is no retail participation in this cycle at all. The best anecdotal evidence I have for this is these viral videos of people watching the Coinbase Super Bowl commercial where they're singing along to the Backstreet Boys. And then all of a sudden, the Coinbase logo drops and they start booing viciously at the rug pull. Most normal people from what I can tell at this point hate crypto. And they don't make any

3:13distinction at all between Bitcoin and crypto. So this wide scale propaganda campaign is successfully keeping normal people away from Bitcoin. And it seems to be successfully creating a ton of fear uncertainty and doubt among even existing Bitcoiners. But meanwhile, there is a very important signal coming through all this noise that tells you no Bitcoin is not dead. In fact, Bitcoin adoption is stronger than ever. And I now have the evidence to prove it. I'm about to show you the data that turned this for me from a pet conspiracy theory into a cold hard fact. Because the highly respected Bitcoin exchange river just dropped a detailed report showing institutions have continued to buy Bitcoin at a record pace even while the price was getting wrecked. And the other day, an article in Bloomberg even admitted the same thing. The institutional scaffolding around Bitcoin is holding up just fine. They put that out by the way just days after dropping

4:15another semi-hit piece about how Bitcoin was losing its identity and all the narratives around that are falling apart. The very same Bloomberg writers came back with a piece about how even though Bitcoin shed a trillion dollars of value, the institutional scaffolding built around it didn't collapse at all. And the ETF money has mostly stayed. So on one hand, you have sentiment and adoption among retail is virtually dead. We may be experiencing a bear market in Bitcoin's price. But on the other hand, the title of river's research report is there is no bear market in Bitcoin adoption. And the biggest headline stat that they dropped was institutions last year in 2025 accumulated 829,000 Bitcoin. That includes businesses, governments, funds, ETFs, etc. We're talking about structural adoption from mainstream traditional big-time players. River also pointed out that RIAs registered investment advisors are net buying. RIAs have been net buying for eight straight quarters.

5:19And river estimates that they put about $1.5 billion per quarter into Bitcoin ETFs. These are the people who decide what responsible adults can and should own. And they are buying. River also pointed out that about 60% of top US banks are building Bitcoin products. And banks don't typically build products for things they think are going away. They build products for things their customers demand. B&Y, Mellon, PNC Bank, City Bank, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Vanguard, all of these have flipped from a hostile negative or skeptical view to a positive view in the last 12 months. River also pointed out that public companies are stacking. Bitcoin adoption by public companies grew 2.5 times in 2025 with 194 public companies holding Bitcoin. They also noted that nation state adoption is expanding with more new entrance in 2025. So take a breath and zoom out. If Bitcoin was actually dead,

6:23why are the most regulated, slowest moving, most reputation sensitive institutions on earth accumulating it and building around it? They bought over 800,000 Bitcoin in 2025 alone. Well, maybe you're thinking, well, but it's sold off even more in January and February of 2026. So maybe all those institutions started bailing in the last two months. And that's a good question. And it brings me to a perfect example of how retail gets emotionally pushed around by false narratives and propaganda. Do any of you remember Ben McKenzie? I won't blame you if you don't because he hasn't been around for a while. But this is the actor from the OC who turned into a self-appointed anti crypto white knight and was a notorious Bitcoin and crypto hater from last cycle. Pretty sure he even famously lost $250,000 short in crypto stocks to try to prove some point. And then he disappeared for a while. Until out of the blue, he popped up on my YouTube algorithm last week with another Bitcoin is dangerous hit piece. Personally, to be honest,

7:25I wouldn't really care if he was just going around targeting crypto. But of course, like all these other lazy critics, he just refuses to acknowledge any distinction between Bitcoin and the rest of crypto. So I am forced to destroy him, whether I want to or not. It's my duty. And this recent video that he made with more perfect union who's done other hit pieces on Bitcoin before was completely ridiculous. Not only was it just hyperbolic doomers and bulls**t, but my biggest gripe with it was that it was based on a totally faulty premise to begin with. I will spare you the whole video, but I will see if I can edit it down so you get the gist. You may have noticed the crypto's crashing again. Thanks to loosening regulations, people can buy financial products that give them exposure to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies through the regulated stock markets. But in October of last year, investors began to take some risk off the table and sell their shares. The price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has nose-dived. The Wall Street firms that issue them like BlackRock turn to the crypto exchanges like Coinbase to actually sell the Bitcoin. Then the price starts plunging. What's the floor?

8:27Well, zero. The problem with crypto being tied into our regulated financial markets is the contagion effect. If crypto were to continue to crash violently, the selling of these assets would push the prices of cryptocurrencies down, which can lead to the selling of other companies. Here's hoping that the crypto crash we're currently experiencing doesn't take the rest of the regulated financial markets down with it. Fingers crossed. Oh, very spooky stuff. 2008 bank contagion style apocalypse caused by Bitcoin. Again, this is ridiculous, fun, emotional manipulation designed to poison retail against Bitcoin and keep them far, far away. Bitcoin is bad and you're a bad person if you buy it. And I would say generally it's working. Retail is misinformed and emotionally driven. And these type of scary stories work on them. Just look at the comments on that video if you want proof. But I wasn't buying his little narrative. So I went and did the homework that he and more perfect union couldn't be bothered to do. And here's the biggest problem with the little story they're trying to spin. Yes, Bitcoin's price dropped about 50% in the last four months. But there was no mass exodus from

9:32the ETFs. During this latest drawdown from about late January to mid February, total spot Bitcoin ETF holdings dropped from about 1.36 million Bitcoin to about 1.31 million Bitcoin. So that's about 50,000 Bitcoin net outflows or about 3.7% of peak holdings during that crash window. And if you zoom out and you look at it from the all time high, we touched back in October of 2025, Bitcoin ETFs across the board are down about 100,000 Bitcoin or roughly 6 to 7% of peak holdings. Meaning essentially a 93 to 94% hodl rate across all Bitcoin ETFs despite a 50% crash in price. So the whole ETF death spiral that nuke's traditional markets story is complete made up both. And the Bloomberg writers also said the exact same thing. ETF money has mostly stayed. Wall street is still in. So what's really happening? Well, clearly retail is being fed fear while institutions

10:35are demonstrating patience. And if I'm recalling correctly, wasn't there some famous investor who once said markets are a device from transferring wealth from impatient to the patient? Yeah, that's exactly what's happening here. It does beg one question, which is if these institutions are buying who is selling to them and river answered that question to a lot of the supply has been coming from long term holders, whales, early adopters of Bitcoin who are now distributing their coins into a deeper, more liquid market, which is all very normal. We've covered that on this channel before. That's actually market maturation. It's good for Bitcoin to see old whales distributing their coins amongst new entrants. So here's my message. If your entire view of Bitcoin is based on the headlines and the Twitter vibes and whatever your stupid uncle has to say at Thanksgiving, then you're not going to make it. The headlines are designed to get clicks. Twitter is filled with bots and morons. And your uncle probably thinks treasury bonds are still risk free. So it all adds up to this. Somebody smarter than you, more patient than you, with more capital than you wants your Bitcoin.

11:38So while the dummies are ignoring it, the loudest voices are trying to push you away from it. Meanwhile, the actual structural story is distribution is expanding. The buyer base is deepening. The ETF wrappers brought in a whole new class of capital. Banks are building around it. Advisors are allocating and public companies and nation states continue adopting it. Adoption is compounding, even if price isn't reflecting that yet. These people are out here desperately trying to keep you away from Bitcoin, while they gobble up as much of it as they can. The FUD gets loudest at the exact moment that patient capital wants your Bitcoin the most. It's all right there out in the open. The most sophisticated allocators on earth, building positions, while the big scary headlines try to bully you out of trading your dirty debasing fiat for the hardest and best form of money ever known. So I'm not going to tell you what to do with your money, but I do suggest that it might be a good idea to quit slacking and start stacking.