It is February 2026, and the markets do not lie, but they are manipulated...
While gold and silver break historical highs driven by structural mistrust in the global financial system, Bitcoin—the scarcest and hardest asset ever created—plummets or remains artificially stagnant.
This is not a natural market correction. What we are seeing is the deployment of media smokescreens to cover up a large-scale defensive financial operation. While headlines resurrect old ghosts to tarnish Bitcoin's reputation by linking it to criminal circles (such as the recycled narrative of the Epstein case and money laundering), the system is desperately trying to redirect global liquidity toward assets it can control: gold (physical, heavy, unseizable by the average user but centralized in vaults) and Treasury bonds.
The goal is clear: to keep capital within its sphere of influence. Understanding that falling prices and media attacks are two sides of the same coin is the first step in avoiding the trap. And last but not least: disguising the real inflation of fiat currencies reflected in the prices of hard money. Suppressing the price of gold and Bitcoin is a way of manipulating the true gauge of inflation.
1. The Playbook: From Gold to Bitcoin
To understand what they are doing to Bitcoin today, one need only look at the criminal record of banks in yesterday's precious metals market. This is not a theory; it is the modus operandi of banks, documented in federal courts. If the banking system has been legally convicted of manipulating the gold market, it is pure naivety to think that they are not doing the same with Bitcoin—especially with ETFs as a tool.
Institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC have been doing this for decades, even centuries. Over the past 15 years, these banks have paid billions of dollars in fines for manipulating gold and silver prices.
The JPMorgan Case (2020): Historic $920 million fine. Its traders admitted to manipulating precious metals futures markets for eight years, placing massive fake sell orders to create an illusion of panic, artificially collapsing the price in seconds, and then canceling the orders before they were executed.
The narrative that “markets are efficient and honest” crumbles in the face of reality. If they manipulated gold hundreds of thousands of times under the noses of regulators, the logical assumption is that they are applying the same tactics to Bitcoin right now.
Financial Alchemy: Creating Supply Out of Nothing
The main tool of manipulation is the disconnect between the real asset and its representation on paper.
For every physical ounce on COMEX, hundreds of ounces are traded in paper contracts. This allows the market to be flooded with “synthetic gold,” diluting real demand.
In Bitcoin, ETFs and Futures (CME) are the modern version of COMEX. They allow Wall Street to sell exposure to Bitcoin without touching UTXOs (real bitcoin). In this way, they absorb institutional demand with a promissory note, preventing that buying pressure from impacting the spot order book and raising the real price.
2. The Heads of the Hydra: How They Try to “Tame” Bitcoin
Since institutions cannot destroy Bitcoin, they want to neutralize its ability to liberate the individual. These are the current vectors of attack:
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The “Paper Bitcoin” Trap: The ETFs approved two years ago were the Trojan horse. They have created millions of “Paper Bitcoin” through rehypothecation. Treasury Companies centralize custody at Coinbase, inflating the virtual supply while real Bitcoin does not move on-chain.
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The Casino of Custodial Exchanges: If you can't audit it, it doesn't exist. Centralized platforms operate like unregulated casinos, offering obscene leverage to encourage gambling addiction and sweeping positions through internal price manipulation. They are the single point of failure for state confiscation and also operate under a fractional reserve system.
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The Trojan Horse of Stablecoins: Tether (USDT) and USDC are confiscatable surveillance tools. By concentrating liquidity in the BTC/USDT pair, the system can destabilize the market simply by attacking the stablecoin's parity.
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Centralized Mining (Censorship):*The concentration of mining in the US has turned pools into OFAC's enforcement arms, introducing transaction censorship at the block level.
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The Collateralized Loan Scam: “Never sell your Bitcoin, borrow against it.” This narrative was designed to take your keys away. When they artificially suppress the price, they sweep your positions and take your real Bitcoin at a discount.
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The End of Cash (CBDC): All of this sets the stage for the final imposition: state-controlled, monitored digital money with an expiration date.
3. Why are they going to lose? Bitcoin is different from gold.
Despite its power, there is a very clear mathematical and physical limit. Bitcoin has a defense mechanism that metals do not have: absolute auditability and cheap portability.
Manipulators are extremely powerful in the short term (days/weeks), but they lose their power as the time horizon lengthens.
The absolute limit
This is where Bitcoin differs from gold. The supply of gold is elastic (if the price rises, more is mined). The supply of Bitcoin is inelastic: They cannot print more. No matter how high the price rises, there will never be more than 21 million.
Maintaining a manipulated position costs money (interest). They cannot keep the price artificially low forever because they would go bankrupt paying the costs of maintaining that position open against real demand.
Our defense weapon: Self-Custody
This is the final line that terrifies manipulators. In the traditional system, you buy gold and the bank gives you a certificate; you rarely ask for the bullion. That allows for the fractional reserve system. In Bitcoin, any user can withdraw their coins to a cold wallet in minutes.
The Decoupling: If banks sell too much “paper Bitcoin” to lower the price, but investors take advantage of that cheap price to buy and take Bitcoin off the exchange, the actual reserve runs out. The price of “real Bitcoin” decouples from the price of “paper” and inevitably skyrockets (short squeeze).
Unlike London's opaque vaults, the blockchain is public. Anyone can see if reserves are falling. On-chain data eventually destroys the narrative of price manipulation.
4. The Resistance Manifesto: What we must do
The war for Bitcoin is not about price, it's about ownership. They have the printing press, but we have cryptography. If we want Bitcoin to survive as a tool of freedom, we must act:
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Abandon Centralized Exchanges: Liquidity must return to P2P and non-custodial OTC markets. If there is an intermediary with your keys, you are vulnerable to confiscation and you finance your own manipulation.
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Trade Directly Against Fiat: Eliminate the systemic risk of stablecoins. Trading BTC/USD or BTC/EUR makes it difficult for the system to shut down liquidity by regulating tokens.
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Delegitimize ETFs: Bitcoin that enters BlackRock rarely leaves. “Not your keys, not your coins” is not just a slogan, it is the law of survival in Bitcoin. We must never stop repeating it.
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Builds circular economies: Money is a medium of exchange, not just collateral for debt. Use Bitcoin to buy and sell real goods. Close the cycle without touching the banking system.
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Avoid collateralized loans in Bitcoin. Banks are experts at manipulating prices and will force liquidations to steal collateral. They have been doing this for centuries, and this time will be no different.
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Reclaim the Cypherpunk Spirit: Running a node is not enough. We need to decentralize physical mining and prioritize privacy.
Don't hand your keys over to BlackRock. Don't let them manipulate and steal from you.
Conclusion
They can manipulate price volatility, but they cannot manipulate the long-term secular trend due to the impossibility of inflating the supply of Bitcoin.
Amidst the noise of charts and market chaos, there is an untouchable technical reality where the power of manipulators is reduced to zero: they cannot stop the heartbeat of the protocol.
They have no ability to alter the mathematical issuance of a block every ten minutes, no authority to reverse a P2P transaction, and no off switch for a cross-border, uncensorable, and resilient network that operates 24/7 without interruption.
While they spend billions trying to distort the perception of value, Bitcoin continues to validate the truth block after block, indifferent to their maneuvers. They can manipulate the price in the short term, but they are completely powerless against the rules of consensus.
Tick Tock, Next Block...
