BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes has said that he would not buy Bitcoin (BTC) today if he only had $1 to invest.
However, he still expects the cryptocurrency to eventually climb back above $100,000 once central banks return to printing money.
Waiting for the Fed to Print
In a March 10 interview with Natalie Brunell on CoinStories, Hayes argued that the ongoing conflict pitting the U.S. and Israel against Iran has created a real risk of a broad market sell-off that could pull BTC below $60,000.
“There’s a situation where the longer that this carries on, there could be a massive sell-off in equities, and Bitcoin might fall a bit lower, might break $60,000, and that could be sort of a big cascading of liquidations down,” Hayes said during the interview.
According to him, every major Middle East conflict in his lifetime eventually prompted the Fed to print, leading him to conclude that the signal to watch is not the war itself but what central banks actually do in response.
“If I had $1 to invest right now, would I be putting it into Bitcoin? No,” he said. “I would wait. I think that the longer that this conflict goes on, the higher the likelihood that the Fed has to print money to support the American war machine, and that’s when I’m going to buy Bitcoin.”
However, he cautioned against trying to time the moment, noting that most people are following the same mainstream coverage and could likely misread the situation.
Asked why he thought BTC had underperformed over the past 6 to 9 months, the former BitMEX CEO pointed to what he described as a liquidity deficit rather than weak demand for the king cryptocurrency itself.
“Bitcoin is a liquidity alarm,” he stated, arguing that AI-driven job displacement is quietly building deflationary pressure in the U.S. economy. In his view, there isn’t enough dollar liquidity to offset the other demands on capital, especially spending by large tech companies building out data center infrastructure.
No Grand Schemes to Suppress Bitcoin
Hayes also pushed back on the idea that institutions or large market makers like Jane Street have been suppressing the price of BTC.
“I don’t think there’s anything nefarious or like some evil conspiracy of Jane Street and other market makers to try to manipulate prices lower,” he said.
The crypto trader attributed most such claims to investors looking for someone to blame after bad entries and advised anyone without a professional trading setup to completely avoid leverage and short-term positions.
Personally, he described himself as “structurally very, very long Bitcoin and other coins,” adding that there’s currently a much stronger need for stateless money than when Bitcoin launched in 2009.
Hayes’s comments have come with Bitcoin trading just under the $70,000 mark following months of sideways price action. However, unlike the BitMEX co-founder’s suggestion that the asset could dip to $60,000, analyst Markus Thielen believes that the way BTC brushed off rising oil prices and geopolitical noise in the past week was a bullish sign, which made a move toward $80,000 more likely.
The post Here’s When Arthur Hayes Will Buy Bitcoin Again appeared first on CryptoPotato.
