The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.

Our analysts just identified a stock with the potential to be the next Nvidia. Tell us how you invest and we'll show you why it's our #1 pick. Tap here.

Bitcoin bros have a new bro: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Days after Bessent announced the Treasury planned to double long-term debt buybacks from $2 billion to at least $4 billion, Bitcoin jumped to nearly $80,000. The rest of the crypto market followed. The question is: can it last?

Bitcoin is back, rebounding from its early-February 2026 lows after nearly 200 days of sideways action. It spent about 120 days falling from its $130,000 highs to as low as $59,800, or a 52% drop.

Why Bitcoin fell from such heights is a mix of conspiracy and the commodity's four-year cycle. After Bitcoin peaked in late December 2017, it took about 1,420 days to reach its then all-time high of ~$69,000 in December 2021. Bitcoin took the same amount of time to reach its October 2025 high of ~$130,000, only to fall once again.

What changed?

On August 19, Bessent stepped in with his now-infamous debt-management decision involving U.S. bonds, and told the Fed to kick rocks. Yields fell from their 19-year highs, making Bitcoin, still viewed as a risky stock, that much more attractive. Another $2.74 billion in short positions surely helped, too, as Bloomberg reports.

Bessent's bond intervention worked for about two days. By Friday, yields were close to where they were on Wednesday.

We could have seen this coming: Bessent's intervention in Japan didn't work. If bond markets ignore Bessent's attempt to take the reins, this week's pump could end up as another fake-out, like we saw in late February and late March, as the risk-free rate rises. Liquidity could also get squeezed, which historically have never been good for Bitcoin.

One stock. Nvidia-level potential. 30M+ investors trust Moby to find it first. Get the pick. Tap here.

The short-term "yield trade" isn't Bitcoin's only tailwind, though. It's also a currency-debasement trade, according to infamous hedge fund manager Ray Dalio.

Dalio urged investors to go "underweight debt assets like bonds" and "overweight gold and a bit of Bitcoin" because of U.S. debt, which hit $40 trillion this week, in a LinkedIn post.

"When you look at the arithmetic, it's simple," Dalio said. "We're approaching a tipping point where financing the debt will either force sharply higher rates or aggressive money printing, both of which are bad for bondholders and currency holders."

He's not wrong. The CBO laid out the math in its January 2025 Budget and Economic Outlook. Mandatory spending and interest costs grow faster than revenue from 2025 to 2035 under current law, the agency said, and debt swells as a result. Federal debt held by the public goes from 100 percent of GDP in 2025 to a projected 118 percent by 2035. That would break the all-time high of 106 percent, a record set in 1946 just after World War II.

The CBO also noted that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase primary deficits by about $3.7 trillion from 2026-2035, with an estimated $1.07 trillion in additional net interest costs over the entire 10-year period. That's $72 billion per year, and that's conservative.

If you look at Bitcoin's first bottom in June 2022, it took about 210 days of sideways trading before the asset finally reversed. The same kind of pattern has been playing out recently.

But we'd be remiss not to mention the bigger picture. From peak to trough, from the highs of 2021 to the lows of January 2023, it took almost 430 days for Bitcoin to reverse course. Looking at 2025-2026, Bitcoin is only 315 days in, meaning we could have more consolidation ahead before the real move begins.

This isn't investment advice, just observations. It's next to impossible to time anything with Bitcoin and crypto. Even Michael Saylor has been selling over the last couple of months to fund Strategy's preferred stock dividends, despite once calling Bitcoin a "swarm of cyber hornets."

So far, though, Saylor has weathered it. However bad it looked for a while there, he's proven you can sell some of your Bitcoin as long as you have 840,447 BTC or so more.