Home › Media › Bitcoin Roundup – February 14, 2026
Bitcoin Roundup
Scott Marmoll · February 14, 2026
"Something Big Is Happening" — Matt Shumer
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
Matt Shumer, an AI startup founder, published a piece this week comparing the current moment in AI to February 2020 — the "this seems overblown" phase right before everything changes. GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 dropped the same day, and Shumer says he is no longer needed for the technical work of his own job. He predicts 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs could be gone within one to five years. I use AI every single day and I can tell you the technology is real. I have been skeptical of AI equity valuations and I still am — but the underlying technology is not a bubble, even if the stocks are. Here is what nobody is talking about: this is the most deflationary technology in human history arriving in the middle of the most inflationary monetary system in human history. That tension has to resolve somewhere. When labor markets get disrupted at the scale Shumer is describing, the importance of holding a hard asset with a fixed supply becomes impossible to ignore.
Bitcoin is hovering around $66,000, down roughly 50% from the October 2025 all-time high of $126,000. Down 21% year to date. Gold, meanwhile, is sitting at $5,000 an ounce, up 65% last year while bitcoin fell 6%. Standard Chartered has cut its year-end bitcoin target from $300,000 to $150,000 to now $100,000 — chasing price down with the same conviction they chased it up. The four-year halving cycle is doing exactly what it has always done. Canary Capital's CEO said it plainly: "2026 I expect to be a bear leg to the four-year cycle." The analysts who were calling for $300,000 are now calling for $100,000. They will be wrong in both directions. Gold's outperformance is real, but gold benefits from sovereign demand and decades of entrenched market structure. Bitcoin is navigating a liquidity squeeze in the middle of a cycle correction. The divergence does not invalidate the thesis. Dollar cost average. Cold storage. Don't get greedy.
Crypto's "Age of Speculation" May Be Over — Mike Novogratz
Galaxy CEO Mike Novogratz says the era of retail expecting 30-to-1 returns from crypto is ending. Institutions are entering with different risk tolerances, and crypto rails will be used for "real world assets" with "much lower returns." He points to tokenized stocks as the future. The October 2025 wipeout — $19.37 billion in leveraged positions liquidated in 24 hours — "wiped out a lot of retail and market makers" and "Humpty Dumpty doesn't get put back together right away." Novogratz is partially right. The speculation era for altcoins and leverage traders is ending, and good riddance. But he is conflating bitcoin with "crypto," which is a mistake he should know better than to make. Bitcoin is not a speculative vehicle for 30-to-1 returns. It is sound money. The tokenization of "real world assets" he is so excited about is Wall Street putting old wine in new bottles. You do not need a blockchain to tokenize stocks. A centralized asset on decentralized rails defeats the entire purpose. The only real innovation of blockchain is bitcoin's removal of trusted third parties. Everything else is a more complicated, more expensive version of something that already exists. If institutions are replacing retail, that is not bullish for "crypto" — institutions want bitcoin, not dog coins.