Just buy bitcoin and self-custody. $1 bought and REMOVED from exchanges wipes out $5 of short derivatives.

It's estimated 80% of the price decline seen in the past 30 days is from derivative trading - leveraged bets that don't actually touch real bitcoin. They just get to push price down and do it by higher volume than what's being bet in real value terms. But did you know holding bitcoin on an exchange helps derivatives continue to trade like this?

When you remove actual bitcoin from exchanges, it pulls out liquidity and squeezes the paper bets. When evaluating risks on shorts contracts that need to settle, a contributing factor is how much bitcoin is sitting on exchanges, regardless of if you have an open order.

When synthetic exposure grows faster than actual bitcoin on exchanges... bad stuff happens to those who short bitcoin. It doesn't work the other way around. There's no inverse of having higher ratio of long bets in derivatives and not enough bitcoin liquidity.