Stefan Jespers, a prominent crypto influencer known as WhalePanda, took to X to raise doubt about Bitcoin’s qualification as a store of value. While such an opinion is hardly popular in the crypto community, it has its fair share. Let’s break it down.
- A Bitcoin investor and influencer, WhalePanda, points to the weakening Bitcoin performance in 2025, disputing that we are in a bull market right now.
- He says that gold and big stocks are a better store of value than Bitcoin, which has grown only 500% in eight years.
- While not appreciating Bitcoin’s long-term performance, WhalePanda highlights Bitcoin’s important role as an uncensorable means of exchange.
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Bitcoin as a store-of-value
Bitcoin has an infamously low network capacity with its five to seven transactions per second (for comparison, Visa boasts around 24,000 transactions per second). Multiple developers are involved in working on this problem.
However, many Bitcoin enthusiasts just dismiss the idea of using Bitcoin as a means of payment. Instead, they say, Bitcoin is a store of value. Notably, Michael Saylor, whose company Strategy is the biggest corporate owner of Bitcoin, claims that Bitcoin is not a currency but rather a capital akin to gold. According to Saylor, Bitcoin is better than gold, as its digital form makes it more mobile and manageable.
Not everyone agrees that we should get over the fact that Bitcoin is a store of value and not a means of payment. For instance, Twitter co-founder and Block Inc. CEO Jack Dorsey (and a Bitcoin creator, according to Matthew Sigel of VanEck) said that Bitcoin has to be used for payments in order to be relevant.
Reservations with the use of Bitcoin as a means of payment, however, are not limited by the low network capacity but also the fear of potential opportunity loss: “no one wants to be a pizza guy,” as Jameson Lopp, a CTO at crypto custodian Casa, once said. He was referring to the first-ever purchase made via Bitcoin when Laszlo Hanyecz spent 10,000 BTC to buy two pizzas in 2010.
The use of Bitcoin as a store of value became so popular that many countries (or smaller jurisdictions) and corporations are considering or already creating Bitcoin reserves. Nevertheless, Bitcoin OG WhalePanda outlined his reservations about Bitcoin as a store of value asset.
WhalePanda’s considerations
WhalePanda posted a series of tweets explaining how Bitcoin is not the best asset to be a store of value. First, he stressed that he believes that $124,000 (currently a peak Bitcoin price, reached on Aug. 14, 2025) was not the top of this bull run. In a follow-up post, he clarified that “October has always been a good month,” so probably in October, the BTC price will move above $124,000.
More than that, WhalePanda articulated that once the inflation is factored in, we cannot call $124,000 an all-time high, as the USD value has dropped 10% in 2025. The actual all-time high, according to WhalePanda, was in December 2024, when Bitcoin exceeded $106,000.
Earlier, on Aug. 14, WhalePanda already challenged the idea that currently Bitcoin is in the bull market phase, citing that while the $124,000 price reached by BTC on that day formally was the record-high, “it hasn’t made a new high vs Euro.” More than that, he emphasized that other big assets perform better than Bitcoin: “Higher market cap stocks have 5-10% days and Bitcoin can’t,” WhalePanda wrote, adding that the only asset performing worse than Bitcoin is Strategy.
If $124,000 actually was the top of this cycle, WhalePanda said, “there is no reason to hold BTC as [a] store of value.” He added that there is no point in holding an asset that loses 80% of its value (that’s what happened to Bitcoin in November 2018, when it was only 20% of its peak price reached in December of the previous year).
More importantly, WhalePanda offered an alternative evaluation of Bitcoin’s four-year gains. Instead of speculating about Bitcoin going from $16,000 to $124,000 in four years (from the lowest point to the highest point in the last four years), he compared two peak values Bitcoin had in four years, from $69,000 to $124,000, which is a considerably less impressive gain.
Such an evaluation totally makes sense, as for those who bought Bitcoin at $69,000, the August 2025 peak at $124,000 is less than a 50% gain in four years. WhalePanda claims that gold has a better performance. While in four years the gold price grew by less than 50%, it was pretty stable with strong long-term appreciation potential.
Alternatives to Bitcoin
WhalePanda mentioned that lately, gold and big stocks have been performing better than Bitcoin. In a similar manner, the pseudonymous Twitter account using the Tyler Durden handle noted that it took eight years for Bitcoin to get from $20,000 to $124,000, which is more than a 500% growth in eight years.
Are there stocks or other assets that did better? Gold didn’t make 500% in eight years. However, if we look, for example, at Nvidia (NVDA) stock, we’ll find out that in eight years, it grew from around $4 to roughly $180. In the same timeframe, Sterling Infrastructure, Inc. (STRL) stock went from $13 to $295. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) stock went from $14 to $166. The list goes on. All of these and various other stocks display strong long-term price appreciation while being generally less volatile than Bitcoin.
Going back to WhalePanda’s posts, it’s worth saying that he is not bearish on Bitcoin. While not seeing Bitcoin as the best possible store of value, he, however, points out that Bitcoin’s role as “uncensorable means of exchange” is what really matters to him. In this sense, gold, stocks, and other traditional assets cannot replace Bitcoin.
