This is a pretty big blow. The ETF has been the talk of the town for the last four years, and it is not unreasonable to think that it has been holding the hand

This is a pretty big blow. The ETF has been the talk of the town for the last four years, and it is not unreasonable to think that it has been holding the hand under the price, since to a lot of people it represented the coveted inflow of institutional investment into bitcoin. With this gone, the immediate outlook for bitcoin is bleak. There is little market adoption to speak of, in fact bitcoin is probably losing market share, as the initial hype and attention grabbing announcements of bitcoin support have died down, and a lot of merchants have decided that the miniscule business it drives is not worth the trouble. Also, the network is straining even under the current load, leading to (much) longer transaction confirmation times and higher fees. The average fee for a bitcoin transaction is now almost one dollar - this rules out a lot of use cases that previously people would have said were ideal for bitcoin. Which leads me to the even bigger problem: The bitcoin community and ecosystem is in a massive deadlock, between two sides that are equally rabid and antagonistic, and dividing the project down the middle, between the developers and the mining operators. Few outsiders likely know how bad it has become, but visit r/bitcoin and r/btc on reddit if you're curious. This would be concerning in itself for the future of the project, but it also means that right now no major updates can be made to the bitcoin network, because each camp runs a big percentage of the network and block any new initiative from the other side. All of this makes me very bearish for bitcoin in the medium term. I am very sure that bitcoin has a future, but how long out that is, and how big it is, remains doubtful and could well be influenced negatively by particularly the issue of governance. Satoshi once said something like "in ten years bitcoin is either worth a huge amount or nothing". I'm starting to fear that might not be true - bitcoin could also become a small niche platform for a very limited set of use cases.