The One Chart that Explains Why Bitcoin Won't Go Up

People think that if you are sitting on 1000 BTC, the question is whether to sell it all, partial, or keep. That’s wrong. The real question is: do I earn 7mm/year safely or do I earn 15mm/year and risk partial sale, or do I earn 30mm/year and part with my 90mm for good? The OGs didn’t one day randomly decide they want to sell it all. They got assigned.

Lots of great questions since on how to analyze Deribit data to understand positioning. I've made updates to the article to help, but will share the highlights here: The first graph shows you that Deribit BTC options OI (by BTC Units, not $ notional) has essentially 5xed since 2022. Dollar notional can be noisy because the price of Bitcoin itself affects the calculation, whereas we are mostly interested in the BTC units that are being engaged on derivatives trading. Here, the trend is clear- observe that the line is upward sloping consistently since 2025. OI has nearly 3xed. We also know most of this OI is calls, because we see the 2x C/P imbalance which Deribit reports. So things bring to the most important question - how do you know then these calls are being SOLD, or being BOUGHT, since the heart of the argument relies that calls have to be SOLD where dealers are long gamma in inventory? This is literally the alpha in how the Citadels and Jane Streets make money every single day. There are many ways to come to a best educated guess, and one of the most intuitive methods is to understand whether the creation of OI was resulted by the maker hitting bids or lifting offers. The assumption here is that the natural seller/buyer is the impatient offer maker versus the market maker, which while not always true, is generally the case. Lots of heuristics are needed to correctly calibrate orderbook signals. And so if you look the further three expirations that is available on Deribit (March 2026 to Sep 2026), you can now see more clearly that almost all of the gamma exposure on the upside is LONG. The wall sits at 104k through 110k, and picks up again after 120k. This is why paying attention to options positioning matters so much. While perps/liquidations are really useful to give short-term trading signals, it is actually the contour of liquidity that the options market creates with duration over a long period of time that can create really powerful moves.

Some ppl are commenting that “Bitcoin is going down because there is OG selling, options has nothing to do with it” Well duh obviously it’s going down because more sellers than buyers That’s why this article is titled “why Bitcoin is NOT going UP” Understand the difference