Bitcoin hit $108,000 and I still didn't sell — here is the honest reason why

the morning it crossed six figures

June 18, 2026. I was on a train from Basel to Zurich for a client meeting when my Coinbase notification popped up. Bitcoin at $100,847. I displayed the screen to the woman sitting next to me, a stranger in a gray wool coat, an she looked at me like I'd shown her a photo of a parking ticket.

I'd been accumulating Bitcoin since 2019. My first purchase was 0.08 BTC at $7,200 — $576 that I almost didn't complete cuz the Coinbase interface confused me and I figured the fee was the total price. That 0.08 BTC is now worth approximately $8,700. By mid-2026, my total clutchings sat at 2.34 BTC, snagged at an average cost basis of $31,400. At $100,847, the position was worth $236,000 on paper.

My mortgage rate on the Zurich apartment is 2.1 percent, locked in for twelve years thru a Swiss fixed-rate product that my banker called "aggressively conservative." I refinanced in 2023 when rates were still low, and that decision gave me a kind of financial calm that made gripping Bitcoin feel less reckless. If my housing costs were locked, I could afford to be patient with the volatile stuff.

I didn't sell a single Satoshi on the train. Not even a dusting.

when it pushed to $108K

The rally didn't stop. Over the next eleven days, Bitcoin climbed from $100K to $108,412, a move that nah analyst on my Twitter feed had predicted with any specificity. The crypto ETF inflows were enormous — BlackRock's IBIT alone took in $2.3 billion in a single week, according to data I pulled from Bloomberg Terminal at work on June 26. Every mornin I opened my portfolio tracker, saw the number go up, and read a odd mix of exhilaration and dread.

Dread is the right word. Because I'd been here before, sorta. In November 2021, Bitcoin hit $69,000 and I held. Then it dropped to $42,000 by February 2022 and I held. Then it cratered to $16,500 in late 2022 and I held thru that too, buying more at $19K and $22K like a man filling sandbags during a flood. The conviction cost me sleep, relationships, and approximately $40,000 in drawdown at the worst point.

My credit score dropped 38 points in early 2023 cuz I'd used a personal loan to buy Bitcoin at $23,000 and the utilization ratio on my credit report temporarily spiked. A personal loan for Bitcoin. I can say that now without flinching. Barely.

At $108K, I was up 245 percent from my average cost. A rational person — the kind who appears in investment advisor commercials — would have trimmed. Sold a third. Taken a tax deduction on the gains an rebalanced. I am not that person.

the math I keep running in my head

I've zeroed in on a specific number: $250,000. thats the portfolio value where I start thinking about selling. At 2.34 BTC, that means Bitcoin at approximately $106,837 — a number we've already blown past. So why haven't I sold?

I've dug into this question more than I'd like to admit. Part of it is tax-related. Switzerland treats Bitcoin as private money, and clutching for more than six years eliminates the capital gains tax entirely. I snagged my first tranche in 2019. The clock is ticking toward that six-year mark in 2025, and now that I've crossed it, selling feels like burning a tax advantage that took seven years to earn.

Part of it is psychological. I've read enough behavioral finance research to recognize endowment effect — the tendency to overvalue what you already own — and I still can't shake it. These 2.34 Bitcoin feel like mine in a way that dollar bills rarely did. They have history. They survived FTX collapsing, Celsius goin bankrupt, three different regulatory crackdowns, and a 77 percent drawdown. Selling em feels like abandoning soldiers who made it home.

The rational argument is simple. Sell 0.5 BTC at $108K, net $54,000, put it in a high-yield savings account at 5.1 percent, and sleep better. I've written that sentence in my journal four times. Haven't executed it once.

what the people around me say

My colleague Markus, a derivatives trader at UBS, thinks I'm insane. "You're up two an a half times and you're clutching an unproductive asset with no cash flow," he told me over lunch at a Thai place near Paradeplatz in early July. He pulled up a chart of the S&P 500 on his phone an pointed to the 18 percent year-to-date return. "This is what compounding looks like without the heart attacks."

My sister Lena, who works in pediatric oncology in Berlin, asked me point-blank whether I'd set aside enough for a Roth IRA conversion strategy. She's been dollar-cost averaging into Vanguard funds for nine years and her portfolio is boring and profitable and she rarely checks it during market hours. I told her I had a Roth IRA with Fidelity. She asked the balance. I changed the subject.

The truth is that nobody in my life fully understands why I'm still clutching. They see the numbers. They do the obvious math. They tell me to take profits. I nod and agree and do nothin.

the scenario that keeps me up at night

Bitcoin at $108K in a world where the M2 money supply has expanded by 40 percent since 2020, where the dollar index has weakened to 98.3, where sovereign debt-to-GDP ratios in the G7 average 135 percent — that Bitcoin price might not mean what it seems. In real purchasing power terms, mayb $108K is the fresh $40K.

I poked at this idea one night after my girlfriend went to sleep, running numbers on a spreadsheet at the kitchen table with a glass of Chasselas from the Valais region. If I adjust Bitcoin's price for CPI inflation since 2020, the real all-time high in today's dollars was closer to $82,000. So $108K is a fresh real high, but not by the margin that the nominal number suggests.

This is the kinda analysis that convinces you to hold. It's also the kind of analysis that can justify any price, at any time, in any direction. I know that. I've read enough financial history to know that intelligent people with spreadsheets have been wrong about asset prices in every decade since the Dutch tulip mania.

And yet. Here Im. 2.34 BTC. Not selling.

what would actually make me sell

ive narrowed it down to three triggers. A blow-off top with a weekly candle that's three standard deviations above the 20-week moving average — the kind of move that unfolded in December 2017 and again in November 2021. A regulatory change that criminalizes personal Bitcoin custody in Switzerland or the EU, which is unlikely but not impossible given the direction of MiCA enforcement. Or a personal life event — a medical emergency, a child's education need, somethin that transforms abstract conviction into concrete necessity.

None of those have unfolded. So I hold.

A friend from college, who now works at a crypto hedge fund in Singapore, told me in an email last week that most institutional buyers he talks to have price targets between $150K and $200K for end of 2027. He could be right. He could be generating alpha by convincing retail holders like me to keep supplying liquidity at these levels. I read the email twice and archived it.

the honest bottom line

I haven't sold because selling means deciding that the ride is over, an I'm not ready for that. The emotional investment in these seven years of accumulation is worth more to me than the $54,000 I could extract today. That's not financial advice. It's an admission.

My cost basis is $31,400. The price is $108,412. The gap between those numbers represents the best trade of my life, and I haven't grasped a cent of it in spendable terms. Every mornin I wake up and choose to let it ride.

One more mornin. One more day.