Paper and notebook in attachments.

This is a long one. The a complete review with the citations and the appendix at the bottom so you can check everything yourself. Grab a coffee. 1. INTRODUCTION AND METHOD Okay, so this whole review exists to answer one question: which model of bitcoin actually survives contact with the 2025 to 2026 data? The period under review runs from the all time high on October 6, 2025, around 126,100, through August 2026 where we sit around 63,000. That is minus 49 percent, ten months into a bear market. And I want you to understand why this window is a gift for anyone who thinks in systems: it contains out of sample tests for basically every major claim from both the bull side and the bear side. The 2020 to 2024 period could not give us that, because it was one long adoption impulse in one direction. You cannot test a claim in a regime that only ever confirms it. This one tests everything. Before the analysis, the method, because the method is the whole point. I graded every source by quality tier and I weighted accordingly. Top tier: peer reviewed finance papers and primary legal documents. That means Griffin and Shams (2020, Journal of Finance), Lyons and Viswanath-Natraj (2023, Journal of International Money and Finance), Wei (2018, Economics Letters), Kristoufek (2021, Finance Research Letters), Liu and Tsyvinski (2021, Review of Financial Studies), Makarov and Schoar (2020 in the Journal of Financial Economics, and their 2021 NBER blockchain paper), Baur, Hong and Lee (2018). And the legal record: the CFTC order against Tether from October 2021, the New York Attorney General settlement from February 2021, Strategy's 8-K filing from July 6, 2026, the Federal Reserve statement from July 29, 2026, and the IMF Article IV review of El Salvador from July 2025. Second tier: institutional research. Fidelity Digital Assets, Galaxy Research, ARK, CF Benchmarks, and sell side notes from Citi and Standard Chartered. Third tier: on-chain analytics, Glassnode, CryptoQuant, Arkham. Important, this is probabilistic entity clustering, not audited holdings. Fourth tier: journalism. Bottom tier: the advocacy content, bear polemics like the King article and bull narrative work like stock to flow and hyperbitcoinization essays.