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October is usually a month for innocent frights and fun scares, but for Bitcoin investors, this month has left many holding the token legitimately fearful. In the last 24 hours alone, the cryptocurrency king has lost nearly 7% of its value. Bitcoin is currently sitting at below $104,000 per token. Thats especially notable considering that the cryptocurrency hit an all-time high of more than $126,000 just 12 days ago. Heres what you need to know about Bitcoin’s most recent crash. Bitcoins tumultuous 2025 Bitcoin has been on a wild ride in 2025. The token began the year with considerable faith from investors, largely due to the incoming Trump administration, which clearly favored cryptocurrencies more than any other presidential administration before it. In the weeks surrounding Trumps inauguration, Bitcoin spiked, going from a January low of around $91,000 to above $106,000 on the day Trump was sworn in for his second term. But as Trumps Liberation Day tariffs loomed and roiled markets in March and April, Bitcoin slumped, reaching lows of nearly $76,000 at the beginning of April. Yet, into and over the summer, Bitcoin steadily rose. By August, it had hit a high of over $123,000, and by October 5 of this year, it had hit an all-time high of $126,198. Since that all-time high, the token’s value has been slidingand Bitcoins decline has accelerated in the past 24 hours. Whats behind this recent slide? There seem to be two main factors pulling the token lower recently. 2 events are weighing Bitcoin down This year has been no stranger to geopolitical uncertainty. Such uncertainty can negatively impact markets, including stocks, cryptocurrencies, and other financial assets. Throughout 2025, weve had the ongoing conflicts between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Hamas. These conflicts introduce uncertainty into the world, and if theres one thing investors hate, its uncertainty. But recently, another geopolitical uncertainty has arisen: This time, not from a physical conflict but from an economic one. Earlier this month, President Trump threatened to impose an additional 100% tariff on China after the country introduced new export controls on rare earth elementsminerals vital for industries such as technology and national security due to their importance in electronic devices. So far, neither Trump nor China has backed down, leading investors to fear that the two largest economies on the planet may yet again raise barriers against each other. These barriers could have severe negative knock-on financial effects for both countries. Besides the U.S.-China economic conflict, a second event seems to be weighing on Bitcoin. This one is domestic: the continuing U.S. government shutdown. The current shutdown has now lasted 17 days and counting. It began on October 1, with Republicans and Democrats being unable to reach an agreement on funding the federal government. One of the primary issues in the shutdown is the implementation of spending cuts. Republicans want to reduce spending on critical social services, while Democrats want to ensure that funding for healthcare subsidies is included. Like the ongoing U.S.-China economic conflict, the continuing U.S. government shutdown breeds uncertainty, which makes investors nervous. And nervous investors tend to sell, rather than buy, in order to lock in gains and hedge against potential further losses in the future. Gold seems to be the preferred safe-haven this time Paradoxically, investor uncertainty can sometimes benefit Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Thats because cryptocurrencies are sometimes viewed as safe-haven assets. These are assets that people turn to during times of economic uncertainty, which often sends traditional stock markets down. Howeverso far at leastthis time around, investors seem to have gone back into the arms of a more traditional safe-haven asset: gold. While Bitcoin is down more than 10% in the past month, the price of gold is up more than 18%. As gold rises, some investors who own cryptocurrency may choose to convert their digital token profits into physical gold. Over the past 24 hours, during which Bitcoin has fallen nearly 7%, gold has risen by over 1.1%. One ounce of gold is now worth $4,352nearly an all-time high. The precious metal is up over 9.4% in the last five days alone. During that time, Bitcoin has fallen more than 9%. Yet Bitcoin isnt the only cryptocurrency seeing steep losses in recent days. As of the time of this writing, other major cryptocurrencies are also down significantly in the past 24 hours, including Ethereum, which has fallen more than 8%, and BNB, which has fallen 11.5%.
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The fortunes of major quantum computing firms turned negative this week as share prices sankin some cases by double digits. The so-called Quantum Four publicly traded companiesRigetti Computing, IonQ, Quantum Computing Inc, and D-Wave Quantumsaw their stock prices tumble on Thursday. And as of this writing, all four companies are down even lower in premarket trading on Friday. Berkeley, California-based Rigetti (NASDAQ: RGTI) has seen the biggest drop, with its stock price falling almost 15% on Thursday, October 16. As of this writing, the stock was down another 7.65% during the premarket session. Shares of IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) were down by a similar amount on Thursday, although their 2.23% drop on Friday has not been quite as steep. Quantum Computing Inc (NASDAQ: QUBT) fell by 11.73% on Thursday, while D-Wave (NYSE: QBTS) was down 9.65%. Why are quantum computing stocks down? There doesn’t seem to have been any market-moving negative news specific to the quantum computing space. In fact, D-Wave had just announced on Wednesday a $12 million deal to bring its much-hyped Advantage2 computer to Italy. However, the broader stock market experienced shocks on Thursday after regional bank Zions Bancorporation accused some of its borrowers of fraud and warned that it would take a large loss, as the Wall Street Journal reported. This disclosure has sparked fears about the credit health of regional banks more broadly, and those fears appear to be spilling into the markets. Stock futures were all in retreat on Friday morning as investors continue to digest the news. In the meantime, some may be gravitating toward safe-haven assets like gold, which just set yet another record this week when it topped $4,300 per ounce. Quantum computing investors may be profit-taking All four of the major quantum computing firms have had enormous runs over the last 12 months, with shares of Rigetti soaring almost 5,000% over that period. With markets turning negative and troubling signals emerging from the banking sector, it’s natural that investors in quantum computing might be inclined to sell off some of their shares while profits are high. Although quantum computers are seen by many experts as a transformative technology that could reshape the industry, the space is still highly speculative, and some have argued that the stocks are currently overvalued. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
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Hello again from Fast Company and thanks for reading Plugged In. Before I go any further, a bit of quick self-serving promotion: This week, we published our fifth annual Next Big Things in Tech list. Featuring 137 projects and people in 31 categories, its our guide to technologies that are already reshaping business and life in general, with plenty of headroom to go further in the years to come. None of them are the usual suspectsand many have largely flown under the radar. Take a look, and youll come away with some discoveries. Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote about Sora, OpenAIs new social network devoted wholly to generating and remixing 10-second synthetic videos. At the time of launch, the company said its guardrails prohibited the inclusion of living celebrities, but also declared that it didnt plan to police copyright violations unless owners explicitly opted out of granting permission. Consequently, the clips people shared were rife with familiar faces such as Pikachu and SpongeBob. Not surprisingly, that policy gave Hollywood fits. Quickly changing course, OpenAI tweaked its algorithm to reject prompts that clearly reference copyrighted IP. A handful of high-profile Sora members have used its Cameo feature to create shareable AI versions of themselves, including iJustine, Logan Paul, Mark Cuban, and OpenAIs own Sam Altman. Theyre everywhere on the service. But with other current celebs off the table, the Sora-obsessed turned to one of the few remaining available sources of cultural touchstones: dead people. That too has proven controversial. Most notably, the daughters of George Carlin, Martin Luther King Jr., Robin Williams, and Malcolm X have all decried the use of Sora to create synthetic videos of their fathers. Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad, wrote Zelda Williams on Instagram. If youve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. I am sympathetic to their angst. In 2021, a genealogy site called MyHeritage presaged the Sora era by launching a feature called Deep Nostalgia that let you turn old family photographs into brief videos. Out of curiosity, I uploaded a photo of a deceased relative. The moment I saw the results, I regretted having done so. Being constantly exposed to AI simulacrums of your parent created by random strangers must be agonizing. In response to concerns about bad-taste AI resurrections, OpenAI told The Washington Posts Tatum Hunter and Drew Harwell that it would allow representatives of the recently deceased to block Sora depictions. But the company didnt specify what it considered to be recent. Whatever its definition, its not going to make everyone happy. The aforementioned famous fathers died anywhere from 1965 (Malcolm X) to 2014 (Williams). They surely wont fall under a recency exception. Yet the old bit of wisdom tragedy plus time equals comedywhich apparently originated with another dead person, comedian Steve Allendoesnt always hold true. It depends on the context. Even more than a decade later, Robin Williamss death by suicide still feels like an incalculable tragedy. I have not run across any videos of him on Sora, and would prefer I never do. But I dont feel the same way about Queen Elizabeth II, who made it to 96 and was spry until her 2022 passing. Actually, I thoroughly enjoyed a jag of Sora remixes that began with a clip of her praising the cheese puffs at Costco (delightfully orange) and went on to show her relishing other delicacies in various venues around the world. Some of these clips made me LOL, not figuratively but literally. In fact, the only reason I peruse Sora at all is because an overwhelming percentage of the items in my feed are fanciful and at least aspirationally funny. AI slop of the sort that striveshowever clumsilyfor realism is scarce on the service. The same is hardly true on other social networks such as Facebook and TikTok, which are infested with machine-generated kindhearted celebrities and cute animals. Im not saying that Sora is consistently riotous. Ive scrolled through a lot of videos of MLKand Mister Rogers, Bob Ross, and othersin which the only point is that theyre mouthing some anodyne term they wouldnt have used, or talking about Sora itself. That gets tiresome fast, and makes me at least slightly queasy. It might even be slop. Its just not the sum total of Sora. I have not been above making my own Sora videos depicting the departed. Inspired by the fact that Orson Welles once recorded a radio commercial for frozen peas, I prompted for a video depicting him filming such an ad. It came out entertaining, in part because Soras version of Welles reminded me of the late John Candys wonderful impression of him. Other users remixed the clip into ones showing Welles endorsing everything from twine to camp chairs, starring less and less convincing approximations of the legendary actor-director. Maybe you had to be there. But I found it to be a rewarding if minor act of collaborative creativity, not a regrettable coarsening of the internet. All in all, encouraging people to channel their AI-video-generating energy into clips that are playful, genuinely social, and cordoned off from reality, as Sora does, seems like a positive development to me. Still, I try to show grace toward the feelings of others and would accept more restrictive policies on the use of deceased celebrities. Maybe the service could permit them only if nobody alive ever met the person in question. Cleopatra and Abraham Lincln would pass that test; Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein would not. (Thats before you get to the fact that the estates of some celebrities have deals with licensing companies that probably arent thrilled with Soras unauthorized use, such as CMG Worldwide, which represents the Monroe and Einstein estates.) If nothing else, building new guardrails around specific categories of famed individuals no longer with us would be an interesting challenge for some engineer at OpenAI. I cant see the company investing much effort in it. But in a strange way, its done the world a favor by forcing us to confront questions like this while the stakes remain relatively low. AI is only going to get better at deepfaking people, famous and otherwise. Better to figure out how we feel about that now, before the synthetic dead folks are truly indistinguishable from the real thing. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company Inside Microsoft’s quest to make Windows 11’s AI irresistibleExecutives with a combined 130+ years of tenure on the company’s decades of work to get people to talk to their PCsand why the time might finally be right. Read More Billionaire investor Frank McCourt is not giving up on his dream of acquiring TikTokThe financier says he wants a closer look at the Trump deal for the wildly popular social-media platform. Read More Goodbye, SEO. Hello, GEOHow AI search is rewriting digital strategy. 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