Btc is starting to feel like a macro trade again

I may be overthinking this, but the recent btc move feels less crypto-specific than people are making it sound.

I read a CoinDesk piece arguing that gold, silver, and btc are all getting hit by the same unwind in the “debasement trade.” Basically, the idea is that if the Fed stays hawkish, the dollar firms up, and real yields move higher, non-yielding assets like gold, silver, and btc all become less attractive at the same time.

That makes more sense to me than trying to force every btc drop into a crypto-native explanation. There was no single protocol event or exchange headline that explained the move cleanly. It looked more like the market reducing exposure to scarce/liquidity-sensitive assets across the board.

The uncomfortable part is that bitcoin spent a lot of time being marketed as digital gold, but now it seems to be trading like both digital gold and a high-beta risk asset. When macro is friendly, people argue it is an inflation hedge. When macro tightens, it gets sold like speculative tech.

I was watching the btc perp reaction on BYDFi after the gold and silver selloff, mostly to see whether funding or positioning looked like a crypto-specific flush. It did not really feel that way. The price action looked more tied to macro pressure than anything happening inside crypto itself.

Not saying on-chain data is useless, but I am starting to think it is secondary during weeks like this. If gold, silver, DXY, and yields are all moving together, btc may just be part of the same macro basket whether crypto people like that framing or not.

For people actively trading btc now, what are you watching first: on-chain data, Nasdaq, gold, DXY, or yields?