Looking 7 months before the halving in 2012 and 2016 I don't see a parallel for the current situation.
Every cycle is different. Even if we're in another bullish cycle, it won't look the same as the previous ones.
I'm not sure how much of a market we can talk about in April 2012 but the December of 2015 probably was a valid and well quite developed market, yet I don't see any huge drops around December 2015 (between 2015-11-02 and 2015-11-09 it went from $501 to $297 but back then this was still considered "normal" I suppose).
Why was it normal back then but not now? The Bitcoin markets may be more mature now by some metrics but they are still illiquid and volatile. This dump looks totally normal to me, though not exactly what I
hoped to see.
So how is it different now? What actually triggered the sell-off and why it happened?
Bakkt "sell the news" event, CME futures settlement. In technical terms, the downside break of the triangle triggered sellers, which broke supports in the $9,000s. That support break caused a huge cascade of stop losses, resulting in the crash.
To me this looks like the sell-off during November 2018 when we went from $6300 to $3100 in matter of 4 weeks which made absolutely no sense to me either.
Maybe. I think it's unlikely to play out exactly the same way but time will tell.