Looks like in 2021 we just skipped the main final explosive part of the bull market and went sideways instead, and so the price skipped the long drawn out bear market and went straight into final capitulation sending it to the bottom of the market. The market is just 10x larger than it was 3 years ago.
But we had the same thing in 2017 (not 2018) after having a big rise but with slight differences in timings and percentages. For example after price went 3x above the previous ATH to $3k it crashed hard down to $1.7k (-43%) and then started going sideways for nearly 2 months.
We had another one after reaching 5x above previous ATH from from last week of August to first week of October where price crashed hard from $5k all the way down to $2.8 (-44%) and went sideways for a little less than 2 months.
Similarly in 2021 after reaching 3x above previous ATH ie. $65k price it crashed hard (-53%) and is not going sideways and its been only a month and a half.
Here is a similar classic similar topic with people talking about how the bear market has started back in June 2017 when we had that 43% dump.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1974100.0;allPage ~170 is filled with them.
Well the corrections in 2017 were not similar to current price actions, they were similar to the corrections we got earlier this year. They fell just over 40%, not over 50%, despite the market being much smaller and therefore more volatile back then, and each time it took about a month and a half to get back to the previous peak and push higher. That doesn't really look at all like what is going on now. Doesn't seem at all likely that at the end of this month the price will be back over $60k and pushing significantly higher.
The two 2017 corrections you mention line up with the two early 2021 corrections quite well, just the 2021 ones took less time to come back up and were smaller, but that makes sense given the institutional demand keeping the price floor from falling as much or for as long. Whereas now it looks a lot more like a bear market....except we had no blow-off top to cause a bear market. So it actually looks a lot like what I said, bear market bottom capitulation phase, without the year long bear market preceding it.
I think the drop from $60k to $30k and the drop from $6k to $3k are so similar I don't even really need to explain that, though I did for clarity. This is not me calling a bear market in something like June 2017. June 2017 and Jan 2021 were similar corrections and in neither one did I remotely think we were entering a bear market, in fact I laughed both times when people thought it was the end of the bull market that had just started as the sentiment was clearly still very immediately bullish, so no I'm not doing a June 2017 type of thing here. Also, I'm saying we're NOT in a bear market, I'm saying we skipped the blow-off top so we also skipped the bear market that results from it. And I think it is pretty plain to see that the two early 2021 corrections were similar to the two big 2017 corrections, whereas the current price action is a different market event.
Now, if bitcoin suddenly pushes back up over $60k next month and to significant new ATHs soon after then you'd be right, but does anyone seriously think that's going to happen? I definitely think the price is going to be stuck low for a while, something longer than a 6 week correction but far less than a bear market / crypto winter. As I said, things looks a lot like a normal bitcoin macro cycle, except we never got the end of it so we never got what resulted from the end. We skipped the November 2017 to November 2018 big boom and bust, and the big bust only happens if the big boom happens. And because of that I also expect this bottom to last less than the 4.5 months the last bear market bottom lasted, perhaps more like 2-3 months, so I think we'll see a breakout of ~$40k this summer, because market sentiment won't get nearly as bad as it gets at the bottom of a long crypto winter.
Obviously what would prove this relationship I've pointed out here wrong would be if Bitcoin busts out of the $30,000s next month and shoots back to ATHs soon after, showing this is just a big correction, as you are saying, or if price continues crashing for a long time showing that we are in fact in a bear market. I think the relationship I've shown here and what I expect to happen are much more likely than either of those two scenarios, but time will tell!
Personally I'm holding off making any moves with my trading stash and staying in cash with it until a clear move is made - either significantly down into the $20k's perhaps showing we're in a bear market, or significantly above $40k showing we're in the next bull phase of this market, which I expect as I said will be later this summer. I'd love for you to be right and in no time we'll be back to pushing ATHs, but looking at things that just seems absurdly optimistic and it looks like my analysis is probably much more accurate and it could be a 2-3 until the next breakout and six months before we're back to ATHs. Which would also fit in line perfectly with the market thesis I've had since the beginning of this year which says we're in a long term bull market that'll take the shape of a bunch of medium sized bull runs and 3-6 month cool off periods. I now expect the first of these cycles within the larger bull market to play out over the course of about a year now, from oct 2020 to late 2021, at which point we'll surpass the ATH and move into the next medium cycle of what I think could be a decade long bull market.
Feel free to disagree. I'm often wrong on short term price action cuz that's impossible to predict, though here I'm staying away from any short term analysis. What has happened the past 8 months looks just like the market structure I've been postulating about since beginning of this year, and I just realized the relationship I posted in this thread and it seems very relevant to what is going on and also plays into my long term market thesis.
The tl;dr prediction from this analysis (which matches up with my broader market thesis for the next decade) is I expect we are bottoming now and the next half year will be bottom, break out, and build back to ATH. Then see new ATHs in early 2022 or perhaps before end of year if positive news/sentiment can overpower FUD a bit more quickly.