The market isn’t crashing because of scandals and bad news

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I don’t know, folks. Solana looks pretty cooked. The price has fallen below the 50 day and 200 day moving average, and is currently hovering around $130. It’s dropped about 35% since Valentine’s Day and is certainly not alone, with the whole market bleeding red over the same interim.

As such, we now have a lot of people asking: Is the bull run over? And if so, is the recent Bybit hack (or some other news, like the LIBRA memecoin fustercluck or the upcoming FTX unlocks) to blame? Conventional wisdom suggests that every cycle, a major hack or scandal shutters the market’s seemingly unstoppable momentum. But are these events really the cause, or just convenient scapegoats for something inevitable?

Bull runs seem to follow a fairly predictable rhythm, actually. Historically, BTC has peaked a little less than a year after reclaiming the previous cycle’s all-time high, often in December or January. It then moves briefly sideways, then downwards, and everything else follows the leader. This pattern held true in 2013, 2017 and 2021. In our current cycle, bitcoin reclaimed $69K in March 2024, and may have peaked 10 months later at $108K in January 2025.

Unsurprisingly though, people seem keen to frame the recent Bybit hack as the cause of a presumptive bearish spiral, rather than accepting that a pullback was simply due. Solana, which rode bitcoin’s momentum to nearly $300, has been caught in the same unwarranted blame game.

We’ve seen this before. Everyone knows that Mt. Gox and its admission of insolvency killed the 2013 bull run. China banning Bitcoin halted the truly magnificent ICO run of 2017. Scandals from Luna and FTX were, of course, to blame for jettisoning the 2021 moonshot. Except no, actually. None of that is true.

Bitcoin topped above $1,000 in December 2013, roughly 9 months after reclaiming its previous $31 ATH. The Mt. Gox scandal didn’t break the dam until months later in February 2014. Likewise, China’s Bitcoin ban didn’t end the 2017 bull run. The ban happened when bitcoin was around $4K. The price dipped briefly before rocketing to $18K. When the market finally crashed in January 2018 (10 months after passing the previous cycle’s all-time high), people went on to say that it was due to China cracking down on bitcoin mining in the wake of the ban.

As for Luna and FTX, both devastated investor confidence, but neither caused the bear market. Crypto prices at large had already been in decline since December 2021, or about a year after surpassing the previous cycle’s all-time high. The terraUSD collapse happened in May 2022. FTX didn’t implode until November. Solana, which was admittedly affected due to its close association with the latter, was already deep into its downtrend before that event unfolded.

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