Bitcoin is down ~47% from its October 2025 ATH of $126K. Fear & Greed at single digits. "BTC to zero” Google searches at 5-year highs. ETF outflows mounting. People are calling for $40K, even $25K. So I animated 15 years of drawdown data to put this moment in context. - - - Left: BTC price (log scale), colored by drawdown regime. Right: The distribution of every single day Bitcoin has spent at each drawdown depth from an ATH, built up in real time as price evolves. Importantly, the distribution evolves and is not static - the peaks/valleys grow over time - but what is the trend in how they’re evolving? This tells you something important about what Bitcoin is becoming. - - - There are 3 predominant drawdown regions: 🟢Green = 0 to -15% (Regime 1) ⚪️White = -15% to -35% (Transition) 🔴Red = ≤ -35% (Regime 2) Watch it build. 2011: -92.7% bottom. The histogram is a thin red smear. Almost all of Bitcoin's short existence spent deep underwater. 2013-2015: Another cycle, another -72% drawdown. The distribution fills in a fat red tail between -60% and -80%. Over 1,500 days in drawdown. Most of them brutal. 2017: BTC makes a brief ATH at $11,562, but the histogram tells us that with 2,524 drawdown days, red still dominates. Bitcoin had spent most of its life getting punished. 2018: -78.4%. The -60 to -80% band fills in further. Again, Bitcoin getting punished. This has been the story of the old Bitcoin. Then something shifts. By 2021, the green bars near 0% start growing much more. Bitcoin is beginning to spend more time near its highs than it used to. The distribution is migrating left. 2022 bottom: -68.5%. Still deep, but shallower than every prior cycle bottom. Each cycle's worst drawdown has gotten less severe: -92.7% → -87% → -84% → -77% → -68.5% The floor keeps rising, the green keeps growing, and the red tail is still there - but it's shrinking as a share of the whole. The transition zone is gaining more share too, but still markedly less time there than red or green (for example we just recently spent nearly 90 days in this zone after the Oct ‘25 ATH). This is what maturation looks like in the data. Not the absence of drawdowns, but the gradual compression of their severity and the accumulation of time spent near highs. - - - So where are we now? Down ~47% from $126K. Sentiment is the worst since June 2022. Everyone's asking if this is 2018 again. Probably not. Bitcoin has spent a structurally larger share of time in Regime 1 than ever before, especially in this cycle. Green-white oscillations are replacing the deep red plunges. The dives into Regime 2 are getting shallower. We could still go lower from here, but the data is compressing the downside, cycle over cycle. Whether the market believes that right now is a different question… - - - Worth a boomark 📙, as you might need to come back to this a few times to digest 🧠

Awesome breakdown, props for putting in the work. One possible outlying variable that I think could trigger another major pullback is governments and institutions. They could be accumulating in small amounts, instead of hoarding in whale sized wallets. Skewing the numbers to show that more individuals are buying again. Then flash crash 10% the market in one day, to try and shake us out. I still feel like were gonna see one more of these stress tests before the next ALT. This is just a feeling, no data supporting what I am saying.