Fall Back 😡
Ah man I hate daylight savings time. At 2 AM this morning the clocks flipped back to 1 AM; a most unnatural occurrence, assuming time can be considered natural and not a thing that we just made up for self-organization. Getting ready for it to start getting dark at 5 PM and then 4 PM by the time the winter solstice rolls around in six weeks. Not my cup of tea. I keep getting told that daylight savings time will be abolished one day but here we are still doing this tired practice with a weird and somewhat ridiculous history. Oh well.
October results are in!
Right at the end I was pretty convinced that October was going to end in the green, which would have been absolutely hilarious considering all the doomsaying we've been seeing in the pleb trenches. People are losing their absolute minds because of the four year cycle. Is it over already? Did we already peak?
The fact that anyone would even ask this 13% from the top rather than just parrot the normal "buy the dip" sentiment is pretty significant here. Market sentiment is a wildly mixed bag at the moment, and both sides are calling the other side the "obvious" counter trade. Nothing about this cycle is obvious; this time actually is different for once.
omg omg!
Instead of being green the monthly candle of October landed 3.69% in the red, which gives the bears even more fuel because the last time October ended red just short of 4% in 2018 the next November to follow was red -36.57%. However, all of this fear is provable contradictory cognitive dissonance. People are worried about the bull being over because of the 4-year cycle, but then they turn around and compare a devastating 2018 bear market year with 2025 which is supposedly the exact opposite. You really have to pick a lane here and stay consistent on these things. The flip flopping isn't going to do anyone any favors.
When I see posts like this I can't help but chuckle.
Notice how Bitcoin has NEVER been rejected from this line into a bear market. Why is that? Because in order to draw the line in the first place the peaks of 2018 and 2021 have to already exist. You can't draw the line without the first two points existing, so to pretend that we've cratered into a bear after being rejected from a line that couldn't have existed is just absurd. This is the definition of retroactive FUD and doomsaying analysis we are seeing these days.
Also notice that this is a linear line across multiple cycles. Even stocks experience exponential growth across long spans of time due to compounding interest/gains. Even +10% per year is exponential. You simply can't draw straight lines on the linear chart for Bitcoin across multiple cycles and expect it to mean anything, but this is how people think; this is who you're trading against, as they say.
Gold ETF launch holds lessons for Bitcoin investors
Is it possible that the ETFs and institutional adoption of Bitcoin has killed or temporarily halted the 4-year cycle? Certainly it's possible but it's also not an outcome I can bet heavily on... or perhaps I'm always betting heavily on such an outcome because I'm always irresponsibly long. The early gold ETF launches in 2004 sent the asset into an almost decade-long bull market with only a real 30% pullback following the 2008 housing crisis.
Could Bitcoin be about to pull a similar move?
Could we just slowly and painfully climb a wall of worry for the next decade without any real 50%+ pullbacks? It certainly seems possible considering all BTC bubbles are the direct occurrence of high volatility and massive greedy overleverage the likes of which we simply have not seen this year. Let's take another look at the excel sheet.
2025 has been the most stable year of crab in BTC history.
We started this year at $94k and we are now at $110k. Currently up 17%, this is significantly lower than the average gain of 50%-100% per year. Look at 2025 compared to literally any other year. 2025 has been the most stable and solid year by a surprisingly wide margin. Zero monthly candles have gained or lost even as much as 20%. The same cannot be said for any other year. The standard is for at least one month in a year to have massive volatility in the 30%-50% range, and normally it's even more than one. What could elicit such stability during the time in the cycle where we expect such greed?
Bitcoin’s Silent IPO: Why This Consolidation Isn’t What You Think
One of the best theories for what's been going on is laid out in this substack post pretty well. The idea that institutions like Coinbase and Blackrock are printing "fake paper Bitcoin" is the usual pleb slop that holds very little weight at the moment. However, this idea that OG Bitcoiners are selling into institutional demand is much more likely considering this is exactly what on chain analysis is telling us.
Wallets that have been dormant for near or over a decade have been waking up around $100k and aggressively selling into this newfound demand. Bitcoin is now a Big Boy asset and a plaything on the billionaire level. Never before has someone been able to sell billions of dollars of BTC without tanking the price heinously, but now they can.
Old School Bitcoiners that got into the tech because it was a revolutionary act or because they just wanted to take a big risk for big rewards... well those people have every reason to sell here. "They've won." Or perhaps they've lost if you think about it. How many cypherpunks are selling their bags because Bitcoin no longer represents the thing they were trying to achieve all those years ago. Institutional adoption has a way of whitewashing the industry like that.
The fact of the matter is that we are in this very awkward transition period in which the money from very early investors is being cashed out near this $100k unit bias level. None of this is panic selling. None of this is panic buying. It's a theory that explains the entire year of 2025 and why it's been so lackluster in both directions. We have backstops and buyers of last resort to make sure price doesn't tank more than 20%, and we have OG sellers looking for liquidity at the higher levels. These are all signs of a maturing asset that's been adopted by the world at large. The only question is where we go from here.
Forever Awkward Positioning
My own technical analysis of the BTC chart remains optimistically bullish but contains many worrying signals. The 25 daily moving average is falling off a cliff and almost guaranteed to death cross against the MA(200) in the next couple of days. This is unavoidable because the price 25 days ago was during that peak above $120k and the average is losing those big numbers and getting replaced by today's price. Meanwhile the MA(200) has been only-up for many months. I assume there's a good chance for a quick dump soon that will scare a lot of people.
Until then the MA(200) has done a great job of propping us up every time we've fallen below it. Hopefully that continues but we are battling two resistances at the same point: MA(25) and the conservative trendline at $110500. Either way there's going to be a big move up or down very soon.
I maintain that this chart looks very bullish as long as strong support in the $100k-$103k range doesn't start cracking. It's even more bullish when the price trades between the moving averages like it is now. These averages tightening have always been a strong sign of stability and the ability to move up into price discovery to less known territory.
November itself is very often a pinnacle month for Bitcoin. If the four year cycle continues to deliver this should be a pretty great month considering that October was completely deflated by Trump FUD. Both gold and stocks are at all time highs. The only thing seemingly holding us back are all these old wallets dumping into fresh exit liquidity. Sometimes Bitcoin lags. It is known.
Conclusion
This time is actually different. Didn't see that coming! The year in which the four year cycle demanded infinite greed accompanied by overleverage, bubble, and collapse, has instead been replaced by a boring crab littered with institutional buyers providing exit liquidity to early investors. I have no idea what to expect from 2026 after experiencing this kind of once-in-a lifetime transference of wealth, but hopefully we get a few hints as Q4 comes to an end.
Hasn't been that fun I can yell you that. The Gubment shutdown isn't helping and EBT payments not going out doesn't help. Sounds dumb because we don't think of the 42 Million people on EBT as buying Crypto but when everyone was getting hammered from inflation and more people are clinching up it doesn't help.
I don't know what will happen with the Gubment but we are seeing some pops with legacy chains like Dash and Digibyte.
ICP as well. They did make a solid move in my opinion with trying to pitch their platform for other successful L1s to use as Decentralized storage.
I feel like the end of this cycle depends a lot on if the Gubment shutdown ends.
The only thing that sellers are going to be doing is selling to Blackrock and the institutions. They want all the BTC, lol. People's mindsets kill me really. But that's fine. I am buying and mining as much as I can right now. Plebs will never learn.
Sometime in 2026 we'll peak...
I think they tried to abolish DST a while ago, but people couldn't handle the dark and they lost their minds so they went back to it!
Yeah, as annoying as it is and I'm sure I feel semi-jetlagged for a week each time, it's better than it still being dark at 8am or 9am.
I bought the dip. This year is the least volatile Bitcoin has ever been. What could be the cause? Whilst I think there has been relentless OG selling, there must be lots of paper Bitcoin circulating too/Bitcoin held on exchanges/ETFs. Time will tell.
Eventually, when Blackrock owns enough BTC, we can just ignore BTC and use alts.
Let's hope that 2026 will be a more stable year for cryptocurrencies (in general). Ups & Downs are kinda nice sometimes, but stability brings normalcy to chaos.
Fingers crossed, @edicted.