Brian of The Tiny Crypto Blog
3 min readMay 1, 2022
Are we, now?

As I was looking at crypto prices the other day, my thoughts connected to a memory- that memory was the experience of watching prices in 2019 and 2020 (up until August, anyway.) There are parallels today.

Examine this price chart for bitcoin that spans from December 2020 to April 30, which was when the price broke out above its previous 2017 high:

Sidewards, lads! Sidewards!

Now look at the price chart from the beginning of 2019 until October 2020, just before prices broke out towards the previous all-time highs and touched the sixty-thousands a few months later:

More sidewards!

For those who were not around then, (and those that were, but do not immediately recall,) I want to point out the parallels that lead me to believe that we are in a bear market today.

Maddening sideways movements

Living through the post-bear market of 2017, one recalls how deep these prices went:

*ouch*

We went from *just* below 20k down to the low 3,000s in a process that took and lasted for FOURTEEN MONTHS. (That may not seem like a lot in hindsight, but if you lived through the excitement of upward price movement in 2016 and 2017, living through a period of falling knives (plunging prices) and sandpaper (interminable sideways movement that slowly wears you down,) it was time that never ended.

Now that we have the backdrop set, let’s go back to the chart starting in May 2019:

Sidewards, I said! Sidewards!!!

Once prices made their breakout, from their previous range of grinding lows, prices pulled back and fell into a sideways range between 7,000 to 12,000 (minus the days in March 2020 when the entire investment market was in turmoil.) During this time, prices would repeatedly touch that 10,000 mark…then pull back. Touch it…then pull back. After being beaten down for so long in the single thousands, and then have the price break out, signaling an end to the bear market, only to fall back down again…it truly was maddening.

What made it all the more frustrating was that you saw the growth in awareness in mainstream circles, you saw the increased adoption and innovation in crypto in general, you started to hear more mainstream names and large investors talk about it, the increase in retail participation, yet the prices were not correlating.

Jump back to the first chart that comes up to today:

Well, well, well.

Let’s tick off the parallels:

  • a breakout to new highs- CHECK
  • a pullback after the highs and then extended movement into a sideways range- CHECK
  • an increase in awareness, adoption, innovation and implementation of the technology and networks- A BIG, FAT FREAKING CHECK

Simple conclusion: we are in the bear market now.

Act accordingly.