Paul Xue BTC 链上数据研究

Bear-market bargain-hunting saga: I had a date with the bottom, but I flaked 😂

First time, 30K: “Wow, V’s reversed—let’s go!” Turned out it was fake. The first time, I believed.
Second time, 20K: “Clearly it’s building the base—triple bottom—All-in!” It was a scam. I believed again.
Third time, 18K: “Brothers, it hasn’t broken the prior low—support is solid, let’s go!” This time it was luring me in deeper. I believed yet again.
My money was gone.
When the real 16,000-bottom finally arrived, the main force started to push up.
Watching the red line turn green: “Hmph, this time it’s that awful dealer trying to trick me into entering! I won’t fall for it—I’ll wait for a lower chance!”

We often think that a bear market is simply a continuous decline. But if you calculate the time proportions carefully in the chart, you’ll be surprised to find that the truly fierce, large-scale drops (the steep bearish candles in the chart) actually take up a very small share of the time. Meanwhile, most of the time (the blue shaded areas), the market is instead going through what looks like a promising “bounce-back” or a frustrating “sideways consolidation.”
Why does this happen? It’s the perfect reflection of human nature and BTC’s characteristics.
Human nature’s weakness: refusing to admit failure. When BTC crashes hard from its highs (like the beginning of 2026 shown in the chart), most people’s first reaction isn’t to cut losses—it’s to wait for a “rebound to break even.” This mindset leads to a prolonged period of consolidation after the drop. Each small rebound gets interpreted as a “buy-the-dip opportunity,” pulling in new capital that then gets trapped, until it exhausts the patience of all holders.
BTC’s volatility: the intensity of the selloff versus the boredom of sideways trading. BTC is known for high volatility. Its declines are often accompanied by panic-driven liquidations and cascading leveraged forced liquidations, causing the price to plunge dramatically in a very short time. And then the subsequent “boring” sideways consolidation is the market digesting fear and rebuilding consensus (or falling into further despair)—a process that’s more torturous than the drop itself.
Final reflection:
A real bear market doesn’t bankrupt you in an instant. Instead, it slowly wears down your willpower, capital, and confidence through long waiting and intermittent hope (the blue intervals). Until most people— including those who were once firmly bullish— eventually cut their losses and exit in silence and despair, only then can the real bottom be considered to have arrived.
Look at this chart: in which blue interval did you once think, “the bear market is over”? And in which steep selloff interval did you experience the real panic? Leave your story in the comments.

Bitcoin on the daily chart also shows a very clear bearish divergence. For the short-term target, it looks toward the area around 68,000—this is a high-probability short-term opportunity that can be seized. However, however, however—this is still a bearish market phase. After that, there will be another big drop, driving down toward the final bottom around 50,000, or even lower! $BTC

With Bitcoin’s strong rebound last night, the bottom divergence signal in this wave is especially clear. It’s okay to take a short-term long in this moment. When you see it around 68,000, multiple technical experts have supported this view. Buy some BTC spot without leverage!
Not investment advice—please consider it yourself!

Let’s talk about why Bitcoin forms a “flat” bottom:
Judging from the historical price action across the past two cycles, Bitcoin’s bottoming process often requires a continuous 2–3 months of a “flat base” or even a “grinding down” pattern. A sharp, decisive V-shaped reversal like what you often see in the U.S. stock market is quite rare. Behind this, it’s essentially the inevitable interplay between technical indicator mean-reversion and human weakness.
From the indicator perspective, what’s shown in the chart is the Pi Cycle Bottom (the Pi-cycle bottom indicator) along with long-term moving averages. After the market goes through a major sell-off and price breaks below—or endlessly approaches—the green and red long-term moving average lines, it indicates that the market has entered an absolute value zone of extreme oversold conditions. At this point, on-chain indicators such as the MVRV Z-Score also typically fall to near ice-cold levels. This “flatness” is, in reality, an “energy accumulation period” where long and short forces repeatedly tug-of-war around historical absolute support levels, exchanging hands over and over, until supply and demand for positions are finally cleared.
And what truly makes the bottom so flat and so prolonged are human weaknesses:
1. Fear and despair (refusing to trade from the left side): Before the bottom arrives, the massive drawdown (for example, late 2018 and late 2022) shatters all market confidence. At this time, “extreme fear” in human nature takes the upper hand. Retail traders and even institutions are in a state of “once bitten, twice shy.” Even if prices are at extreme lows, people still don’t dare to buy because they fear there could be even newer lows—so the bottom lacks the explosive buying power from retail.
2. Eroding patience (position washing): Big players and main funds understand human nature well. They won’t choose a V-shaped reversal to “carry retail traders on their shoulders.” Instead, they use months of sideways consolidation (a flat base), exploiting the human tendency toward “lack of patience” and “eagerness for quick results,” to flush out the last shred of retail conviction that survived the initial crash but gets worn down during the prolonged sideways period. This is what people call “time trading for space.”
In short, only when trading volume becomes extremely thin, speculators have fully exited, and positions have been transferred and settled from retail traders into long-term believers (Long Time HODLers), can this “flat base” be considered truly constructed. The pullbacks at the beginning of a bull market work the same way—rebuilding consensus through sideways action. Once you understand the “flat bottom,” you understand the market’s deepest sense of reverence and the struggle between players.