You and I keep watching people search for a bottom as if it were a single number you can point to with confidence. But when we follow the logic of past cycles and the incentives around scarcity, we see a calmer possibility: the market may still demand one more lesson in pain before it offers a steadier foundation.
You feel the tension, do you not? Everyone wants the comfort of a quick bottom, yet markets rarely grant comfort on schedule.
Let us begin with what is simplest: people act with purpose, and they act under uncertainty. In a fragile environment, optimism is not a forecast, it is a preference. And preferences do not move prices unless they are backed by real buying power and real patience.
This is why Michael Terpin, the chief executive officer of Transform Ventures, looks at the current crypto market and says it is unfolding almost exactly as historical patterns would suggest. Not because history is a machine, but because human responses to profit, fear, and regret tend to rhyme when the same incentives return.
So when you hear someone declare that the bottom had to be at eighty thousand dollars, and that the bear market would last only six weeks, notice what is being smuggled in. It is not analysis. It is a desire to skip the part where speculation unwinds and weak conviction is forced to sell.
Terpin calls that kind of confidence ridiculous, and we can see why without raising our voice. A market that rose on crowded expectations does not usually reset with a gentle dip and a tidy calendar.
And when others proposed sixty thousand dollars as the floor, followed by an immediate climb, he heard the same impatience wearing a different outfit. Too soon, he said, because the market had not yet finished asking the hard question: who is holding Bitcoin because they understand it, and who is holding because they wanted a fast exit into someone else’s enthusiasm?
Now here is the mid point where you should pause with me. If everyone can see the cycle, why does it still hurt?
Because seeing a pattern is not the same as living through it. The knowledge is dispersed, the time horizons differ, and each person must decide whether to bear uncertainty or hand it to someone else at a discount.
Terpin does not insist on another year long drawdown. He simply suggests something more modest and therefore more plausible: one more point of pain. In his view, Bitcoin could revisit the fifty thousand range, or even the forty thousand range, before a more durable bottom is formed.
To understand why that claim is not mere pessimism, we need to look at the mechanism people keep treating as a magic spell: the halving.
The halving matters because it reduces the reward miners receive for validating transactions by half, roughly every four years. That is not a slogan. It is a rule that changes the flow of new supply.
This built in supply shock is central to Bitcoin’s scarcity, and scarcity is not poetry, it is a constraint. When new supply slows while demand holds steady or rises, the price pressure can turn upward. That is why halvings have often preceded major bull markets.
Over time, this mechanism slows Bitcoin’s inflation rate and ultimately caps total supply at twenty one million coins. That cap reinforces the idea of Bitcoin as digital gold, not because someone declared it, but because the supply schedule is not negotiable.
Yet notice the paradox. The same predictable scarcity that attracts long term savers also invites short term speculators to front run the story. And when too many people try to harvest tomorrow’s price today, the market often punishes them before it rewards the patient.
Terpin says, we are exactly where we should be, and he anchors that statement in the well established four year cycle around the halving. He points to one of the more reliable elements of prior cycles: the rough timing of the bubble peak and the subsequent unwind.
He argues that the bull market tends to pop in the fourth quarter after the halving, and that the speculative blow off phase typically lasts between nine and eleven months. This time, he says, it was eleven months.
Then he draws a close parallel to the last cycle, giving you a date pair that feels almost too neat to be real. The highs, the bubble popping, were on November tenth, twenty twenty one. The lows were right after F T X declared bankruptcy on November tenth, twenty twenty two, exactly a year to the day.
Even the broader rhythm shows consistency in his telling. One full cycle was off by only three days from a clean four year interval, while the first halving cycle was only a few weeks off a year in its peak to trough structure.
Now let us be careful, you and I. This is not a guarantee that the next move must match the last move. It is something subtler: a reminder that markets are social processes, and social processes often repeat when the same hopes and the same leverage return.
So if Bitcoin revisits the forty thousand range, it would not be a betrayal of the halving story. It could be the market completing its re sorting, transferring coins from those who needed a narrative to those who can tolerate time.
And if it does not revisit those levels, the deeper lesson remains the same. The bottom is not a number. The bottom is the moment when forced sellers are mostly gone, and when remaining holders are aligned with what they claim to believe.
Let us end quietly here. When you stop asking, what price must happen next, and start asking, what kinds of people must be holding for stability to emerge, the cycle becomes less mysterious.
If you have your own way of reading these cycles, leave it beside ours, and let us compare the logic rather than the slogans.
