If you browse Twitter today, you’ll see an overwhelming celebration of the Bitcoin bull market. Prices have once again surged past the $90,000 mark, with many on social media proclaiming, as if the market always belongs to prophets and the fortunate.
But if you look back, you’ll find that the invitation to this feast was actually sent out during the market’s most desperate moments; it’s just that many lacked the courage to open it.
Bitcoin has never followed a straight upward trajectory; its growth history is a script interwoven with extreme panic and irrational exuberance. Behind each deep downturn lies a highly attractive “asymmetric opportunity” — the maximum loss you bear is limited, while the gains you achieve could be exponential.
Let’s take a time-traveling journey and let the data speak.
2011: -94%, from $33 to $2
This was the first time Bitcoin was “widely seen,” with prices soaring from a few dollars to $33 within half a year. But soon, a crash ensued. Bitcoin’s price plummeted to $2, a drop of 94%.
Imagine the despair: major geek forums were desolate, developers fled, and even core Bitcoin contributors posted doubts about the project’s prospects.
But if you had “gambled once” back then, investing $1,000, when BTC prices surpassed $10,000 years later, you’d be holding $5 million worth of chips.
2013–2015: -86%, Mt.Gox Collapse
At the end of 2013, Bitcoin’s price broke through $1,000 for the first time, attracting global attention. But the good times didn’t last. In early 2014, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt.Gox, declared bankruptcy, with 850,000 Bitcoins disappearing from the blockchain.
Overnight, media outlets had a unified stance: “Bitcoin is over.” CNBC, BBC, and The New York Times all reported the Mt.Gox scandal on their front pages. BTC prices fell from $1,160 to $150, a drop of over 86%.
But what happened later? By the end of 2017, the same Bitcoin was priced at $20,000.
2017–2018: -83%, ICO Bubble Burst
The chart above comes from a New York Times report on the crash. The red box highlights a quote from an investor stating that they had lost 70% of their portfolio’s value.
2017 was the “year of nationwide speculation” when Bitcoin entered the public eye. Numerous ICO projects emerged, white papers filled with words like “disruption,” “restructuring,” and “decentralized future,” plunging the entire market into frenzy.
But when the tide receded, Bitcoin fell from its historical high of nearly $20,000 to $3,200, a drop of over 83%. That year, Wall Street analysts sneered, “Blockchain is a joke”; the SEC filed numerous lawsuits; retail investors were liquidated and exited, and forums were silent.
2021–2022: -77%, Industry “Black Swan” Chain Explosions
In 2021, Bitcoin wrote a new myth: the price per coin broke through $69,000, with institutions, funds, countries, and retail investors flocking in.
But just a year later, BTC fell to $15,500. The collapse of Luna, the liquidation of Three Arrows Capital, the explosion of FTX… successive “black swans” toppled the confidence of the entire crypto market like dominoes. The fear and greed index once dropped to 6 (extreme fear zone), and on-chain activity nearly froze.
The chart above is taken from a New York Times article dated May 12, 2022, showing the simultaneous plunge of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and UST.Only now do we realize that behind UST’s collapse was also the “pump-and-dump” maneuver orchestrated by Galaxy Digital with Luna — contributing significantly to the meltdown.
Yet again, by the end of 2023, Bitcoin quietly rose back to $40,000; after ETF approval in 2024, it surged all the way to today’s $90,000.
We’ve seen that Bitcoin has repeatedly achieved astonishing rebounds during seemingly catastrophic moments in history. So the question arises — why is this? Why does this high-risk asset, often mocked as a “musical chairs” game, repeatedly rise after collapses? More importantly, why can it provide such strongly asymmetric investment opportunities for patient and knowledgeable investors?
The answer lies in three core mechanisms:
Mechanism One: Deep Cycles + Extreme Emotions Create Pricing Deviations
Bitcoin is the world’s only 24/7 open free market. There’s no circuit breaker mechanism, no market maker protection, and no Federal Reserve backstop. This means it’s more susceptible to amplifying human emotional fluctuations than any other asset.
In bull markets, FOMO (fear of missing out) dominates the market, with retail investors frantically chasing highs, narratives soaring, and valuations severely overdrawing;
In bear markets, FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) fills the internet, with cries of “cutting losses” echoing, and prices trampled into the dust.
This cycle of emotional amplification causes Bitcoin to frequently enter states of “prices severely deviating from real values.” And this is precisely the fertile ground where value investors seek asymmetric opportunities.
To sum it up in one sentence: In the short term, the market is a voting machine; in the long term, it is a weighing machine. Bitcoin’s asymmetric opportunities appear in those moments before the weighing machine has been switched on.
Mechanism Two: Extreme Price Volatility, but Extremely Low Probability of Death
If Bitcoin truly were the kind of asset that “could go to zero at any moment,” as often sensationalized in the media, then it would indeed have no investment value. But in reality, it has survived every crisis — and emerged stronger.
- In 2011, after crashing to $2, the Bitcoin network kept operating as usual.
- In 2014, after Mt.Gox collapsed, new exchanges quickly filled the gap, and the number of users kept rising.
- In 2022, after FTX went bankrupt, Bitcoin’s blockchain continued to produce a new block every 10 minutes without interruption.
The underlying infrastructure of Bitcoin has virtually no downtime history. Its system resilience far exceeds what most people understand.
In other words, even if the price halves, and halves again, as long as the technical foundation and network effect of Bitcoin remain, there is no true risk of it going to zero. What we have is a highly attractive structure: limited short-term downside, with open-ended long-term upside.
That is asymmetry.
Mechanism Three: Intrinsic Value Exists But Is Overlooked, Leading to “Oversold” Conditions
Many people believe Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, and therefore its price can fall without limit. This view ignores several key facts:
- Bitcoin has algorithmic scarcity (a hard cap of 21 million coins, enforced by the halving mechanism);
- It is secured by the world’s most powerful proof-of-work (PoW) network, with quantifiable production costs;
- It benefits from strong network effects: over 50 million addresses have non-zero balances, and both transaction volume and hashrate repeatedly break records;
- It has gained recognition from mainstream institutions and even sovereign nations as a “reserve asset” (ETFs, legal tender status, corporate balance sheets).
This leads us to the most controversial yet critical question: Does Bitcoin have intrinsic value — and if so, how can we define, model, and measure it?
1.3 Will Bitcoin Go to Zero?
It is possible — but the probability is extremely low. A certain website has documented 430 times that Bitcoin was declared “dead” by media outlets.
Yet directly beneath that declaration count, there is a small note: If you had bought $100 worth of Bitcoin every time someone declared it dead, your holdings today would be worth more than $96.8 million.
You need to understand this: Bitcoin’s underlying system has operated stably for over a decade with virtually no downtime. Whether it was the collapse of Mt.Gox, the failure of Luna, or the FTX scandal, its blockchain has consistently produced one block every 10 minutes. This kind of technical resilience provides a powerful survival baseline.
Now, you should be able to see that Bitcoin is not a “baseless speculation.” On the contrary, its asymmetric potential stands out precisely because its long-term value logic exists — yet is often severely underestimated by the market’s emotions.
This leads us to the next fundamental question: Can Bitcoin, which has no cash flow, no board of directors, no factories, and no dividend payouts, truly qualify as an object of value investing?