Yesterday (February 24th), I still chose to go hiking outdoors and did not pay attention to the market price. In fact, the fluctuations in my own account have been quite large recently. Just now, I roughly looked at it and found that compared to the highest point of Bitcoin, if calculated in U.S. dollars, the account profit has dropped by about 17% in the past month or so. However, this is just a numerical change for me. I have also experienced asset profit drawdowns of more than 70% in U.S. dollars before, but that was no big deal as long as I still have the coins in my hands.

If someone likes to watch the price every day, the market will occasionally give you some surprises or shocks. Here it comes again: this morning, I saw that my friends were discussing the market situation and found that the market had crashed again. The price of Bitcoin fell from around $96,000 to around $91,000, and the daily RSI also fell to around 36. Compared to Bitcoin, the daily decline of Altcoins was even greater, which can be described as a bloodbath, with many coins falling more than 10%, as shown in the figure below.

This drop has also triggered a chain reaction. As of the time of writing, in the past 12 hours, more than 310,000 people have been liquidated and about $960 million in funds have been directly wiped out (into the pockets of a few people). The market panic seems to be spreading. As shown in the figure below.

According to the liquidation data, this price flash crash has basically cleared out the long positions around $92,000. Currently, there are still about $900 million in long positions around $89,000, and the market may continue to explore downwards.

As for the reasons for this price flash crash, there are already many analysts and KOLs on the internet who have summarized it, saying all kinds of things, such as the Fed's policy and the strength of the U.S. dollar causing the decline, the outflow of ETF funds causing the decline, Trump's tariff policy causing the decline, and OKX's alleged violation of U.S. anti-money laundering laws causing the decline... Interested friends can search and learn about these on their own. Anyway, whether the market goes up or down, we can always find various reasonable reasons and analyses afterwards.

Compared to strictly managing their own positions, many people seem to prefer to find reasons for the rise or fall. But do we really need to find so many reasons afterwards?

Recently, by observing the messages in the background, I feel that many people have become a bit like "startled birds". For example, when Bitcoin goes up a little, they see $150,000 and come to ask me if they can still buy, and whether the bull market is coming again? When Bitcoin drops a little, they see $70,000 and come to ask me if they should sell, and whether the bear market is coming now?...

Their views keep fluctuating. Now when I encounter such messages, I rarely reply. Although I have repeatedly expressed my own views in my articles (regardless of whether my views are right or wrong, I am relatively optimistic), there are still people who like to leave messages asking some repetitive and meaningless questions, such as "Do you think the crypto market still has hope?" "Do you think I should quit the crypto market and play the Hong Kong stock market now?" I receive dozens of similar questions every day.

Perhaps, the questions they ask are not really questions, because they don't seem to have a clear idea of what they want to ask or what specific issues they want me to solve. They raise such vague questions, probably just seeking some psychological comfort. But the problem is, I'm not a psychologist. However, this does seem to be a good direction. If there are interested certified psychological counselors, they may consider providing relevant services or businesses for the crypto market, which may have good development potential.

Often, some friends want to accept 10 times the return before making a trade, but few people will consider in advance how they will react if they experience a drawdown of more than 50%. This is one of the main reasons why most people cannot make money.

In fact, as long as we strictly manage our positions according to our own risk preferences and strictly follow our trading discipline, the market fluctuations like today can be basically ignored. In the past when I was working in the company, the big boss often gave us a sentence during the meetings: "The Bodhisattva fears the cause, and the sentient beings fear the fruit." I think this sentence is very good, and I have been thinking and understanding it over the years. I also share it with everyone here.

Next, let's discuss another question: Is the crypto market no longer focused on fundamentals?

For many people, this bull market has indeed been quite difficult to make money. The situation where you can blindly buy exchange coins and they may multiply several times, as in the past, is gone. So far, this bull market seems to be the bull market of some institutions, a few people, and Bitcoin.

In fact, during the 2022-2023 bear market, including ourselves, we still have the habit of researching the fundamentals of projects. For example, we are more inclined to pay attention to projects that can obtain financing and have better product experiences. But as reviewed in last week's article (February 21st), the prices of many projects that we initially thought had good fundamentals have plummeted miserably. Good projects do not mean good prices, and bad or empty projects do not mean they cannot surge.

In this cycle, the number of new projects in the market has shown exponential growth (according to DEXTools data, the number of tradable tokens on on-chain DEXes has exceeded 14.84 million), and the speculative element has become increasingly high. Gradually, we will find that the current market seems to no longer focus on fundamentals, but has completely become a logic of attention economy.

Where people's attention is focused, that is where the hype and price increase will occur, even if it is just air. For example, the surge of the hottest AI concept tokens in this cycle does not seem to be due to the fact that projects like NEAR, TAO, and RENDER can create practical value, but more due to the global explosion of ChatGPT, which has driven the attention to the AI concept.

In fact, a similar situation existed in the previous bull market, such as Facebook's name change to Meta, which shifted people's attention more to the concept of the metaverse and pushed up the prices of many metaverse-related tokens. Compared to the previous round, the attention in this round seems more difficult to grasp in advance, because the continuous wealth effect of MEME coins (accompanied by more unseen news of zeroing out) seems to have disrupted some existing experience rules and hype rhythms. Many people don't even care about the technical innovation and product experience of the projects, the only thing they care about is whether there are opportunities for quick money.

So the market has become an interesting pattern: a certain trend attracts the attention of the mainstream public/or the mainstream public creates a certain demand → liquidity flows in quickly and hypes it up → the prices of related tokens soar → mainstream people/insiders/smart money start to withdraw → the attention of the retail investors begins to focus and they start to hold the bags → the trend begins to reverse and most of the retail investors are trapped. Then, create a new attention cycle, and repeat.

This repetitive pattern, if repeated too often, will naturally make people feel fatigued, and the funds of most people (mainly retail investors) will naturally lose more and more, and PvP will also become more and more serious, and the frequency of trend changes will be faster, especially for MemeCoin, where a attention narrative may now have a life cycle of only a few hours from birth to collapse.

The ultimate result is what we mentioned in our previous article: this market seems to have been ruined. No one cares about project research anymore, no one cares about project whitepapers and roadmaps anymore, the only thing people care about is what the next attention narrative might be, and whether they can rush in and out first.

But this may also be an inevitable path of development of things. As the prosperity and bubble eventually pass, most of the Altcoins and MemeCoin in this market can only be zeroed out, and the market will eventually return to the fundamentals of the economy. When most people are in despair (the current stage of this market still does not seem desperate enough), we might as well re-focus on those projects with relatively good fundamentals, able to generate sustainable returns, and have development prospects, in order to make longer-term plans.

Don't always stare at the screen looking at prices, it's better to do something more meaningful than staring at the screen. If you are not a professional trader, you can try to reduce your trading frequency and extend your investment cycle, such as investing on a quarterly or annual basis, and perhaps you will feel more relaxed than you are now. As ordinary investors, we should not always try to make quick money, unless you have already thought clearly about what special abilities you have to make quick money in this extremely high-risk game, that is, what makes you able to lead and make money from the other 99% of people.

If you always want to get rich overnight or make a lot of money in a few months, but you don't have the investment ability, special background or special channels to get rich in the short term, then even if you change to a new environment and opportunity, you will most likely continue to live a tiring life and not get the result.

At the current stage, the emotions I have observed in my friends are mainly divided into several types: one is being trapped in a full position and continuing to be bearish and disappointed with the market; one is short-term bearish and ready to continue buy the dips; one is in cash, watching and not knowing what to do with the rise and fall. In my personal advice, this still needs to be decided according to your own risk preference and position situation:

If you are now fully positioned and trapped, don't always want to break even and withdraw, you need to face the failure positively and re-plan your position target; if you have profits, you should strictly follow your established trading discipline and partially realize the profits, don't be greedy.

If you are now in cash and can bear a certain amount of risk, then in the face of the current market situation like today, you can consider building a position and buying BTC in batches.

If you are now in a half position and your risk preference is relatively low, then you can continue to patiently wait for new opportunities.

In any case, you need to optimize your portfolio based on your own position and risk preference, there is no fixed money-making template, everyone should be different. The wallet is your own, since you have chosen to enter this field to play some high-risk games, you should have the basic awareness of being willing to bear the gains and losses and accept the consequences, and it is best to use funds that will not affect your real life to play, ordinary people should not leverage or play contracts at any time after entering.

In the past two days, I also casually looked at some other people's views, and I found that some analysts seem to have already turned bearish to $70,000. As for whether $70,000 can be reached, I don't know, and I can't predict it either, but if it's bearish, then it should be able to break through the $89,000 level first.

Remember on January 13 this year, that night also made many people sleepless, with BTC hitting a low of around $89,000 that day, breaking through the short-term psychological position of many people. In our article at the time, we repeatedly expressed a point of view: try to form and establish your own trading system, don't always be influenced by news and emotions, and trading needs to consider cycles. If your goal is 10 years or 20 years from now, then the current BTC, whenever you buy, is not expensive.

On February 24, 2025, Strategy said: We bought 20,356 BTC at a price of $97,514 per BTC, and have achieved a 6.9% BTC return rate from the beginning of 2025 to now.

A BTC OG who was trapped at the top of the 2017 bull market said: Thanks to MicroStrategy for buying our BTC that we had hoarded for years at a price of $97,514 per BTC, allowing us to realize a 400% BTC return rate and live a better life in 2025.