How the Cycle Begins Long Before Anyone Notices
Every crypto cycle seems to start in the same quiet, awkward way. A handful of people stare at a flat chart and mutter that the price is too low, and almost everyone ignores them. Those early months feel like walking through an empty room where the lights are still on but nobody cares enough to switch them off.
Then the price flickers. A small move, barely worth mentioning. The kind of shift you’d dismiss if you weren’t looking directly at it. But it’s always that kind of twitch that sets things in motion.
The strange part isn’t the price action itself—it’s how predictable the human reactions are. The Bitcoin halving may set the timing, but it’s people who give the cycle its shape. They repeat the same emotions with the reliability of a metronome.
Act I: The Boredom Phase
This is the long stretch where the market feels abandoned. Volume dries up, headlines disappear, and the loudest analysts drift back to whatever performs better on social media. Bitcoin becomes something you mention only to hear someone groan. In past cycles it dragged along the floor so quietly that entire months blurred into one monotone range.
Yet this is exactly when the thoughtful accumulation begins. Not the flashy kind with fanfare, but the slow, almost secretive buying that only shows up on a zoomed-out chart. It’s the same rhythm you’ll notice if you’ve ever looked at behavioral cycle diagrams—something like the “Wall Street Cheat Sheet,” which explores how optimism and despair tend to cluster together (example here).
The boredom phase feels like nothing is happening, but it’s the ground layer for everything that follows. While most people forget the market exists, a minority quietly builds their positions.
You can see echoes of this pattern in the broader economy as well, especially in long-horizon shifts like the transition toward what some call an “industrial hardening” era (link). The surface stays calm while the foundation rewires itself.
Act II: The “Maybe I’m Missing Something” Phase
The turn upward rarely feels dramatic at first. Bitcoin inches higher, just enough to catch the corner of your eye. A few days later, it’s higher again. The candles stack with steady insistence rather than fireworks. This is the moment when people who haven’t looked at a chart in months begin opening their apps again “just to see where things are.”
It’s the phase shaped by self-conscious curiosity. Not greed. Not excitement. Just the uncomfortable awareness that the price is moving without you. Group chats start to reawaken. Someone asks a question disguised as a joke. Someone else says they “might pick up a little.” The tone shifts from boredom to uneasy attention.
This is the hinge of the cycle. Once people begin to feel vaguely late, the tempo accelerates.
Act III: Euphoria
When the crowd finally arrives, it arrives loudly. Crypto doesn’t ease into its mania; it barrels into it like a carnival truck with loose speakers. Coins with cartoon mascots soar for no obvious reason. New blockchains appear promising speed, scale, and everything short of immortality. People talk about “the new internet” the way dot-com investors did in the late 90s (reminder here).
During this stage, confidence becomes theatrical. Telegram channels overflow with triumphant screenshots. Every dip is a “shakeout.” Every warning is dismissed as old-fashioned thinking. Even friends who swore off trading after the last crash reappear with sudden optimism.
This is also the moment when the least prepared investors rush in. Barbers, co-workers, cousins—they all show up at once, often choosing the exact point where risk is at its highest. It happens in nearly every cycle, as reliably as sunrise.
The mood spills into other parts of the economy too. You can see the same overconfidence in places like the boom-and-bust cycle of asset-light businesses such as Sonder (breakdown here) or in long-term debt structures that rely on optimism lasting forever (analysis here). The psychology is identical even if the charts differ.
Act IV: The Crash
The drop never arrives politely. Sometimes it hits in one violent swing. Sometimes it unravels slowly, a few percentage points at a time, giving people just enough hope to delay the inevitable. Either way, the tone shifts fast. The same traders who celebrated every candle on the way up begin refreshing their screens with growing tension.
The first selloff is often dismissed as “normal.” The next one stings a little more. A third begins to chase away the bravado. Threads fill with post-hoc explanations. People claim they planned to take profits. They rewrite their reasoning on the fly, the way people do after every unwelcome surprise.
Forced liquidations and panic selling start to appear clearly if you watch real funding data. One example is the funding rate dashboard on CoinGlass (link), which shows how quickly the crowd’s mood swings when leverage unwinds.
Conviction shrinks. Timelines go quiet. Those who rushed in at the top retreat just as quickly. The mania surrenders to fatigue, and the market folds itself back into silence.
The Cycle Resets
After the dust settles, boredom returns. Charts flatten. Attention wanders elsewhere. This is when a new group begins to study the same range that others ran from. The questions they whisper sound familiar: has this bottom been forming longer than it seems? Is the silence telling us something?
Over time, the same slow pulse returns. It doesn’t arrive with fanfare; it builds quietly, the way it did before. The great irony of crypto is that even as the ecosystem becomes more serious—industrial mining, regulated ETFs, corporate adoption—the emotional rhythm remains primitive and cyclical.
You’ll see variations of this pattern not only in crypto but in housing, tech stocks, or long-term debt experiments like the proposed 50-year mortgage (overview here). Different markets, same human reflex.
Each cycle has a bottom that feels forgettable, a rise that feels slow until it feels fast, a mania that feels like a celebration, and a fall that feels like a personal insult. Anyone who understands that rhythm won’t become immune to the cycle, but they might stop believing the old lie that this time, for them, the pattern won’t repeat.
