#美股存储板块跌幅扩大 #WCTCS9 #每周来晒 Looking at AI Through Bitcoin’s Three Bull-Bear Cycles: Painful Pullbacks Are Part of the Big-Narrative Rally

Recently, investors holding tech stocks have had remarkably similar experiences: unrealized losses in their accounts keep growing. At first, they can still firmly believe in the industry’s long-term prospects, but as prices keep falling, their confidence starts to waver.
Seeing a screen full of bearish opinions, they can’t help repeatedly asking themselves: Is the AI story already over? Has the main trend of this cycle completely ended? When people are suffering losses, it’s easy to fall into a cognitive trap: equating short-term price declines with the disproof of the underlying narrative. As soon as share prices fall, they overturn all their previous judgments; when the market turns collectively pessimistic, they follow suit and conclude that the sector has reached its end. To break out of this misconception, we can look from a different perspective. Today, let’s set aside price targets and predictions about when a rebound will come, and review a long history of bull and bear cycles to understand current market sentiment — Bitcoin’s three complete bull-bear cycles.

Open Bitcoin’s long-term logarithmic chart, and across three bull-bear cycles spanning more than a decade, the script is strikingly similar: narrative takes off → major uptrend → deep pullback of 50%+ → accumulation of positions
First bull-bear cycle: 2012–2015, a niche narrative for tech enthusiasts
During the narrative’s initial phase, Bitcoin circulated only among small circles of cryptography enthusiasts, and the general public had barely heard of it; trading volume was subdued. Expectations of a halving began to emerge, followed by a spectacular major rally, with the price soaring from a few dollars to $1,163 and entering the view of mainstream media for the first time. After the peak, a black swan struck: exchange MtGox collapsed, and the market declared “Bitcoin is a scam”; the maximum drawdown reached 87%. In the middle of the decline, almost the entire market pronounced the story over.
A prolonged bottoming phase began. Short-term speculative holders painfully sold and exited, while long-term capital slowly accumulated cheap coins, completing the accumulation of positions and building strength for the next bull market.
Second bull-bear cycle: 2015–2018, a bubble rally embraced by the masses
At the bottom in 2015, market sentiment hit rock bottom. The narrative gradually gained traction: digital currencies transformed from a niche experiment into an asset the public could participate in. The 2016 halving took place, the ICO bubble exploded in 2017, and retail investors around the world poured in, pushing the price to a peak of $19,783. After the euphoria, the bubble burst; regulations tightened globally and numerous projects collapsed, with the maximum drawdown reaching 84%. Market confidence completely collapsed, and countless participants vowed never to touch it again. All highly leveraged funds were liquidated and cleared out, and the market traded sideways at the bottom.
Third bull-bear cycle: 2018–2022, an institutional allocation narrative
At the end of 2018, the market was in utter despair, while a new narrative quietly emerged: Wall Street institutions were entering the market, Bitcoin was being considered as an alternative asset allocation, and expectations for a spot ETF began to build.
The 2020 halving, combined with global monetary easing, sent the price soaring to $68,789. The Federal Reserve began an aggressive rate-hiking cycle, while the collapse of Terra’s stablecoin accelerated the tightening of liquidity; the maximum drawdown reached 77%, and panic selling was everywhere. Short-term capital exited, while the share of long-term holders locking up their coins continued to rise, ushering in a bottoming phase of accumulation.

The same human drama played out repeatedly across all three bull-bear cycles: during the rise, everyone cheered and imagined the future upside; midway through a deep pullback, market consensus became unanimous: the story is over. But looking back afterward, what the declines wiped out was mostly short-term speculative capital and inflated valuations—not the grand narrative itself that had sparked the rally.
This is the cruelest truth about big-narrative rallies: the most desperate moments are often not the end of the cycle, but the most painful phase of position rotation.
Having read this far, many readers may easily misunderstand: does this mean the AI sector will also replicate Bitcoin’s hundredfold rise in the future? Absolutely not.
Bitcoin and AI have similar market-sentiment patterns, but their underlying assets are completely different.

Bitcoin has no operating company, no revenue, no cash flow, and generates no real social production value.
Its value foundation comes from global consensus, US dollar liquidity, and supply expectations. Once consensus collapses, the asset has no fundamentals to provide a safety cushion.
The AI industry chain is completely different: it is a tangible, real-world industry. Optical modules, computing chips, and servers are backed by ongoing global capital expenditure on computing power; companies have orders, capacity, and revenue, and can generate operating profits.
AI is a productivity revolution. It is changing production efficiency across industries, and its industrial deployment is really happening.
✅ What can be taken as a reference: the sentiment patterns of grand-narrative rallies. A major surge is inevitably followed by a deep correction; during declines, the market turns collectively pessimistic; panic-driven markets mainly wash out short-term speculative positions, which does not mean the industry’s logic has disappeared.
❌ What cannot be copied: the scale of the rise, asset risks, and driving logic.
The AI sector will not replicate Bitcoin’s explosive surge, and stocks within the sector will diverge sharply. Theme stocks without earnings support will find it difficult to sustain a rally, even if the sector’s long-term outlook is positive.

In one sentence: Bitcoin’s history is not a crystal ball for predicting AI stock prices, but a mirror reflecting the unchanging human nature behind bull-market bubbles and bear-market panic. The distress AI investors are experiencing now is essentially rooted in the same dynamics as the distress felt by holders during Bitcoin’s three pullback periods. During the major rally, the market fully priced in years of optimistic expectations all at once, leaving valuations stretched. When expectations begin to cool at the margin, valuations are repriced downward. As share prices continue to fall, our inner fears are amplified. It’s easy to simplistically interpret “valuation correction” as “industry thesis disproven.”
Here are 3 suggestions for adjusting your perspective, for AI investors feeling anxious today:
1. Distinguish between “valuation fluctuations” and “the industry thesis being disproven”
A sector decline ≠ the end of the AI industry.
Industry development progresses steadily and linearly; share prices fluctuate nonlinearly in response to capital flows and expectations. A technological revolution will not stop just because a sector undergoes a temporary decline. Demand for computing power, the deployment of multimodal AI, and the intelligent transformation of industries are all continuing.
2. Grand sectors never move “straight north.”
For any technological transformation sector on a ten-year scale, the market will always move in a spiral upward, with huge pullbacks along the way. Straight-line gains exist only in the imagination. Deep corrections are an inherent part of long-term market cycles, not an unexpected event. Every major theme has to go through round after round of bubble deflation and position rotation.
3. Being bullish on a sector ≠ blindly holding every stock; learn to accept divergence
Even if the long-term logic for the AI sector holds, the whole sector will not rise across the board. In the future, capital will continue to abandon companies relying purely on conceptual hype, with no orders and no ability to deliver profits; resources will continue to concentrate in leaders capable of consistently delivering earnings. Choosing the right sector is only the first step; screening for companies with sound fundamentals is the key to weathering volatility.

What tests people most in the market has never been the spectacular major rally, but the long bottoming period that follows it.
When prices fall, a screen full of pessimistic voices can easily sway our judgment. Bitcoin’s three bull-bear cycles tell us that when the market unanimously sentences a grand narrative to “death,” it may be worth stopping to think calmly: what has disappeared—the underlying industry logic, or the confidence of short-term speculative capital?
Of course, history does not simply repeat itself. Cycle patterns can help us stay calm, but they cannot guarantee future returns. Investing ultimately has to return to company fundamentals and respect market volatility.