Could BTC drop back to $10k?

I woke up and, somehow, BTC is still trading in a 67k range.

In the past two days, a bearish Bitcoin article [1] has been pretty scary. It says that if the oil price rises to $150, Bitcoin could fall back to $10k.

Let’s do the math first.

What does $10k mean? It would mean a drop from the historical high of $126k in Dec 2025 down to $10k—that’s a 92% decline.

A 92% drop has only happened once in Bitcoin’s history: in 2011.

Let’s look at what happened in the usual four-year cycle. In 2014, Bitcoin fell from $1,100 to $170, a drop of 89%. In 2018, it fell from $19k to $3,200, down 84%. In 2022, it fell from $69k to $15.5k, down 77%.

The drawdown is narrowing—from 89% to 84%, and then to 77%. The market is getting bigger, institutions are moving in, and spot ETFs are providing steady buy demand. In 2014, Bitcoin’s market cap was only $10 billion; today it’s in the trillion-dollar range. A $10 billion market dropping 90% and a trillion-dollar market dropping 90% are not the same thing.

Even in the perfect storm of 2022—Three Arrows, Luna, and FTX’s cascading blowups—BTC’s decline still didn’t break through 15k to return to $10k. In a world where fundamentals are already no longer the same, is BTC really supposed to fall back to $10k just because oil prices rise?

That article claims that $10k is a tail risk that requires the Strait of Hormuz to be closed for a long time, oil prices to surge to $150 to $200 and hold there for a year, the Federal Reserve still not stepping in, and ETFs to see large-scale redemptions.

An oil price of $150 to $200 may be possible, but can it last for a year? How devalued would the U.S. dollar have to become? High oil prices themselves are a catalyst for an economic downturn. If oil truly reaches that level, the global economy won’t be able to hold up within half a year. Once demand collapses, oil prices will come back down.

Now, as for the Federal Reserve not saving the market: what did it do in March 2020 when the pandemic hit? In U.S. stocks, there were four circuit breakers. What did the Federal Reserve do? It delivered unlimited quantitative easing—rates were cut straight to zero. In 2023, during the banking crisis, what did it do again? It poured out emergency liquidity facilities. The Federal Reserve’s job is to stabilize the market—especially when an oil shock triggers an economic recession. It has no second option.

As for large-scale ETF redemptions: today, 11 spot ETFs hold more than 67k Bitcoins. These are structurally long-term funds. BlackRock, Fidelity—some of the world’s largest asset managers—spent over a year and piled in countless compliance costs to get ETFs approved and launched. Then, half a year later, they all liquidate together? This kind of assumption isn’t macro analysis anymore. It’s a final fantasy.

So for $10k to be on the table, it’s not about one bad piece of news. It requires a collapse and retreat of the entire market structure. It’s not absolutely impossible, but the probability is extremely close to zero—toward infinity small. From a mathematical standpoint, an “infinitely small” probability is essentially impossible.

Another core logic in that article is that oil price increases lead to tighter liquidity, which leads to a drop in Bitcoin. This logic is correct in the short term—2022 is a vivid example. But the article stops there. It doesn’t keep asking what comes next.

What comes next? After oil stays at $150 to $200 for half a year, what happens? A global economic recession, corporate profits collapsing, unemployment surging, and U.S. Treasury interest exploding. With $35 trillion in Treasuries at a 5% rate, annual interest would be $1.75 trillion—more than the defense budget. At that point, does the Federal Reserve have any choice? It would have to shift from fighting inflation to protecting the economy—stop rate hikes and restart the printing press.

The full chain of logic should be like this: oil prices rise—short-term it’s a negative, because liquidity tightens; in the medium term it’s still negative, because the economy falls into recession; but in the long run it turns positive, because fiat currency devalues and Bitcoin’s scarcity becomes more pronounced. The original text only sees the first layer. Even if you only look at the third layer, it would still be one-sided. But you have to survive the two phases of darkness before dawn to reach the third stage when the East brightens and the sun rises.

So for short-term traders, the risk warning in the original piece might be worth taking seriously. But for long-term DCA investors, these short-term fluctuations are just bumps on the road—don’t let them derail your direction.

If you’ve used leverage, then please be careful. Short-term risks are real—be careful of a black swan wiping everything out overnight. If you can’t handle a drawdown of 50% or more, then Bitcoin might not be for you. But if you’re someone who DCA monthly and plans to hold for 10 years, then these short-term bearish “signals” are nothing more than noise.

That article may not have been intended purely to scare people. It provides some useful data and a risk framework. Its problem is that it treats an extremely low-probability tail risk as a scenario worth taking seriously (and even emphasizes it as the title), and it only walks through the first layer of the bearish logic without continuing to extrapolate.

As investors, we’re not trying to predict the future. We allocate probabilities to different possibilities, then make decisions based on our own time horizon and our risk tolerance.

My countermeasure is simple: keep the “eight-character formula,” don’t look at the short term, and trust the cycle.

Bitcoin has never been designed to perform over a week, a month, or even a year. It’s meant for the moment when the fiat currency in your hands turns into worthless paper—you can still stand up straight and not kneel.

$150 oil? Then let the storm come even harder.