Bitcoin is volatile and does have big crashes and big increases but not THIS big, that's different situation. We should be considering how this could be very different and not really look like a situation that would be difficult and different.

I think the best thing we could do right now would be making sure that we are going to see the difference and be a lot better.

I understand the situation a lot better when you handle the situation to be just about doom, and this would be doom.

In this post I was talking about my personal take on the "death" of a cryptocurrency protocol. Not about some "law" someone other should obey or so It's like if someone said: "Xcoin is dead", and the listed events happened, I would accept it. All cutoff points are arbitrary so it's on me which one I chose.

In the case of no node of the original addnodes list connecting and all communication channels like forums/Reddit silent, then I would accept the "death" of that currency.

But I would not consider Bitcoin dead if it falls to the early-2017 price for a couple of minutes. If you consider it dead then, it's of course your choice to do so

If we're talking about $100 or $10, my response could be different and I may be much more skeptic regarding a recovery. My (again arbitrary, but nevertheless) reasoning would be: the crypto market in 2016/17 substantially changed, after the monopoly (MtGox) shut down. I think late 2016/17 in some way was a "change of era": first the establishment of a more diverse exchange market, then we had the first really succesful altcoin with Ethereum, followed by the ICO craze which brought a lot of retailers into "crypto". And then the approval of the first Bitcoin futures in early 2017. So "a fallback to 2017 prices" would mean that there is still some adoption remaining.

The pre-2013 price ($100 and lower) would mean instead going back to an extreme niche of tech nerds.

(Sorry for the delay in answering, I was some days away and then this thread went off my watchlist, today it has returned thanks to the last ("great" post.)

If you want to dismiss some other subjective views of death, then you need to present an objective approach that can be validated otherwise it is arbitrary dismissal that does not make either personal opinion any more valid than the other.  

You would find yourself in a small minority, and by most metrics it would be dead (large retractions in everything closing in to 90% and above) and I see no point to hold such opinions in this case. As much as one wants to dismiss this and hope for an utopian world, a large part of Bitcoin's valuation comes from the belief in what it is, what it can do, and its importance in the overall world. If this belief widely collapse, then it is going to diminish severely by all metrics. No belief, no participation. No participation, no decentralization or security.

Why though? What about then a return from $1m to $1000, that you would consider death? So your death limit is somewhere between a multiplier of 1000x and 100x?   In this case then we could actually state that we are of the same opinion, it is just that there is a difference in the magnitude whereas for you to agree to the same a slightly higher price factor difference is needed -- that is practically it, no?

Yes, at least for me. There are several metrics that show a shift in 2016/17. The most important one is the total amount of transaction fees paid, which in 2017 jumped from 10 to 500 million USD. In 2025, it was 750-1000 million USD, and even in the record year 2024 it was only slightly over 1 billion, so the order of magnitude since 2017 hasn't changed much.

Why transaction fees paid metric is so important? Because that shows that people actually are using Bitcoin, and they are willing to pay for it. Most other metrics can be distorted.

I think the altcoin market had another shift in 2021, when most altcoins peaked, and since then almost all are struggling to find new ATHs. 2017-21 was still a growth phase for alts like Ethereum or Solana. But where I think you're correct is that the growth was remarkably slower after the extreme 2016-18 boom (Bitcoin dominance shows it).

Yeah but how many people were using Bitcoin back then? I believe not more than a million or a few more (Google also agrees with that, an estimation says it passed 1 million users in 2013), this is the population of an average large city. Or 0.01 % of the population.

I have not dismissed your opinion, see my last post (you even quoted the relevant part in this post). I have stated why I don't agree with it and my subjective approach is different

The only "objective" way to constate the death of a cryptocurrency would be in a big brother scenario where we know the whole Internet traffic and know that the network is not running anymore. Not possible from today's point of view.

I do see a point in holding that opinion, and I'll explain why.

My reasoning is that the market is so speculative that the Bitcoin price alone has not much to do with its "fair price". This means that we can see extreme over- and undervaluations. A recent example: No way that the "fair price" of Bitcoin dropped 50% in a few months only based on adoption data. This drop was caused by speculation (profit taking and liquidations). It's even possible that more people hold Bitcoin in April 2026 than in October 2025, i.e. "adoption" has progressed but price has not.

Now back to the scenario where I think a $1000 drop without any fundamental change in "adoption" would be possible. Short recap: bear market that lasts longer than 2 years, no clear progress in "landmarks" of adoption (e.g. strategic reserves, ETFs) bulls are so eager to publish nowadays, followed by several collapses of Bitcoin companies (Saylor, exchanges etc.) and an extreme panic crash through several "key support lines" (e.g. 38k, then the 2022 15k low, and of course $10000).

This scenario is my base for a recovery, not the number "$1000". $1000 was selected because it 1) is approximately the lowest number we've seen in Bitcoin's "mass adoption phase" as I've defined it above (and in two occasions post -2017, in 2018 and in 2020, the price dropped again relatively close to $1000),  and 2) because it's a psychological support. The second point is important, because if people see dropping it severely below $1k "many" would subjectively consider it dead.

In other words: $1000 is approximately the lowest number I can imagine the market to fall without a fundamental (adoption-related) problem.

This is already a different scenario than mine. I believe in such a "collapse" scenario indeed it's difficult to recover. But that is already a scenario with "fundamental adoption-related problems". It's not an impossible scenario, but I believe the "panic drop to $1000" without fundamental problems is more likely.

The key to differentiate both scenarios may be the evolution of transaction fees again. If it drops dramatically back to pre-2017 levels (<500 million would be a warning sing, <80-100 million $ the confirmation as it would be lower than in any year after 2017) then it is highly likely that adoption is dropping and such a collapse scenario is likely.

I don't think the multiplier (and thus the "price itself") is the problem. The problem would be the switch to a clearly different era or adoption scenario.