When you look back at the last few years the stock market has exploded for the last five years take for example the S&P 500 gaining roughly 17% every year on average for the last 5 years. That's some serious money gains for a select few people that could afford to invest during some of the worst times around the world. That 17% per year for the last 5 years is much higher return then the average which historically has come in at 7%-8% year to year.

We have also seen this with Bitcoin happen as well but mainly on the back of the last year. The important factor with bitcoin however is to not it's all time low and all time high and see what it's done historically which we will get into here soon.

Now normally and has proven correct in the past is Bitcoin is often a leading indicator as to what the rest of the markets are feeling. As bitcoin continues to sell off we could very well see it return to $30,000 - $50,000 range next year being that next year is looking like it's going to be a full bear market. This is historically what bitcoin has done for it's last few cycles.

So 2026 in terms of technical looks bad for bitcoin and crypto overall.

The Idea

The biggest mind shift I think is happening right now. While ETFs and major companies continue to buy up bitcoin it's become increasingly regulated, pressure being put on people drastically and still very confusing and hard to read or very expensive tracking to reporting. This increasing oversight, rules, regulations and integration of bitcoin into the normal financial system is what I feel is a big driving factor for the down turn right now.

Bitcoin was built from the ashes for the 2008 financial crash the completely trashed everyone's savings and retirements and then bailed out large corps and banks with tax payer money further increasing the wealth gap. It's only gotten worse and the idea of bitcoin was a way for every day people to have more control, security, financial privacy and to be a "bank" themselves in a way. But all of that has been eroded to the point where you have to step back and really question of it's worth it anymore.

The core development team has changed on Bitcoin was well and apparently there are some rather big questions coming up about it recently. A recent big change allows more data to be attached to blocks such as images, text etc which actually opens bitcoin up for security issues and new ways to attack it. This throws another wrench into what made bitcoin so valuable and that was it's tested and long standing resilience to attack after attack from ALL sides. The beauty of bitcoin was it's simplicity and that it just worked and it was battle tested. With this update it does throw things into question again about how secure it really is.

Another factor to this is we are seeing very early investors also starting to cash out billions of dollars worth. All of these contributing factors right now paint a rather bearish market that I believe started a few months ago. My prediction was a new all time high of $113,000 and people called me crazy and that we were going to $300,000 or even a million. While sure that might be the case here at some point the next cycle could reach these levels but I'm starting to lean more and more away from bitcoin being an exciting asset to have these days.

My Thoughts

I think 2026 is going to be a rough year for bitcoin and crypto overall. Heavy sell pressure, uncertainty and general a bad outlook for most things going on in the world including what was talked about above. I do however see 2027 -2029 being upward trends again but so far it's unclear to me as to what levels we might see. We are going to have to be a big lower towards the mid to end of 2026 for me to be able to lock in an educated guess.

What are you thoughts?