These past few days, the backend has been bombarded with questions: "Is it that the bull hasn't finished yet, or has the bear already arrived?"

To be honest, when I first entered the circle in 2017, I didn't believe in any "four-year cycle"; I thought it was just a story made up by old investors to deceive newcomers. It wasn't until this time when Bitcoin dropped from 126,000 all the way down to 94,000, and altcoins were directly halved, even falling by 80 to 90 percent, that I truly understood: bulls and bears are not called out; they are realized through drops, they are the answers hammered out by the market with real money.

At the beginning of the month, when BTC was hovering around 110,000, those meme coins were soaring by five to ten times a day, and the scene was all too familiar — the last time I saw this was at the tail end of the bull run in 2021, after the chaos, it was just a ground full of corpses. At that time, I warned a bit about the risks, but I was laughed at for being a "bear" and for having a "small perspective, the bull is still early."

And now? The entire network has 19 billion dollars in leverage being liquidated by the market, this year's gains have been directly wiped out, and those who celebrated early have long been silenced. This wave of decline was never sudden; the script was already written on the day when emotions were at their craziest.

And don't forget, this year is the 18th month after the halving — historical data shows that every cycle starts turning bearish at this time point; this pattern has never failed. Bitcoin can still hold on for a bit with institutional funds, but what about altcoins? No one is there to catch them, and they fall faster than anyone else.

No need to say much about the technical aspect: the three-year 200-day moving average was kicked through, and the 365-day moving average also couldn't hold; now everyone is staring at that critical support at 72,000, and once it breaks, the consequences are unimaginable. Plus, with the Federal Reserve's interest rate cut expectations cooling down, officials frequently hawkish, and after the government shutdown, market liquidity tightening again...

To be honest, this year's "Christmas market" is highly likely to be gone.

So if you ask me how I see the end of the year? The answer is simple: it's likely to fluctuate in the 80,000-90,000 range, and if it drops below 80,000, then the situation will truly not look good; a cycle-level bear market may really be upon us.

The cryptocurrency market has never been a straight line: bulls won't keep rising, and bears won't keep falling. All cycles have validated a saying: what is prosperous will decline, what declines must rebound. We are now standing at the tail end of a cycle, watching it slowly move towards the next round's beginning.

Instead of getting tangled up in whether it’s a bull or bear now, it’s better to calm down: save some bullets, see the direction clearly,