Could BTC drop back to $10k?

Woke up from a nap—BTC is still, more or less, trading sideways around 67k.

In the past two days, an article about Bitcoin being bearish [1] has been pretty scary. It says that if oil prices rise to $150, Bitcoin could fall back to $10k.

Let’s算算账 first.

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

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

Let’s look at what happened in the normal 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, a drop of 84%. In 2022, it fell from $69k to $15.5k, a drop of 77%.

The drawdowns are narrowing. From 89% to 84%, and then to 77%. The market is getting bigger, institutions are entering, and spot ETFs are providing steady buy pressure. In 2014, Bitcoin’s market cap was only $10 billion; today it’s in the trillion-dollar range. A 90% drop in a $10 billion market cap is not the same thing as a 90% drop in a $1 trillion market cap.

Even during the “perfect storm” in 2022—Three Arrows, Luna, and FTX all blowing up in sequence—the BTC drawdown still didn’t punch through $15k back to $10k. In today’s world where fundamentals are supposedly already vastly different, is BTC really going to fall back to $10k just because oil prices rise?

That article says $10k is tail risk, requiring the Strait of Hormuz to be closed for the long term, oil to spike to $150 to $200 and stay there for a year, the Federal Reserve not to bail out the situation, and ETFs to be redeemed massively.

Oil at $150 to $200 might 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 really reaches that level, the global economy won’t be able to hold up within six months; once demand collapses, oil prices will come down.

As for the Federal Reserve not bailing out—what did it do in March 2020 during the pandemic shock, when U.S. stocks had four circuit breakers? It did what? Unlimited quantitative easing, with interest rates driven straight to zero. In 2023, during the banking crisis, what did the Federal Reserve do? It poured out emergency liquidity tools. The Fed’s responsibility is to support the market—especially when an oil price shock triggers an economic downturn, it has no second option.

As for massive ETF redemptions: today, 11 spot ETFs hold more than one million BTC. These are structural, long-term funds. BlackRock, Fidelity, and other of the world’s largest asset managers spent more than a year pushing ETFs through, smashing countless compliance costs—then they liquidate the whole thing collectively half a year later? That assumption is no longer macro analysis. It’s final fantasy.

So for $10k to be on the table, it wouldn’t take one piece of bad news—it would require the collapse and rollback of the entire market structure. It’s not absolutely impossible, but the probability is extremely low, trending toward infinitesimal. From a math perspective, infinitesimals are impossible.

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

What do you ask next? What happens after oil prices hold at $150 to $200 for half a year? A global recession, corporate profits collapsing, unemployment skyrocketing, and U.S. Treasury interest payments exploding. With $35 trillion in Treasuries and a 5% rate, annual interest is $1.75 trillion—more than the military budget. By then, does the Federal Reserve still have a choice? It can only pivot from fighting inflation to protecting the economy: stop rate hikes and restart the money-printing machine.

The full chain of logic, it should have been something like this: oil prices rise—bearish in the short term, because liquidity tightens; in the medium term it’s still bearish, because of economic recession; but in the long term it’s bullish, because fiat currency is devalued and Bitcoin’s scarcity becomes more apparent. The original text only sees the first layer. If you only look at the third layer, that would also be one-sided. But you have to survive the two dark phases before dawn to wait for the third stage, when the East turns bright and the sun rises.

So for short-term traders, the risk warning in the original article 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 disrupt your direction.

If you’ve used leverage, then be careful: short-term risks are real, and you could get wiped to zero overnight by a black swan. If you can’t tolerate a drawdown of 50% or more, Bitcoin may not be suitable for you. But if you’re someone who DCA monthly and plans to hold for ten years, then these bearish “tunes” in the short run are only noise.

That article may not have been intended purely to scare people; it does provide some useful data and a risk framework. Its problem is treating a very tiny-probability tail risk as a scenario worth taking seriously (and even emphasizing it as the title), and only projecting the first layer of the bearish logic—without continuing to project further.

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

My countermeasure is very simple: keep to the eight-character诀—ignore the short term, and trust the cycle.

Bitcoin has never been designed to perform for a single week, a single month, or even a single year. It’s so that when the fiat currency in your hands turns into worthless paper, you can still stand upright—not kneel.

$150 oil? Then let the storm come even more violently.