Bitcoin Slides Again as Anger Takes Over the Bear Market

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, December 16, and today, we are talking about Bitcoin taking another leg down. Before we get into that, however, if you're enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you wanna dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly/breakdownpod. Well, friends, Bitcoin is heading back to the lows as the bear market deepens. Bitcoin plunged at the Monday open trading as low as 85,000. Now this is a slightly higher low than the past two drawdowns of this bear market, but the wipeout snuffed out any hopes of a recovery. The drawdown was a violent affair to begin the trading week. Bitcoin lost 4.3% across the first four hours of trading in New York. That drawdown liquidated 200,000,000 in long positions, once again rinsing leverage out of the system. Time after time over the past few months, we've seen traders try to buy the dip on leverage only to come undone. Some claimed foul play with DefiTracer tweeting, Binance and Wintermute dumping millions of Bitcoin. They liquidated over a 100,000,000 in long positions in five minutes. This is pure manipulation. That viral tweet was accompanied by block records of Binance hot wallet sending Bitcoin to various other exchanges. Not really much of a smoking gun. But the virality of the tweet captured the current sentiment a few months into this bear market. We are now clearly past the denial and firmly into the second stage of a bear market, which is, of course, anger. There's a ton of chatter around market maker Wintermute, who are apparently both insolvent and also dictating price action across the entire crypto ecosystem. And while we have nothing but rumors to go on, it's going to be extremely difficult to form a bottom if everyone is revenge trading on leverage. The bargaining stage should be next when CT begs for a positive catalyst. And then eventually after that, we will reach the acceptance stage, and hopefully, a strong spot led recovery can begin. For now, that is firmly in the future. Volumes are low, and market structure looks pretty bent out of shape. Highblock Capital noted a huge divergence between cohorts in the spot market. Smaller Bitcoin wallets have been accumulating decently, adding 470,000,000 in buy side volumes so far this month. However, Bitcoin whales have been net sellers to the tune of 2,800,000,000.0. In other words, Bitcoin is going down because there's more sellers than buyers. Now to mix in a positive note, this flow data doesn't suggest a zero interest zero bid bear market. There's still plenty of interest in accumulating Bitcoin with short term holders trying to front run a recovery. That cohort's spent …