After a bearish year of perennial price swings that culminated in months of tightly wound sideways movement, the (former) bottom has dropped out for bitcoin and the wider crypto market.By all rights, it’s a complete reversal of fortune from the explosion of value the market enjoyed this time last year, and mainstream media has had a field day exploiting the irony of the peripeteia bitcoin’s price has suffered when we compare it to the investor euphoria of just a year ago.The price plunge is certainly a far cry from the gift hodlers were looking for this holiday season, and talk of bitcoin this year is likely more hushed or contentious than a year prior. But this price action is also nothing new — just another instalment of bitcoin’s many boom and bust cycles. So with prices down significantly even from their position before the bull run was thrown into overdrive, it’s prime time to take stock of how this crash stacks up to bitcoin’s other historic tumbles, and to take price in hand with other metrics of network growth.Where We Are Now, Where We’ve BeenAt the time of publication, bitcoin is trading for roughly $3,700. With an all-time high just shy of $20,000, this means bitcoin is 80 percent down from its peak price. That’s a hard drop to stomach, but it’s not as bad as some of bitcoin’s other, more gut-wrenching price depreciations.In the first major crash the market saw, bitcoin went from a high of $3...
