Michael Saylor has stated numerous times that if you held bitcoin for a period of four years (or more), you've never lost (against the dollar). He was right at the time, but obviously won't make that same claim again, since what he said hasn't happened has now happened.

But markets are markets. 80% drawdowns have happened multiple times, and tje pirce stews at or near those levels for a while (e..g, a couple years). But then not just does bitcoin recover its ATH but it bursts past and increases dramatically -- something that is very rare with any asset class.

Obviously, nearly all who were levered have now seen liquidations, if not a total wipeout. But this is not new. We saw the same thing in 2018-2020. And previously in 2014-2016.

Personally, I don't think these depressed levels will sit for long, but who knows. There are a few tells that comfort me.

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Source: https://mempool.space/graphs/mempool#2y

Two years ago, I had switched to using a couple shitcoins (LTC and Dash) for some lower-value payments because the cost to use bitcoin (on-chain fees) was excessive. There's the same on-chain transaction capacity today as there was in 2021. But today, a combination of further SegWit adoption at exchanges as well as Lightning network has taken the pressure off and on-chain fees have been quite fair -- even with a dramatic amount of volatility. And this is still with most exchanges not supporting LN. Though Kraken offering LN support along with Strike (in the U.S.), and Cash App (again, only in the U.S. and only for withdrawals) has been sufficient, for my needs. But much of the world uses Binance, FTX, and even Coinbase, yet and they have no way to use LN from those centralized exchange platforms.

Essentially, what I'm saying there is that bitcoin now is seeing scalability, which was something of a concern to me prior to LN proving itself.

Another tell, for me is that the aggressive attacks on bitcoin by governments results in exactly what was predicted. Sure, bitcoin adoption has slowed in these places versus the levels seen before the attacks, but where bitcoin activity persists in these places now is below the radar. For example: There is a common use case in Nigeria (which has banned exchanges) that has not been shared much, publicly, where small merchants are buying goods from China (which not only has banned exchanges but banned bitcoin for commercial payments), and these importers are paying in bitcoin.

Essentially, what I'm saying there is that bitcoin continues proving it is censorship resistant, and even tyrannical governments are essentially powerless to snuff it out.

There are a number of other tells, but they essentially follow the same pattern: What were the concerns from way back about whether bitcoin can gain mass adoption and nearly all of them are getting debunked as time progresses.

Exchange rate volatility is still one (bigger) argument that remains valid.