Arena Blog

Five bull markets since 2010, one simple rule. The climb took 8 to 11 months every time. What got shorter is the way back to year-old prices, not because bitcoin falls faster, but because it rises less steeply.

The biggest crypto hack in history cost Bybit about 1.5 billion dollars in February 2025. Its customers lost nothing. Thieves give back almost nothing: 3.1 percent of everything stolen. So whether you see your money again depends on who can carry the loss. A solvent exchange can. A bankrupt one cannot, and in your own wallet, it is you. The biggest hacks, how they worked, and what follows for where you keep your coins.

OneCoin, Bitconnect, PlusToken, Celsius, FTX: billions gone, millions of victims. In 9 of the 15 biggest cases, the warning sign was in the offer itself, before anyone paid in: a fixed return, money for recruiting, a source of profit nobody could check. What the biggest scams had in common, how little victims got back, why the fraud of today looks different, and five questions to ask before you deposit.

Measured by drawdown, the 2026 bear market was the mildest of bitcoin's big cycles: −53 % against −77 % to −93 % before. Measured in time, it was the worst: the low matched a price from five and a quarter years earlier, further back than any low since 2010. And against its own history, bitcoin was not cheap at any low since 2017. Three numbers for every bear market, and what each tells you before you call bitcoin a bargain.

Since 2011 Bitcoin has fallen 30 percent within a month 19 times. How often that happens today, how it fits with falling volatility, how far the drop usually went, and what that means for the size of your position.

When half the top altcoins beat Bitcoin, an altcoin season usually follows. Yet in 11 of 13 cases since 2020, switching to altcoins meant falling behind Bitcoin, whether you bought the leaders or the rest. Five checks and what each one tells you.

Willy Woo labelled the sell walls in Bitcoin's order book "fake" and the bids "organic". What spoofing means in law, how the first criminal case was actually proven, and the one number a heatmap would need to show.

A Bitcoin model published in August reaches $785,000 in 2030 at 60 % a year. Where its line stands today, what rate the target now needs, and why the same method would have given anything from $47,000 to $19 million.

When Bitcoin falls while the spot ETFs report inflows, it looks like support. Across 428 trading days the next day was a coin flip like any other, and within the next 20 days the usual pullback came anyway.

"Stocks have recovered from every war" is true — for one country. After the April 1940 high the Dow needed four years and nine months to get back to even, in 1914 the exchange was closed for four and a half months, and St Petersburg, Vienna, Tokyo and Shanghai are missing from the statistics because their exchanges ceased to exist. Across 39 markets, a diversified investor is down in real terms after 30 years in 12 % of cases.

Across 18 midterm years since 1954 the S&P fell 17.7 percent from its high on average — but only 5 of them had a 19-percent drop inside the second half. What the number measures, how much of it reaches Bitcoin (through the S&P, not through yields), and why Bitcoin's own midterm-year bears come from the halving.

The CFA franc's end was announced in 2019. The rate has not moved since — and the binding part was never the part that was announced. What a currency peg costs, who sets the price of money for fourteen countries, and what it is costing Senegal and Central Africa right now.