You’re not crazy: something really is off with Bitcoin right now

If you’ve been looking at the charts lately and thinking, “What on earth is going on with Bitcoin?” you’re not alone. Bitcoin is supposed to be the apex predator of assets, yet gold and AI stocks are stealing the spotlight, and even the S&P 500 is outperforming it.

That disconnect feels wrong. But when you zoom out, what’s happening with Bitcoin’s price, culture, and investor psychology is a lot more normal than it seems in the moment.

Why Bitcoin is underperforming stocks right now

Bitcoin has built its reputation on absolutely crushing traditional markets during bull runs. In the 2020–2021 cycle, while the S&P 500 climbed around 45%, Bitcoin ripped more than 500%. After the brutal 2022 crash, it did something similar again: from the lows into 2023–2024, Bitcoin rallied roughly 400% while the S&P gained about 50%.

Moves like that trained people to believe that whenever liquidity flows into risk assets, Bitcoin automatically becomes king. If stocks are up, the thinking goes, Bitcoin should be up more.

This cycle has broken that mental model. The S&P 500 is up roughly 20%, while Bitcoin is down around 20%. That feels like the whole thesis is falling apart—but it actually fits a longer pattern.

The hidden cycles: when stocks beat Bitcoin

If you compare Bitcoin’s performance to the S&P 500 over time, you don’t just see one straight line of dominance. You see waves. Long stretches where Bitcoin destroys stocks, followed by periods where stocks quietly outperform while Bitcoin cools off.

Think of it like a volcano. Most of the time, it looks calm or even dead. During those quiet phases, stocks look stronger, safer, and more stable. Then, every few years, the volcano erupts and Bitcoin goes completely parabolic, burying almost every other asset in performance.

We’ve already seen several of these “stocks outperform Bitcoin” phases before massive Bitcoin rallies. The current environment looks like just another one of those cooling periods—especially after the huge run-up around spot ETF approvals, political attention, and institutional hype.

If you want to go deeper into how this cycle fits into the bigger macro and tech picture, including AI, check out this breakdown of why Bitcoin is crashing and how it fits into the AI future.

How Bitcoin’s culture changed after the 2021 mania

The price action is only half the story. The culture around Bitcoin has also shifted in subtle but important ways.

In 2021, crypto turned into a full-blown digital casino. Bitcoin was pumping, money was flying everywhere, and suddenly anyone with a laptop and a social media account became a “visionary founder.” More than 4,500 new tokens launched in a single year. Every week brought a new whitepaper, a new roadmap, and a new promise to “revolutionize finance.”

Most of it was pure speculation. A small group of insiders would mint themselves a huge allocation of a new token, hype it up with slick marketing and influencers, then dump on retail once the price pumped. Underneath all the talk about “innovation,” a lot of these projects were just pump-and-dump machines.

Bitcoiners pushed back hard. The phrase “If it’s not Bitcoin, it’s a shitcoin” was everywhere. Bitcoin maximalists treated altcoin promotion like heresy. Mention a random new token, and you’d get dogpiled as a grifter.

That harsh reaction came from somewhere real: Bitcoin’s culture is built around long-term thinking, self-custody, and opting out of a broken fiat system. Most altcoins, by contrast, were designed to make insiders rich as fast as possible.

From “just buy Bitcoin” to “buy Bitcoin-adjacent things”

But over time, the line started to blur. The message quietly shifted from “just buy Bitcoin and think long term” to “buy things that are related to Bitcoin.”

Take MicroStrategy as an example. It’s a software company that decided to pour its balance sheet into Bitcoin. As its Bitcoin holdings grew, its stock started trading like a leveraged Bitcoin play. The chart went vertical.

Suddenly, people who once mocked anything that pumped harder than Bitcoin as a “shitcoin” were trading MicroStrategy stock for the exact same reason: it moved fast and violently. The demand for quick gains never really disappeared—it just found new wrappers that felt more acceptable inside Bitcoin culture.

The result is a strange mix. You still have the long-term idealists, but you also have traders chasing Bitcoin-adjacent volatility, corporations using Bitcoin as a treasury strategy, and institutions treating it as a macro asset. Bitcoin is pulling in everyone—friends and enemies, true believers and pure speculators.

The uncomfortable truth: most Bitcoiners lie to themselves

There’s another weird psychological twist: almost every Bitcoiner says they want lower prices so they can stack more. But when those lower prices actually arrive, almost nobody feels good about it.

Back in 2021, when Bitcoin was near $69,000, the mood was euphoric. Tesla had bought in. El Salvador made it legal tender. Celebrities were putting laser eyes on their profiles. The narrative was that Bitcoin was inevitable and the legacy financial system was finished.

People kept saying, “I hope it dips so I can buy more. I’m not done stacking.” Then 2022 hit like a truck. FTX imploded, the broader crypto market collapsed, and Bitcoin crashed from $69,000 to around $15,000.

On paper, that was the dream scenario: Bitcoin was finally “cheap.” In reality, it felt like a nightmare. Watching your net worth get cut to a fraction of what it was is psychologically brutal. Families worry you’ve ruined your future. Headlines mock “fake internet money.” The easy “buy the dip” talk suddenly turns into real fear.

Conviction vs. comfort

When the market nukes, you’re forced into a choice:

Either you sell at a massive loss and admit everyone who called Bitcoin a scam was right, or you build real conviction and keep stacking despite the pain.

Real conviction isn’t about posting memes when Bitcoin is green. It’s about continuing to buy when the chart looks dead, the news is terrible, and your stomach is in knots. It means recognizing that you’re not just betting on short-term price action—you’re betting on a different kind of future than the one the current system is offering.

That doesn’t mean going all in recklessly or ignoring risk. It means being honest with yourself about why you’re here in the first place. Is it just to get rich quickly, or is it because you believe in what a neutral, hard, global money could unlock?

What this all means for the next phase of Bitcoin

So where does this leave us?

• Bitcoin underperforming stocks for a while is not a sign it’s “broken.” It’s part of a recurring pattern where the volcano cools before it erupts again.
• The culture has become more complex. It’s no longer just cypherpunks and maxis—it’s traders, corporations, institutions, and everyday savers all piled into the same asset for different reasons.
• Most people overestimate their risk tolerance. They say they want lower prices until they actually get them.

If you’re feeling confused or frustrated, that’s normal. The key is to zoom out, understand the cycles, and get clear on your own thesis. If you believe Bitcoin is just another trade, you’ll behave one way. If you believe it’s a long-term monetary revolution, you’ll behave very differently when the next crash or the next rally arrives.

And if you’re trying to figure out how to navigate this kind of volatility with a strategy—rather than emotion—this guide on how one investor is DCA-ing into the crypto crash is a useful next read.

In the end, Bitcoin doesn’t care about our feelings. It just keeps doing what it does: cycling between boredom, despair, disbelief, and euphoria. The hard part is deciding which of those phases you’re willing to live through.