On November 10, 2021, at approximately 14:30 UTC, the price of bitcoin reached $68,789.63 on Bitstamp and approximately $69,000 on several other major exchanges. The figure was, at the time, the highest price the asset had ever traded at. It would also turn out to be — though no one knew it on the afternoon it occurred — the peak of the 2020–2021 bull market and the highest price bitcoin would reach for the next two years and four months. The cycle that had begun with MicroStrategy’s August 2020 corporate-treasury announcement, accelerated through Tesla’s February 2021 disclosure, peaked through El Salvador’s June 2021 legal-tender adoption, and been performed throughout by the laser-eyes profile-picture campaign whose stated goal had been precisely the price level now in evidence, had reached the number that it had been promising itself it would reach. The price would not stay there.
The number itself acquired immediate cultural significance. 69,000, in the alphanumeric grammar of internet culture, contains 69 — a number with adolescent sexual associations that have been part of online humor for several decades and that bitcoin culture had already incorporated into its broader vocabulary of half-ironic celebration. That bitcoin’s all-time high price would, of all possible numbers, peak just below sixty-nine thousand dollars was, in the bitcoin community’s reception, simultaneously a coincidence and a confirmation. The price chart was given the appropriate annotations. The memes proliferated within hours. Nice, replied countless accounts, in the standard internet response to any appearance of the number. The cycle, having reached its peak, immediately began the production of the cultural artifacts that would commemorate it.
The peak’s market context was substantially driven by the introduction of the first United States bitcoin exchange-traded fund — though, importantly, a futures-based fund rather than a spot fund. The ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF, ticker BITO, had launched on October 19, 2021, and had attracted substantial assets in its opening weeks. The combination of the ETF’s success, ongoing corporate adoption, the post-El Salvador sovereign-adoption narrative, and macroeconomic conditions that were producing significant flows into all risk assets had pushed bitcoin past its previous April 2021 high and into the price territory where the laser-eyes campaign had been pointing. The peak occurred. The buying that had pushed the asset to that peak then reversed.
What followed the peak was the most severe bear market in bitcoin’s history measured by drawdown duration. The price fell to approximately $48,000 by early December 2021, recovered briefly into early 2022, then collapsed substantially during the May 2022 Terra/LUNA collapse and the June 2022 Three Arrows Capital insolvency. By November 2022, in the immediate aftermath of the FTX collapse, bitcoin was trading below $16,000 — a 76 percent drawdown from the November 2021 peak. The asset would not recover to its 2021 high until March 2024, twenty-eight months after the peak, by which point the price would be ascending toward the eventual peak of the next cycle.
The cultural significance of the $69,000 top, distinct from its specific price action, was that it was the moment the bitcoin community’s most elaborate self-fulfilling prophecy nearly succeeded. The laser-eyes campaign had been, in its earnest construction, an attempt to coordinate bitcoin holders’ price expectations toward a specific target — $100,000 by the end of 2021 — through the simple mechanism of repeating the target in public until enough other holders agreed to act as if the target was inevitable. The target was not reached. The peak fell short by approximately thirty percent. The asset would, two and a half years later, blow through the $100,000 level on its way to substantially higher prices, by which point the laser eyes had become a historical artifact rather than an ongoing campaign. 69,000, in the bitcoin community’s memory, is the number the cycle made instead of the number the cycle was supposed to make. The catalog records both the price and the gap between intention and outcome that the price represents.