Drawdown Autopsy: How Deep and How Long Bitcoin Crashes Last
2026-10-08
Return figures hide the experience of holding. A drawdown is the fall from a previous high to the next low. The Drawdown Autopsy lists every episode deeper than a threshold you choose, with the peak date, trough date, days to the trough, recovery date and days to recover.
Bitcoin since 2015
Using daily closes from 1 January 2015 to 6 October 2026, Bitcoin had 17 drawdowns of 20% or more. The median recovery took 86 days, but the tail is long.
| Peak | Bottom | Depth | Days to bottom | Days to recover |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-12-16 | 2018-12-15 | -83.4% | 364 | 1,080 |
| 2021-11-08 | 2022-11-21 | -76.6% | 378 | 847 |
| 2025-10-06 | 2026-06-30 | -53.1% | 267 | ongoing |
| 2021-04-13 | 2021-07-20 | -53.1% | 98 | 189 |
As of 6 October 2026 Bitcoin was about 31% below its 6 October 2025 closing high of roughly $124,753. Across the whole window it closed below its running peak on about 96% of days. That figure is normal for any asset that keeps making new highs: you are almost always under the last one.
What to take from it
- The two worst crashes each needed about two to three years to recover. A plan that needs the money inside twelve months cannot rely on recovery.
- Small drawdowns heal fast; the median hides the deep ones.
- An ongoing episode has no recovery date and is shown as ongoing, never as a completed one.
Method
The tool tracks the running peak of closes. An episode starts when the close falls below the peak and ends on the first close at or above it. Only episodes whose deepest point passes your threshold are reported, ranked by depth. Intraday wicks are ignored, so real lows were usually deeper.
API: /api/lab/drawdowns?asset=bitcoin&depth=20&from=2015-01-01.
Pricing and limits
Runs are metered. Hindsight tools cost $0.002 a run, Token Lab holder tools $0.01, and Social Pulse or the AI analyst $0.05, taken from account credits. Paid plans include a monthly allowance and then fall back to credits. Anonymous visitors get a few free hindsight samples a day, and any result someone has already computed is free to view for a few minutes. Daily and monthly spend caps apply to every account.
Numbers come from the BitBank Hindsight Lab run on daily closes (Yahoo Finance) on 8 October 2026. They shift as the series updates and are history, not a forecast.