2026-09-03
The Biggest Bitcoin Crashes in History (And What Happened After)
Bitcoin has been declared dead by financial commentators more times than anyone’s bothered to count, usually right after one of these.
Mt. Gox, 2014
At its peak, Mt. Gox handled around 70% of all Bitcoin transactions worldwide. Then it turned out roughly 850,000 BTC had been stolen or lost over time through hacking and mismanagement — worth a few hundred million dollars then, tens of billions today. The exchange collapsed, the price dropped hard, and for a lot of people this became the go-to example of “see, crypto isn’t safe.” Bitcoin spent years afterward rebuilding trust, and slowly did.
The 2018 crypto winter
After the speculative 2017 bull run — driven heavily by ICO mania, where anyone could launch a token and raise millions on a whitepaper and a Telegram group — the whole market cratered. Bitcoin dropped more than 80% from its peak. Most of the ICO projects that caused the hype turned out to be worthless or outright scams. Bitcoin itself survived; the vast majority of the tokens that rode its coattails did not.
March 2020, the COVID crash
Global markets panicked all at once, and Bitcoin dropped roughly 50% in a single day alongside stocks, oil, and pretty much everything else. This one wasn’t Bitcoin-specific — it was a liquidity crisis across all assets as everyone scrambled for cash. It also recovered faster than almost anyone expected, which became one of the arguments people later used for Bitcoin as a hedge (a claim that’s still genuinely debated).
2022: Terra/Luna and FTX
Two separate disasters in one year. Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin collapsed in May, wiping out tens of billions of dollars and triggering a broader crypto credit crunch. Then in November, FTX — one of the largest exchanges in the world — collapsed after it turned out customer funds had been used to prop up a related trading firm. Bitcoin dropped alongside everything else, bottoming out around $16,000, down from a peak near $69,000 a year earlier.
What actually happened after, each time
Every single one of these crashes was followed, eventually, by a recovery to new highs. That’s not a guarantee it’ll keep happening — past pattern isn’t a promise — but it’s also not nothing. The crashes tend to share a common thread: they’re usually about specific companies, specific scams, or broad market panic, rather than a flaw in Bitcoin’s underlying protocol, which has never actually been hacked or gone down.
Whether that track record makes Bitcoin resilient or just lucky so far is exactly the question Chapter 13, “Why Does Bitcoin’s Price Crash So Often?”, tries to answer honestly in The Bitcoin Skeptic’s Guide, without picking a side before looking at the evidence.