Bitcoin keeps knocking on $71,500, the door will open sooner or later
Bitcoin went through a familiar but stressful move this week. There was such a strong backlash that it silenced the skeptics and aroused the people who had bought the deal once again.
After plummeting to around $60,000, the price has returned to its center of gravity at the $71,500 zone.
Been there three times already.
Each time, the market hesitated, traders hunkered down, and the bull market ran out of oxygen. Bitcoin is currently back around $70,900 and seems willing to test $71,500 again, but even if you don’t trade or only check the price once a week, this is a noteworthy moment.
Because some levels resemble shared memories rather than simple numbers on a screen.
$71,500 is one of them.
Why does $71,500 keep showing up?
When the level is tested over and over again, it becomes a kind of public square.
Everyone checks it on their chart. But not everyone discusses it in group chats or has plans.
This is important because Bitcoin is a market driven as much by emotion as by mathematics.
After a sharp decline, when the price approaches levels like $71,500, there is a mix of those wanting to exit, those wanting to enter, and those looking for confirmation. That creates friction, and that friction creates the stall you see on the chart.
For traders, this is where decisions are made quickly, stops are firmly set, and leverage is bold.
For long-term holders, the story is rewritten here. Markets that fail to break above $71,500 begin to feel weak, and markets that regain it begin to feel repaired.
This difference in sensation is why zones are important.
The lines on my chart are not decoration
The horizontal lines on the chart are the top and bottom of the channel I’ve been tracking for the past two years.
These are areas where Bitcoin repeatedly finds support or falls into resistance. These are constructed from a combination of historical leverage movements, order book dynamics, psychological price levels, and the familiar entry and exit points that many traders use when trading with size.
I’m not saying this is a magic formula, it’s a map. That way, you can stop guessing and start planning.
And now, according to that map, the next major checkpoint is $71,500.
If you’ve been following my work this cycle, you’ll notice this theme. I’ve spent months writing about how cycle highs form, how risk leaks out of the system, and how bear markets often feel obvious in hindsight, but rarely in the moment.
Back in the fall, I argued that even though markets were still euphoric, they were already showing signs of the cycle cresting. The case is explained in “Time is up: The case for Why Bitcoin bear Market Cycle starting at $126,000”.
We also talked about the time frames that tend to surround cycle peaks and whether ETFs can bend that history in “Bitcoin cycle clock points to last high by late October, but will ETFs rewrite history?”
I then announced the idea that Bitcoin could still fall towards $49,000 during this economic downturn, which upset a lot of people. That hypothesis is alive and well in “Akiba’s mid-term $49,000 Bitcoin bearish thesis – why this winter is the shortest ever”, which I followed up with “January raised some very worrying red flags as I predicted Bitcoin would fall to $49,000 this year” in January when we started to see the type of structural stress that would accelerate the decline.
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Just recently, after the drawdown deepened, I wrote in “My $49,000 Bitcoin Forecast Unfolding, but BTC Approaches a Major Buy Zone” that my $49,000 outlook was still on track, noting that Bitcoin was moving closer to the zone where we expected real demand to start to emerge again.
This new release is the next chapter in the same story, and the market is trying to decide whether it’s healing or just holding its breath.
The decision becomes clear at $71,500.
What does the fourth test usually mean?
Three failed attempts at the same level can mean two different things, and the difference all depends on how the price behaves on the next approach.
In some cases, repeated tests can weaken resistance and absorb sellers, thinning the walls each time and ultimately pushing up prices.
Repeated tests can also create traps, buyers become impatient, leverage builds up and stops piling up underneath, and rejection can spark a sharp decline.
You can feel that tension from the way you look at the current chart. The rally has been steady, without the explosive urgency that usually appears when markets are completely confident.
This is a useful time to talk about levels rather than predictions, as that can change quickly.
Here’s how to put together $71,500
I treat $71,500 as the line that the market has to prove.
A clean move beyond that only makes sense if it is maintained. In Bitcoin, wicks are common, so are failed breakouts, and the difference between strength and noise is whether the price can rise above the recycled level long enough for traders to stop treating it as a short sale.
If Bitcoin breaks through $71,500 and is accepted above, the upside objective becomes the next band on my map.
On my chart, the next zone above is around $73,700, then $77,000, then just under $79,000.
These levels are important because they are historically where markets have paused, reversed, or accelerated. These are then where profit-taking tends to be concentrated and where leveraged traders tend to set their next triggers.
The mood changes when Bitcoin fails again at $71,500.
This indicates that the pullback from $60,000 has not yet repaired the structure and that sellers are still adhering to the same upper bound, raising the possibility that price will return to the mid-range territory where it has already spent time during this recovery.
On my chart, the closer shelves below are around $70,000 and $66,900, with deeper support memory near the lower half of $61,000.
This is why $71,500 is important, it sits at the edge of the recovery channel and is the easiest way to distinguish continuation from rejection without imposing a narrative on the chart.
Human parts traders forget
Every time Bitcoin approaches levels like $71,500, there is a crowd behind the candle.
There are retail traders who buy late in the cycle, watch the drawdown, and then commit to selling when they approach breakeven.
Long-term holders who have seen this movie before haven’t panicked, but are feeling the tension in their stomachs when the price returns to where it has already failed so many times.
There are new investors who just learned what a “liquidity sweep” is last month and are trying to figure out whether this pullback means safety has returned.
There are desk traders who don’t care about the story and only care about where stops are likely to be concentrated and how much liquidity exists around known levels.
Those people all behave differently and all interact at the same price.
That’s why charts work. Charts are simply records of human behavior.
That’s why I keep coming back to these channel bands. These give me a way to pin human emotions into reproducible areas of interest.
How does this fit into the larger cycle story?
I do not believe that $71,500 is a permanent ceiling. I see this as the next checkpoint in a broader cycle that has already passed through the top stages of euphoria and entered the damage control stage.
That’s the core of my discussion of bear markets, and it’s why I casually put controversial numbers like $49,000 in my paper.
The drop to $60,000 doesn’t invalidate that big idea. This confirms a more important fact: the market is capable of rapid and violent pricing again.
In January, I wrote about the types of red flags that appear when a system is stressed, from the way flow changes to the behavior of miner and market plumbing.
These things don’t get resolved overnight.
But what actually happens is the market breathes, sells, rebounds, pulls people back, and then reveals whether there was real strength behind that rebound.
That is the moment we are approaching now.
The $71,500 zone is where Bounce will be tested in public.
Attention level, simple version
If you want the cleanest way to track this without getting confused by indicators, here’s how to simplify this.
- $71,500a line that the market continues to reject, a reassertion that holds changes its tune.
- $73,700the next resistance band above, is the first place where sellers are expected to test a breakout.
- $77,000 to $79,000in higher bands, stronger continuations are more likely to encounter greater friction.
- $70,000below the nearest shelf, if the market loses this after another rejection, it shows weakness.
- $66,900a deeper midrange, a level often associated when momentum wanes.
- Low $61,000a post-crash memory zone where the market showed its hand in a capitulation move.
That’s a map.
All that remains is to observe how Bitcoin behaves when it touches the line and resist the urge to create certainty.
What I see when I get there is
When the price hits $71,500 again, I look at three simple things.
- First, speed. Will Bitcoin slice quickly or will it wear out and hesitate?
- Second, follow through. Breakouts that cannot be held often lead to sharper moves because they create a trap position.
- Thirdly, the reaction. The market shows what it thinks about a level by how aggressively it defends or recovers from that level.
If Bitcoin clears and sustains $71,500, the story shifts towards recovery and continuation. When it is rejected again, the story returns to the damaged but still functioning market.
Either way, it’s more important than 1,000 hot takes.
Because in cycles like this, the most valuable thing you can have is a plan, and the most expensive thing you can have is uncharted confidence.
Thoughts of the end
Bitcoin has not announced what it plans to do next. It leaves clues, but those clues tend to cluster around the same zones over and over.
At the moment, $71,500 is the clearest clue on the board.
It has already been tested three times since the $60,000 crash. Prices are approaching again. Traders will treat this place like a battlefield. Long-term holders will treat it like a barometer.
And the market will treat it for what it is: the level that will determine whether this pullback turns into something bigger or whether there is still winter left for Bitcoin to show us.
Disclosure, this is market commentary and not financial advice. Risk management is more important than the story.
(Tag translation) Bitcoin
