A bear market is an extended decline in prices, conventionally dated from a peak once a broad index or asset has fallen roughly 20% and stayed down. Its mirror is a bull market. The threshold is a convention rather than a definition — it comes from equity-market usage and is carried over to crypto loosely, which is why two commentators can disagree about whether one is underway at all.
The 20% convention and its limits
Bitcoin has repeatedly fallen more than 20% inside stretches that were later described as bull markets. A drawdown that would mark a bear market in a large equity index is an unremarkable week in crypto, so in practice the label leans on duration and character as much as depth: months rather than days, lower highs as well as lower lows, and a change in what the market rewards.
Because of that ambiguity, the useful question is usually whose bear market. Someone reading a weekly chart and someone describing a multi-year cycle can both use the phrase correctly and mean entirely different things — a distinction worth holding on to whenever the term appears in a headline.
How MoonWire uses it
We do not declare bear markets. Our reads classify conditions mechanically as a market regime, and we report the phrase when a source uses it, attributed to that source. In our 11 August market pulse the same 20% lag in Bitcoin was read by two analysts as opposite things: a verdict on the cycle, or the precondition for the next leg up. Our 13 August pulse covered a comparable split over where the market's liquidity had gone.
What it is not
A bear market is not a forecast, a fixed duration or a floor. It is a backward-looking description of a price path, and it carries no information about when that path ends — the 20% figure marks the entry, never the exit. It also says nothing about individual assets, since sectors and single coins routinely move against the aggregate.