Bitcoin just had its worst week since the collapse of FTX, with the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index dropping over 15% week to date. At one point on Thursday, bitcoin was trading at $60,057 — meaning it lost more than half of its value since the crypto’s all-time high of $126,272.76, reached just four months ago on Oct. 6, 2025.
Overall, it was a wild week in markets. Software stocks sank and pushed the S&P 500 index negative for the year, before rebounding. Gold and silver tumbled after a steep selloff last week. And the Cboe Volatility Index, a measure of volatility known as Wall Street’s ”fear gauge.” hit a two-month high.
Bitcoin’s crash cast doubts over the mythology around the crypto. Yet while it may have been bitcoin’s worst week in years, Corey Geho bought more anyway.
Geho, a retail investor in his early 30s, said he buys the same amount of bitcoin every week. That meant buying bitcoin in October 2025 at the $120,000 level, and buying bitcoin in February at the $70,000 level.
Geho first bought bitcoin in 2015, and due to its early growth, he was able to pay off some of his student loans. Since then, he’s been building up his bitcoin portfolio little by little, investing more money at least once every two weeks. When Geho was a public -chool teacher who wasn’t making much money, he would still put what he could into bitcoin. He said he hasn’t sold any of it since 2017.
“Having been involved now for a decade, the media has called for the death of bitcoin pretty frequently. And every time, it comes back and sets a new all-time high,” Geho told MarketWatch.
Buying bitcoin since 2015 means that Geho endured the crashes of both 2018 and 2021.
“Volatility is the price of admission with bitcoin. A pullback from [at the height] to current levels or even lower doesn’t shake my confidence in it as an alternative asset class,” Geho said.
He held through those crypto winters, and by diligently dollar-cost averaging, he’s gotten his cost basis down to around $26,000. That means, even with this recent selloff, he’s still profitable by a significant margin.
Not everyone is as lucky though. Tayleb Brooks, a 27-year-old who lives in Virginia and works in public relations, said that he entered his bitcoin position in October 2024, when the crypto was trading at around $67,000. That means this week was the first time Brooks saw his bitcoin position go negative.
He said that watching bitcoin’s slide “hurts,” but the pain isn’t just from the paper losses. It’s also from the shift in the bitcoin market away from the decentralized hedge it once was. He said the financial derivatives of bitcoin — things like bitcoin futures, options and even prediction markets that track the crypto — have made it such that bitcoin’s supply is no longer finite and people can trade bitcoin without actually owning the underlying asset.
“I like spot ETFs that are required to hold BTC, but Wall Street has many products that don’t,” Brooks told MarketWatch. “Options and futures now allow people to gamble on the price without actually being involved in the blockchain, which is antithetical to what BTC was intended for.”
But other retail investors believe the bitcoin story hasn’t changed. John is a 75-year-old in California, who didn’t want to provide his full name as to not attract attention from “crypto trolls.” He said that bitcoin was originally intended to be a currency, and its adoption by financial institutions and nations points to its use case as a store of value.
In his own life, John sees bitcoin as a form of insurance. He already brings in enough money in pensions to support himself, but he trust the bitcoin thesis and has been buying and holding for years.
Seeing bitcoin’s drop this week didn’t feel good, but he said he has no plans to sell.
“Yes, it does hurt a little. But I’ve been in the game for a fairly long time by bitcoin standards, since 2019, and I’ve seen this movie before,” he told MarketWatch.
During this time, he said, he learned a valuable lesson: If you’re not comfortable with volatility, you shouldn’t be investing in bitcoin.
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