Hmm, what does it mean near?
As of today BTC is +21% from its 52 weeks low, LTC +50% ETH +101%.
If you start from the lows, the percentages you calculate show that the damage was a little bit smaller then before. LOSSES, not PROFITS.
If you, like a lot of people did, bought BTC around 10-19K you still lose a huge amount of money. Even if BTC would be 100% higher then the low.
So prices are indeed still near the bottom. If you have a 10K account and you account drops to $500 and then rebounds to $1,000, you can say:
- I lost $9,000, or
- I recovered and doubled my account from the lowest point.
The first answer is the reality, the second one is a biased one to avoid huge damage to your ego. Your "mean near..." is the second answer from above.
BTC makes me think about the Nikkei. Chart looks the same more or less till 2003; 1989 would be 2018 (point 1) for BTC and we see the same drop which had almost the same size in percentages (point 2). The question now is: will BTC recover like the Nikkei (point 3)?
And even if we watch the "recovery" of the Nikkei, that index still loses over 50% of his value. Include inflation and the real loss is even much higher (+30 years of inflation!!!).
In the late 80's nobody would ever have believed that the Nikkei would go so horribly wrong. The Japanese economy was a miracle... just like BTC was (till 1 year ago).
