Refuse to fantasize, the copycat season may not come

Written by: hitesh.eth

Compiled by AididiaoJP, Foresight News

If you're still waiting for altcoin season, you've already lost.

been almost three years since Bitcoin hit between $15,000 and $20,000 at the end of the last cycle. In the crypto space, three years is a long time. During these three years, those who had been holding positions in the previous cycle were still in the red, and many of them were mentally destroyed. Many tokens never resumed their gains; The narrative is dead; The hype has stalled; Liquidity dries up.

Most portfolios are still the graveyard of dreams. Only a few tokens like Solana and BNB have delivered a real wealth effect. Ethereum has made some moves, but not enough to save those who enter late. Tokens that were sought after in the last cycle, such as DOT and MATIC, are still falling. Game tokens are basically declared dead. Those who believe in the metaverse and gaming narratives have watched their funds depreciate month after month. Yet they still hold and pray as if religion will save them, but it will not.

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in the last three years, there have been only two real paths. The first group is those "holders" who have stagnated in time and have no basis in believing that the market will one day rebound and their tokens will magically return to their previous all-time highs. They didn't rebalance, they didn't evolve, they didn't study new narratives. They don't build any on-chain skills, just hold equally useless positions and wait for a miracle to happen. The worst thing is that many of them leave their tokens on centralized exchanges. And when exchanges like WazirX are hacked or withdrawals are frozen, these people cry on Twitter. But they still learned nothing. Their whole strategy is hope. Hope is not a strategy, in the crypto space, hope is a slow financial suicide.

The other path belongs to the new generation that has entered in the last two or three years. They came in without any loyalty to the old narrative and didn't care about their portfolio for 2020. They are here for one thing, to extract profits from the market. These people enter through two doors: airdrop hunting and meme coin trading. They pivot early on-chain. Some of them started from scratch and accumulated capital from scratch. Most people end up breaking the loss because they don't understand exit strategies, but at least they're in the real game. Not like the timid bystanders who never leave centralized exchanges.

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the past three years, we have witnessed a series of narratives. Meme Season, AI Season, Meme AI Season, Two Meme Cycles, Two AI Cycles, A Small DeFi Cycle, One Buyback and Burn Cycle, Ongoing Privacy Cycle, ICM Meta Cycle, AI Agent Cycle. The narratives become shorter and sharper, and they burn fiery for two weeks and then die. The lazy cried that it was manipulation, and the smart ones rotated and survived. This is not a market for believers, it is a market for survivors.

Now everything is fragmented and the market is no longer a unified community. It is a "trench" and people choose camp. Solana trench, BNB trench, Base trench, Meme trench, AI trench, DeFi trench, ICM trench. Each trench moves differently, and each trench has its own insiders, leaders, information flows, and fluidity loops. The people inside the trenches know where the money is going, and they understand the simple fact that there will never be another unified altcoin season because liquidity has been scattered across narratives, cross-chain bridges, public chains, and cultures. If you're not inside the trenches, you won't see altcoin season again. You will only see red candlesticks and frustration.

Retail investors sitting outside the trenches are still waiting for some macro switch to be triggered to push their lifeless positions to new highs. These people log on to the exchange every day and stare at the charts like addicts. They shout "I've had enough" every week and repeat the same cycle. They are the most self-deceiving people in the entire industry. They still publish charts for LINK to a thousand dollars or DOT to two hundred dollars. They still think that one day liquidity will rotate back to them out of goodwill. They don't realize that this market has no benevolence and no memory. It doesn't care who waits the longest, it only rewards those who adapt the fastest.

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altcoin season has happened, just not happened to you. It happens in the form of fragmentation, it happens in meme coins on the Base chain; It happens in Solana's rotation; It happens in the Ponzi economics of airdrops; It happened in the early AI frontrunners; It happens in the burning of meta tokens. It happens in high-speed rotation while you've been staring at charts of altcoins that died in 2021. That's your choice, the market moves forward, you stagnate.

You follow technical analysis influencers who have never made real money. You use 50x leverage on a token you don't understand, you are liquidated, you margin call, you are liquidated again. You call it bad luck. No. It's not bad luck, it's a lack of skills. Nothing will change unless you accept the truth. You lose money not because you are unlucky, you lose because you refuse to study.

People reject new opportunities because they are addicted to prejudice. When something new comes out, they say it's a scam before they even read it. They see a new meta and ask when the airdrop will be without looking at the documentation. They see smart people in rotation, but they laugh at them. Then when those people posted six-figure earnings, they cried again. You can call it insider trading, if it makes you feel better. But the truth is simpler: you are not defeated, you are compared.

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look at Zcash, it's one of the clearest transactions of this cycle. Powerful narrative; strong support; Organic promotion, Naval has spoken openly about it when it was around $80. Whether you like Naval or not, this signal is undeniable. When a respected voice aligns with a powerful narrative, and fanatical leaders like Mert push it every day, it's not noise. That's a clear, builder-backed momentum play. But most people miss it because they compare it to Monero and don't understand any technology or adoption nuances. They didn't study, they didn't read, they didn't even bother to do it. They dismiss it without much effort, because it is more comfortable not to do research than to admit that they are lazy.

You can't expect to have faith without putting in the effort. If you are not willing to learn, you do not deserve the benefits. Most are too weak to commit, constantly testing small deals, rotating without arguments, jumping from influencer to influencer like a lost lamb. And when the real momentum comes, they panic buy at the top, and then they sit and hold positions in hopes of getting 100x because some clown tweeted. This is not a strategy, it is financial suicide disguised as ambition.

It doesn't matter that the market will always shout huge targets. The market is shouting numbers to attract liquidity, and greed bait is the oldest trick in the game. If you are not mature enough to build your own exit plan, you will return everything you earned. That's for sure, there are no rules, you will always be destroyed by greed.

It ultimately comes down to this. If you can't protect your gains, you'll lose everything. The market does not take money from the weak, it is the weak who willingly hand it over. Market makers aren't stealing money from you, they're just waiting for you to self-destruct. Retail users used to own Bitcoin. It is now institutionally owned. Retail users used to have beliefs, and now retail users only have memes, self-comfort, and screenshots of profits they no longer hold.

This game is not about who is the smartest, but about who is evolving. If you don't study, you're dying. If you don't rotate, you're in decline. If you don't learn on-chain knowledge, you don't matter. You don't need to be special, you don't need internal channels, but you do need to work hard. You need to read, you need to follow the narrative, you need to learn to exit. You need to control your emotions, you need to act when you need to act.

Crypto is not hard, people make it difficult because they chase dopamine instead of discipline. They crave shortcuts so much that they never build skills. That's why in a market where wealth is created every cycle, most people will remain poor.

Those who succeed are not chosen, they are not lucky, they are not born different. They just show up every day and learn while others scroll. They build systems while others chase the noise. They act early while others argue. They exit cleanly, while others are begging for another pull. They survive each cycle because they adapt in each cycle.

If you're still waiting for altcoin season, you've already lost. The game has moved on and will either evolve or be eliminated. No one will come to your rescue, and the new bull market will not magically correct bad habits. Now there is only one rule to learn, otherwise you will be left behind.