According to the unrealized losses of this bear market, the 2022 bear was (at least) as brutal as the bears in 2015 and 2018.

Bear markets mean that the prices of your assets and with that the value of your portfolio will be decreasing. This usually causes some massive unrealized losses all over the board, unrealized losses are those losses that people are still holding and have not sold (that would be realized losses). We also have unrealized profits, meaning that people are in profit but have not sold thus not actually taken the profits. This is a very good metric for bear markets to compare to other bear markets.

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Chart imported from Glassnode

Firstly, this is the ratio of the Unrealized profits and losses this bear market (in USD) and we can already see that we had way more unrealized gains than unrealized losses (for more look on this post). This is actually very usual in all Bitcoin cycles. But now to compare it to other bear markets we have to normalize it by market cap, as obviously there is more USD in the market now than in 2015.

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Chart imported from Glassnode

On this graph we can now see that it was mostly all the same kind of magnitude. If you are precise you can say though that the 2022 bear had more unrealized losses than the bear market in 2018, also a lot of other metric indicate that our bear market from last year was more severe than in 2018. But now for 2015, we have slightly fewer losses maybe also because this way by far the most severe bear market in crypto so far and it will be difficult to change that anytime soon.

I think this comparison is quite interesting as we can see what we actually went through last year and realize that it was nothing easy at all, it was even worse than going through 2018. For that, we deserve a pat on our backs. Even if its not over yet, if you could survive last year you can definitely survive the remaining of the bear.