You know what's wild to look back on? Bitcoin's absolute tear through 2017. I was thinking about this the other day—how BTC went from sitting around $900 at the start of that year to absolutely exploding all the way to $20,000 by year-end. That's not just a bull run, that's basically a 22x in 12 months.

I mean, if you were paying attention to bitcoin price movements in 2017 in USD, you'd have seen something that honestly felt surreal at the time. Every week felt like a new all-time high. The media was going crazy, your barber was asking about crypto, everyone's uncle suddenly had opinions on blockchain. It was pure euphoria.

What gets me looking back is how much of that move happened in just the last quarter. Bitcoin was still under $7k in early October 2017, and then it just went vertical. People who got in early that year saw their positions multiply by 20x or more. That kind of move doesn't happen often.

Compare that to where we are now—BTC hovering around $73k—and yeah, the absolute dollar amount is way higher, but the percentage gains from those 2017 levels are nothing to sneeze at either. The point is, 2017 was a defining moment for bitcoin price discovery. It showed the world that crypto could move in ways traditional markets just don't.

If you're trying to understand bitcoin's history and how it evolved as an asset, you can't skip over what happened in 2017. That run changed everything about how people perceived the space.