I suspect that most retail Bitcoin holders bought it last year and are down 30-70%. The people who post on HN are very much outliers, having known about Bitcoin for a decade. The real retail volume in 2021 came from relatively uninformed people buying their first crypto.
Also, there are the publicly listed corporate whales. Tesla has 42,000 Bitcoins bought at an average price of $31,620. MicroStrategy has over 130,000 Bitcoins bought at an average price around $30k as well.
Public company accounting standards require these companies to mark down their crypto holdings regularly, so it seems that Tesla will be booking a roughly $420M loss for the past quarter, and MSTR has lost a whopping $1.3 billion. (I'm sure Musk appreciates that the loss is close to 420 though, even if Tesla shareholders don't.)
That said, clearly a lot of people are underwater.
Which is just one of the reasons why it's a bad store of value or medium of exchange.
I mean, ~everyone who believed the crypto ads that the article is about did, for a start.
I would assume it's far from done unravelling yet, though. Another dubious crypto HYIP seems to go under every few days at the moment.
It’s odd to look prices dropping to 1/3 and think thing things could get a lot worse or it could turn into just another blip on a larger upwards trajectory.