December 15th was a big day for Bitcoin. It plummeted from $90,000 straight down to $85,616, a single-day drop of over 5%, evaporating enough market value to make a medium-sized country envious.

Strangely, there was no obvious trigger for this decline. No project failures, no sudden policy crackdowns, and on-chain data showed no large holders dumping. All clues ultimately pointed to one place—the upcoming meeting of the Bank of Japan. The market preemptively reacted to a forecast: the Bank of Japan plans to raise interest rates to a 30-year high on December 19th.

What seemed like just a fluctuation in the crypto market actually reflected the increasingly fierce global central bank policy competition. This marks a turning point: the over a decade-long global liquidity boom is officially coming to an end. The valuation logic of various assets will also undergo a thorough adjustment.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, major central banks like the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of Japan have adopted easing measures: quantitative easing, negative interest rates, and various extreme tactics, flooding the market with money. In this environment, capital was bold, willing to buy anything—stocks, bonds, Bitcoin—asset prices soared together. Especially Bitcoin, which rose from a few cents in 2010 to $90,000 in 2024, a ten-million-fold increase. The main driver behind this was the global loose liquidity. The pricing logic back then was simple and crude: money equals market, and capital pushes everything higher.

Now, this game is about to restart.