On a quiet Tuesday afternoon, as Bitcoin bounced 22% to $79,000, Samson Mow posted a tweet that sent a chill through the community: 'The real bull market hasn't started yet.' Not a retraction, not a celebration — a dismissal. For a market that had just breathed a collective sigh of relief after a brutal correction, this felt like a bucket of cold water. But what if Mow is right about the symptom and wrong about the disease? What if the price action we're seeing is not the beginning of a new cycle, but the last gasp of an old one? And what if the true bull market isn't about price at all?
To understand the weight of Mow's words, you need to know the man. He's not just a random influencer. As the former Chief Strategy Officer of Blockstream and current CEO of JAN3, he has spent a decade championing Bitcoin as the foundation of a new financial system. His 'superbitcoinization' theory — that Bitcoin will eventually become the global reserve currency — has earned him a legion of followers. But it has also painted him into a corner. When the price rallies, he must justify why it's still not enough. When it crashes, he must defend the long-term vision. In this sense, Mow is the ultimate Bitcoin maximalist: his bull market only begins when the world adopts Bitcoin at the nation-state level. Everything else is noise.
Yet the market is screaming otherwise. The 22% bounce from the local lows was accompanied by a surge in ETF inflows, with BlackRock and Fidelity adding to their holdings. The spot ETF approval in 2024 was supposed to be the on-ramp for institutional capital. And it worked — Bitcoin's price doubled from the pre-ETF era. But something is off. The bounce feels mechanical, driven by algorithmic trading and options expiry rather than organic demand. The on-chain data tells a story of short-term holders dumping their bags: exchange inflows have spiked, and long-term holder supply has started to decline. This is not the behavior of a market that believes in a new bull run. It's the behavior of a market that sees a 22% gain and takes profits.
Code is law, but people are the context. This is the lens through which I interpret Mow's warning. He is right that the current rally lacks the grassroots energy of previous cycles. In 2017, the bull run was fueled by retail investors buying on Coinbase, sharing screenshots of their portfolio with friends. In 2020, DeFi summer brought a wave of new users who actually used the network — swapping tokens, providing liquidity, farming yields. Today, the price action is largely driven by institutional flows and derivatives. The 'true' Bitcoin adoption — the peer-to-peer electronic cash that Satoshi envisioned — has been replaced by a speculative asset for portfolio diversification. The ETF has turned Bitcoin into Wall Street's toy. And that is a tragedy.
I've seen this before. In 2017, I was a junior developer in Los Angeles, and I watched MyToken collapse. I introduced 15 friends to the project. When it went to zero, I didn't just lose money — I lost trust. That experience taught me that blockchain adoption is a trust crisis, not a technical one. Since then, I've built communities like Ethos Circle, where we navigate the chaos together. The real bull market, in my view, is measured by the number of people who understand what they own, who can weather the volatility without panic, and who use the network for its intended purpose: permissionless value transfer. By that metric, the bull market of 2024 has barely begun. But the price isn't reflecting it.
Community over coin, always. The 22% bounce is a mirage if it doesn't translate into deeper network engagement. Consider this: the number of active Bitcoin addresses has remained flat over the past three months, while the price has oscillated. The average transaction value has increased, but that's driven by institutional-sized transfers, not by everyday users. The Lightning Network, which is supposed to enable microtransactions, has seen only modest growth. We are building a skyscraper on a foundation of sand. The price is the top floor, but the structure is hollow.
Now, the contrarian angle. Mow's claim that the real bull market hasn't started is, in itself, a form of market manipulation. He has a vested interest in maintaining a narrative of scarcity — his company, JAN3, advises nations on Bitcoin adoption. If the market believes that a 'real' bull run is still to come, they will hold, they will buy, and they will wait. But waiting is not building. The danger of Mow's framing is that it encourages passivity. It tells investors to sit on their hands and wait for the messiah (nation-state adoption) to arrive. Meanwhile, the technology is being used by people who don't care about the price — they care about censorship resistance, financial inclusion, and sovereignty. Those people are the true bull market.
I recall the 2022 winter. My community, Ethos Circle, lost 40% of its members. Instead of retreating, I launched 'Project Phoenix' — weekly town halls where we focused on mental health and skill-building. We stopped the churn and grew by 20%. The price didn't matter. What mattered was the resilience of the community. That is the real test of a bull market: can the ecosystem survive the bear? If it can, then the next upswing is not just a price rally — it's a testament to human coordination.
So where does that leave us? Mow is right to be skeptical of the 22% bounce. It is fragile, driven by mechanics rather than conviction. But he is wrong to dismiss it as 'not the real bull market.' The real bull market is already happening — it's just not visible on the price chart. It's happening in the developer hubs in Nairobi and Buenos Aires, where builders are creating tools for unbanked communities. It's happening in the DAOs that are experimenting with decentralized governance. It's happening in the classrooms where educators are teaching the next generation about blockchain ethics. The price will eventually catch up, but only if we focus on what matters.
Trust is the only protocol that matters. The next phase of crypto will not be defined by new all-time highs, but by how well we preserve the values of decentralization and community. Mow's warning is a reminder to look beyond the charts and ask: what are we really building? If the answer is 'a better financial system for everyone,' then the bull market has already started — it's just that the price hasn't caught up to the purpose.