Bitcoin went below a hundred thousand dollars for a few minutes, and closed the day up

On November 5, 2025 Bitcoin closed at $103,885 against $101,497 the previous day: up 2.4 percent. The low touched inside the day, as reported by the market sources, was $99,966.

What happened, in order

In the hours in between, the channels filled up with charts full of downward arrows and analyses of the broken support. The sequence is always the same, and seen from outside it’s almost funny: the price touches a number ending in four zeros, the threshold becomes news, and the news becomes the reason somebody sells.

In the twenty-four hours around the move, about $1.3 billion of positions were force-closed, almost all of them long. That’s the figure going around that day. It isn’t ours, but the chart confirms the direction. Leveraged positions don’t decide where the market goes. They decide how fast it gets there.

The psychological support, measured

A line you cross nine times in ten months is mostly a round number, the kind that appeals to headline writers and to people with ten fingers. It looks like a wall because our attention bunches up there. And when enough people watch the same spot, something really does happen, for a few hours.

There’s a better yardstick for whether the November 5 move was exceptional: in 2025 bitcoin moved 1.6 percent a day on average, one way or the other. That day it moved 2.4. So it was an above-average day, but much less dramatic than the memory it left behind.

What was going on around it

The evening before, New York had voted for mayor, and Zohran Mamdani’s win set off its own wave of commentary about what it means for markets. It’s the kind of link that’s easy to draw and almost never proven. The New York Stock Exchange and New York City Hall are much further apart than the headline makes you think.

And in the background there was the US government shutdown, which was holding up the release of economic data. Without data, markets move on expectations, and expectations move on rumors. That’s the part of the context that really matters, and it usually doesn’t make the headlines.

Put bluntly: a hundred thousand and one is euphoria, ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine is apocalypse. In between there’s one dollar, and the whole difference lies in how many zeros we like to look at.