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

On 5 November 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 with charts of arrows pointing down and analyses of the broken support. The sequence is the usual one and it is worth watching from outside: 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, positions worth about $1.3 billion were force-closed, almost all of them long: that is the number circulating that day and 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 crossed nine times in ten months isn’t a wall: it is a round number that suits headline writers and people with ten fingers. The reason it looks like a wall is that our attention concentrates there, and when enough people watch the same point something does happen — for a few hours.

The right yardstick for whether the 5 November move was exceptional is a different one: in 2025 bitcoin moved an average of 1.6 percent a day, one way or the other. That Tuesday it moved 2.4. It was a day above the average and below the memory it left behind.

What was going on around it

That same day New York was voting for mayor, and Zohran Mamdani’s win produced its own wave of comment on what it means for markets. It is the kind of connection that is easy to write and almost never demonstrated: the New York stock exchange and New York City Hall don’t have the relationship the headline suggests.

And in the background there was the shutdown of federal operations in the United States, which was holding up the release of economic data. With no data, markets move on expectations, and expectations move on rumor. That is the part of the context that genuinely counts, and it is also the part that makes no headline.

Put bluntly: a hundred thousand and one is euphoria, ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine is apocalypse. There is one dollar in between, and all the difference is in how many zeros we like looking at.