On October 10, 2025, bitcoin went from about $122,000 to about $105,000. Call it 14%. Over the following day, more than $19 billion in leveraged positions were force-closed and over 1.6 million accounts were wiped out.
Hold those two numbers next to each other for a second. A 14% drop in bitcoin isn't a black swan. Bitcoin has spent more than 80% of its life sitting in a drawdown of 20% or worse.
So the price move didn't kill those accounts. Something else did.
Your liquidation price is a choice you already made
The exchange doesn't decide when to close you out. You do, at the moment you pick your leverage. Everything after that is arithmetic.
At 3x, price has to run roughly 30% against you before the position gets taken. At 10x, around 9%. At 20x, closer to 4.5%. At 50x, under 2% — which in crypto is most Thursdays.
Read those as distances, not multipliers. What you're actually setting is how much ordinary noise you can be wrong about before you stop having an opinion at all. A 20x long is a wager that bitcoin won't do the thing bitcoin does nearly every month.
Amberdata's reconstruction of that October cascade makes the mechanics uncomfortable to look at. In the single worst minute, $3.21 billion was liquidated, and 93.5% of it was forced selling. Across the month, longs made up 83.9% of all liquidations — a 5.2-to-1 ratio against shorts.
That isn't the market forming a view. It's a chain reaction, where each liquidated position becomes a market sell order that drags the next account across its own line.
October wasn't an outlier either. It was a magnification. Across 2025 as a whole, something like $150 billion in positions were force-closed, and longs ran ahead of shorts all year — on February 3 alone, $1.88 billion of long liquidations came through, about 65% of that day's total.
The pattern repeats because the habit behind it repeats.
