Bitcoin's recent sideways trading state is indeed worth analyzing. Many are waiting to see what changes the December options expiration will bring, but the reality is—nothing much has happened.

The reason behind this is actually quite straightforward. Market participants haven't given up; they've just changed their approach. The gamma pressure concentrated around the December expiration has been dispersed into January and February. What seems like the same market pressure actually extends the timeline. So, those support levels haven't disappeared; they've just shifted.

In the short term, this structure can artificially maintain price stability, but the cost is ongoing time decay. Fixing a price requires expenditure, and this cost accumulates day by day until one side chooses to give up.

Looking at the current macro environment makes this even clearer: liquidity hasn't increased, interest rates remain low, funding conditions continue to tighten, and spot market depth is relatively thin. In such an environment, suppressed volatility doesn't automatically evolve into larger swings.

The usual scenario is this: when the maintenance cost exceeds the expected return, all parties will choose to exit simultaneously. At that point, Bitcoin may not necessarily rise; the key is whether the structure in January loosens, forcing the price to adjust. Options can delay volatility but can never fundamentally prevent it from occurring.

The key is to focus on those critical price levels; everything else is noise.