The Waiting Room

Chris wakes up and checks the Altcoin Season Index before he even checks if he’s still alive.

It’s 24.

Still Bitcoin Season. Still red. Still sideways. Still nothing. His phone lights the dark room like a dying lighthouse—RSI, stochastic MACD, sentiment meters, the fear/greed index stuck somewhere between “mildly suicidal” and “quietly delusional.” It’s been 17 months of this. 17 months of waking up to flat lines and slow bleeds. Every candle looks like a shrug.

“Why won’t it just go?” he mutters to no one, like someone begging a storm to break or a download stuck at 99%.

The group chat is already melting. It never sleeps. A guy named 'Cyborg8900' posts a screenshot from @WolfOfCoinStreet: “It’s coming. Altcoin season is around the corner. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.”

Beneath it, someone drops a trading chart so dense with trendlines and fib levels it looks like a schematic for a time machine or a badly played game of tic-tac-toe. Another guy just posts a meme: Gandalf staring into the void, captioned “Still waiting for alt season like…”

They laugh, but in that strained, slightly-too-hard way—like people on a lifeboat telling each other they see land.

He starts syncing his moods to the influencers. 'TheCryptoThunder' is euphoric on Monday: “We’re seeing the same structure as 2021. Right shoulder forming. Buckle up.” On Tuesday, caution: “Major resistance at 1.18—if we can’t flip it, we nuke.” Wednesday: radio silence. Another influencer goes into full tinfoil hat conspiracy—shadow regulation, IMF suppression, central banks coordinating with whales to keep altcoins down. Mentions Jupiter in retrograde like it’s part of the macro. It would be funny if Chris didn’t find himself nodding along.

He tries to keep faith. Zoom out, they say. Touch grass, they say. But zooming out just shows a longer, slower death. And the grass? The grass doesn’t have leverage.

His portfolio is a mausoleum—$XRP, $LINK, $INJ, $SUI, $SOMETHING-ELSE—each coin a chapter in a different YouTube prophecy. They sit in his wallet like fossils, like unclaimed lottery tickets. Every morning, he opens the app like he’s checking in on an elderly relative he forgot to call.

“Still down?” he asks. Still down.

Someone posts a chart in the chat showing a new microcap that did 800% overnight. Some AI DeFi gaming token on Solana. Chris didn’t buy it. He bought responsibly. He believed in fundamentals— in utility. He bought early.

Or maybe late. He’s not sure anymore.

His friend Mark, who rage-quit crypto after Terra collapsed, sends a voice note: “Dude. Just get out. This is like waiting for a bus that already drove off a cliff.”

Chris deletes it. Then immediately re-watches a montage of the 2021 bull run set to Hans Zimmer’s Time. It’s all Lambos, green candles, people crying on camera while their net worths explode in real time. He feels something between nostalgia and nausea. A tear slips out. He blames the screen brightness.

Then one morning—6:42 a.m.—the Index flips to 76.

Altcoin Season.

Chris blinks. Refreshes. Still 76.

His hands start shaking. The group chat explodes. “WE FLIPPED!!!”—“IT’S HAPPENING!!!”—“SEND IT!!!” CAPS LOCK everywhere. JPEGs of rockets and Pepe frogs flooding in like a dam cracked wide open.

Chris doesn’t respond. Doesn’t post. Doesn’t move.

He just sits there, staring at the number, like it’s a sunrise he stopped believing in. And in that moment—after all the fakeouts, exit scams, influencer pump-and-dumps, twelve-hour X Spaces, and twenty-seven YouTube thumbnails that promised “ALT SEASON INCOMING (MUST WATCH)”—he feels it again.

Hope.

The dangerous kind.

The kind that makes you believe it’ll be different this time.

The kind that makes a man believe he hasn’t wasted the last two years of his life in a digital waiting room disguised as a financial revolution.

And for now, that’s enough.